Grammatical gender in Insular Celtic

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The Welsh data: further analysis

Table B.5: Adjective agreement with feminine controllers, OC-W vs. CC-W, excluding semantic agreement and proper names

Agreeing Total % agreeing

B.3 B.3.1

Fem. (OC) Fem. (CC) 24 40 25 53 96 75 p = 0.0297

Agreement with demonstrative pronouns The older component

Demonstrative pronouns are rarely found in OC-W: there are just 17 instances, 11 with masculine antecedents and six with feminine antecedents. Gender agreement is consistently observed. Semantic agreement accounts for two occurrences, one with a masculine and one with a feminine noun.

B.3.2

The contemporary component

Demonstrative pronouns are rather infrequent in CC-W too (21 occurrences altogether). As shown in Table B.6, agreement with masculine nouns is found 15 times out of 15 and agreement with feminine nouns four out of six. However, as also shown in Table B.6, semantic agreement accounts for two thirds of the pronouns referring to masculine nouns and half of those referring to feminine ones.

Table B.6: Agreement with demonstrative pronouns in CC-W

Agreeing Total % agreeing

Overall Masc. Fem. 15 4 15 6 100 67

Excl. sem. agr. Masc. Fem. 5 2 5 4 100 50


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