The decline of feminine possessives in Norwegian: An empirical and theoretical investigation of gender and declension class

Abstract

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 345 participants across seven dialects: indefinite articles and definite suffixes already reported in van Baal et al. (in press), and pre- and postnominal possessive forms that constitute novel data from the same participants. The paper concludes that the feminine indefinite article and the feminine prenominal possessives are vulnerable across all the investigated dialects, but to different extents. Comparing how individuals combine these two forms with the feminine definite suffix and the feminine postnominal possessives, it is clear that the postnominal forms are i) retained by most speakers, and ii) only vulnerable in speakers who have also lost the feminine/masculine distinction on the prenominal elements. The paper argues that this data supports the formal analysis of Svenonius (2017), 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.