Project Title: The Loss of Grammatical Gender and its Impact on Syntax and Discourse
HEI: The University of Edinburgh
School: School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences (PPLS)
Supervisors: Professor Bettelou Los, Dr Robert Truswell, and Dr Linda van Bergen, PPLS, The University of Edinburgh.
About Gerardo’s Research
Why and how the basic word order of a language may change is still a puzzle. Pronouns give important clues in language acquisition as to the base position of the object. In early English, there was a change in basic word order at the same time that certain object pronoun constructions were lost. This project hypothesises that the loss of grammatical gender played a crucial role in the loss of these tell–tale pronoun constructions. This will help us understand how word–order change can be the result of a domino–effect of changes going on elsewhere in the grammar.
CONNECT WITH GERARDO
E-mail: s1986562@ed.ac.uk