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THEORY: Gender in verbs

From:John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
Date:Sunday, September 30, 2007, 18:57
So, everyone here knoes that nouns sometimes have gender, ie. come in
classes, according to their morphology. Most, if not all of the time, this
also affects other words in the noun phrase, so there are different forms of
adjectivs or pronouns or articles etc. (autc? :), that are used together
with a certain class of nouns. Sometimes, in Bantu frex, the verb phrase or
parts of it may also be affected.

Most likely, everyone has also come across verbs having different inflection
classes, aka. conjugations. However, AFAIK they generally do not affect
anything else? But if in some language they did affect, say, the forms of
the adverbs, or auxiliaries, or objects, would you think it'd make sense to
say that verbs have gender in such a language? What other parts-of-speech
might plausibly agree with verbal gender?

One phenomenon that comes close would be split-S languages, but there the
forms are AFAIK generally still chosen on the basis of the semantics of the
verb; while in nouns, gender generally has a good splash of arbitraryness to
it. Is anyone able to provide better ANADEW, or AFMCL of any kind?

I may be overlooking something obvious; smack me upside the head if I am. :)

John Vertical

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Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>