Vol. 9 (2023)
Articles

Complex Possessive Pronouns in West Flemish and German

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  • Anne-Li Demonie,
  • Pamela Goryczka
Anne-Li Demonie
Masaryk University
Pamela Goryczka
University of Vienna
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/qulso-2421-7220-15159

Published 2023-09-30

Keywords

  • Agreement,
  • Gender,
  • Germanic,
  • Nanosyntax,
  • Possessive Pronouns

How to Cite

Demonie, A.-L., & Goryczka, P. (2023). Complex Possessive Pronouns in West Flemish and German. Quaderni Di Linguistica E Studi Orientali, 9, 59–79. https://doi.org/10.36253/qulso-2421-7220-15159

Copyright (c) 2023 Anne-Li Demonie, Pamela Goryczka

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

In this article we discuss a contrastive, morphological agreement pattern exhibited by singular possessive pronouns in West Flemish and German. While West Flemish zen (‘his’) and eur (‘her’) require a suffix -en to mark masculine agreement, they are unmarked for feminine agreement. Conversely, German sein (‘his’) and ihr (‘her’) require a suffix -e to mark feminine agreement, but they are unmarked for masculine agreement. Put differently, in both languages only one gender is marked for agreement, and West Flemish marks a different gender than German. To account for this intra- and cross-linguistic variation, we argue for a fine-grained analysis, couched in Nanosyntax (Starke 2009 et seq.), of the possessive pronouns and their agreement markers.

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