While Asturian, a language spoken in Northwestern Spain, shows some similarities with Spanish, there is a morphological characteristic that the two languages do not share. Unlike Spanish, Asturian has not only morphemes dedicated to both the masculine (–u) and feminine (–a) genders in its adjectives, but there is also a morpheme that represents the neuter (–o). Related to this morphological characteristic, Asturian exhibits what is standardly called the mass neuter phenomenon. In order for the mass neuter to be present in a grammatically correct sentence in Asturian, certain criteria must be met. For instance, either a masculine or feminine mass noun can be followed by a neuter adjective, and this structure gives a generic interpretation reading. However, it is important to take into account that the same adjective can also agree in gender with the noun that precedes it, in which case the morphological neuter is ungrammatical and the interpretation becomes specific. There also exists a third possibility in which the adjective appears in a prenominal position, in which case the adjective must agree in gender, the interpretation must be specific, and the mass neuter is ruled out. Given the possibilities in gender agreement, specific or generic interpretation, and adjective placement, my study aims to better define the contexts in which the mass neuter in Asturian can and cannot appear in a grammatical sentence, and how the syntactic analysis proposed to account for to the placement of the adjective can shed light to explain the phenomenon under study.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-2357 |
| Date | 01 January 2015 |
| Creators | Burner, Matthew |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | Spanish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
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