This paper offers an account of
the main mechanisms governing morphological adaptation of nominal
loanwords, in terms of grammatical gender assignment and inflection
class membership, in different dialectal systems in the light of
the evidence provided by the area of Asia Minor. Our data show that
notwithstanding the divergence, grammatical gender splits into its
two major primitives, the semantic one relating to sex and animacy
and the structural one, i.e. as an inflectional classifier -in
correlation with the notion of inflection class- in the
organization of nominal classification types. This offers further
support to the claim that gender is not a purely morphological or a
purely semantic category, but a combination of the two. However,
the realization of those two facets, of one, or none of them, is
subject to parametric variation depending, especially in contact
induced varieties, on the interplay between the grammatical
properties of all the involved systems.
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