Cognitive categories and noun classification. Romance neuter: from [passivity] to [indifference]

Abstract

The present contribution aims to reveal the ways in which the evolution of the grammatical category of gender from Latin to Romance reflects the dramatic changes undergone by its semantic domains. Arguments for the hypothesis that Latin gender oppositions were determined by the important role played by activeness (and not animacy) in the interpretation of the state of affairs are brought into the picture in order to explain the subcategorization of nouns in both Latin and in Romance. The term activeness is to be understood as a reflection of the ‘capacity of referents for influencing human life in positive or negative ways’. The changes undergone by grammatical gender in Romance languages were triggered not only by a morpho-syntactic reorganization of case and number, but also by social and pragmatic factors that triggered a reorganization of cognitive categories and their linguistic encoding

Keywords

• activeness
• animacy
• cognitive categories
• grammatical gender
• noun classes