Declension Class and the Norwegian Definite Suffix
Peter Svenonius · 2017
Abstract Some Nordic languages have three genders (e.g. Icelandic), while others have only two (e.g. Danish). Norwegian provides many examples of two and three gender dialects, allowing a microcomparative study. I show how a gender can be reanalyzed as a declension class when semantic generalizations about gender class membership are weak and morphological indicators of a gender distinction are poor. Under these conditions, learners do not posit a syntactically visible noun class feature (gender) but rather one that is visible only to allomorph selection (declension class), which I suggest is located in the phonological part of lexical entries. The analysis is developed within the confines of a theory that observes a strict division between syntactic and phonological information.