Matthew Burner (Eckerd College): ‘On the Inner Workings of Mass Neuter in Asturian and Other Considerations’

Seminari del CLT

Divendres, 13 de març de 2026
Hora 15:30
SEMINARI EN LÍNIA

Abstract:
The distribution of the -o morpheme in Asturian is an interesting morphosyntactic problem worth considering for different reasons. On some nouns -o denotes a mass interpretation in comparison to count readings ending in -u (cf. fierro ‘iron’/fierru ‘an iron object’; pelo ‘hair’/pelu ‘a hair’; filo ‘thread’/filu ‘a thread’). For other mass nouns -o generally fails to surface, (cf. ropa ‘clothing’ not *ropo; corchu ‘cork’ not *corcho). Asturianists commonly refer to these data as instances of the mass neuter phenomenon (ALlA 2001; d’Andrés 1993; Arias Cabal 1998; a.o.), but this only captures an historical observation and falls short of theoretically explaining the data. Namely, the minimal pairs above only exhibit a form and meaning shift ( -o mass ↔ -u count) and they are not an instance of gender shift in the Mathieu (2012) sense (masculine ↔ neuter).

The goal of this talk is to further disseminate my theoretical assumptions of the so-called mass neuter in Asturian (Burner 2022, 2023, 2025). Specifically, we will see how a lexically decomposed view of nouns through Distributed Morphology (DM) uniformly accounts for the morphosyntactic distribution of Asturian noun form, grammatical gender, and meaning. Furthermore, I will show how my proposal also successfully generates different adjective agreement patterns in Asturian (cf. la ropa vieyo / la vieya ropa ‘the old clothing’ but not *la vieyo ropa). Finally, I will present adjective agreement data from Colombian Spanish (los zapatos chimbas ‘awesome shoes’; la camisa chimbo ‘knock-off shirt’) as I work towards a more robust version of my proposed system that accounts for cross-linguistic data.