Teamleader:
Curt Rice

Other Team members:
Tore Nesset
Trond Trosterud

Time span:
Project starts:
01.08.2003

Project ends:
31.12.2004

Brief description and goals:
The gender assignment subproject is part of the CASTL morphology project. The University of Tromsø is a rare institution with respect to research on grammatical gender insofar as there are actually three members of staff who do research in this area. TN, TT, and CR have all pursued research, presentations, and publications on this topic. Our current project takes the theoretically idiosyncratic work on gender assignment and pursues its reconciliation with linguistic theory, especially Optimality Theory and Cognitive Linguistics. Of particular interest to us are cases of conflict in gender assignment, i.e. cases in which a noun falls into the domain of more than one relevant principle. We’re exploring different theoretical expressions of conflict resolution as part of a theory of gender and eventually a broader theory of category assignment and the lexicon. Our empirical focus at this time is primarily on Germanic and Slavic languages.

Activities planned for the project:
TN and CR together with Prof. Hans-Olav Enger (Stavanger) are editing a special issue of Lingua with several invited papers the topic of gender assignment. In addition to the (likely) publication of individual papers by TN, CR, and TT, the volume will include an overview article by TN, CR and Enger. Other activities include talks in the Thursday series, a talk by TN at the Mediterranean Morphology Meeting 4 in September, 2003, and guest researcher visits by Enger and Steinmetz during the coming academic year. CR and Steinmetz also have collaborate writing projects under way which should result in submissions to international journals during the coming months.

Potential external collaborators:
Professor Hans-Olav Enger, Høgskolen i Stavanger; Professor Donald Steinmetz, Augsburg College (USA); Hjalmar Petersen (Faeroe Islands)