This paper reports results from a large cross-dialectal study, showing that feminine forms are changing in several dialects. These results suggest that the Norwegian three-gender system may be in the process of becoming a two-gender system.
By using a more extensive battery of experimental tests than previous studies, we are able to scrutinize the nature of grammatical gender with substantial empirical coverage. The data consists of pre- and postnominal gender forms elicited from participants across seven dialects: indefinite articles and definite suffixes already reported in van Baal et al. The paper concludes that the feminine indefinite article and the feminine prenominal possessives are vulnerable across all the investigated dialects, but to different extents.
The paper argues that this data supports the formal analysis of Svenonius , which claims that feminine gender can be reanalyzed as a declension class, allowing the feminine definite suffix to be retained, together with a phonologically conditioned feminine postnominal possessive. Solbakken, H. However, a more extensive cross-dialectal investigation has not emerged until very recently. They find clear differences between these locations, demonstrating that some dialects have kept a three-gender system, whereas most of the dialects investigated are undergoing a change towards a two-gender system.
This study considers indefinite determiners and definite suffixes, but no other markers of grammatical gender. In the present paper, we investigate prenominal and postnominal possessives in Norwegian. These two syntactic patterns are illustrated in 1 for a feminine noun.
The goal of this paper is to study the status of feminine grammatical gender by comparing determiners and possessives elicited from the same participants in the seven locations investigated in van Baal et al. This will enable us to address the question of whether these gender markers change at the same time and in the same way. Our findings suggest that both indefinite determiners and prenominal possessives are vulnerable in all locations, but to different degrees in different locations.
