Grammatical Gender in Old Occitan

Abstract

This study treats variation in grammatical gender in Old Occitan. By integrating corpus-linguistic, typological, and sociolinguistic methods, the research succeeds in tracing the dynamics of gender-systems in usage. For this sake, a corpus was created based on 17 manuscripts from the Languedoc and Provence regions in France, written in the 13th and 14th centuries. This enables the author to grasp the variation present in medieval languages, and to avoid bias from the normalisation of later editions. With this approach, the investigation of gender variation is based on a solid empirical foundation and thus demonstrates the kinds of new insights that become attainable when linguistic data are approached from a historically informed, discourse-tradition-aware, text-pragmatic, and norm-historical perspective.