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‘Neuters’, Mass-Nouns, and the Ablative in Romance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Robert A. Hall Jr.
Robert A. Hall Jr.*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Abstract

In Asturian and Central-South Italian dialects, there is a category of collective nouns, pronouns, and definite articles which is usually called ‘neutro de materia’ and considered a continuation of the Latin neuter. This category is not a neuter in the traditional sense of the term, but represents a grammatical category hitherto unrecognized in Romance, the mass-noun, and is to be traced to an (also unsuspected) survival of the Latin ablative, through its use in partitive constructions, first with and then without dē ‘of’.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , September 1968, pp. 480 - 486
Copyright
Copyright © 1968 by Linguistic Society of America

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