Le categorie di numero e genere nelle lingue indoeuropee antiche nel quadro teorico della Role and Reference Grammar

In some ancient Indo-European languages, there are nouns that show changes of grammatical gender and number. The gender and number variation allows us to identify morpho-syntactic phenomena, which integrate more coherently in an active-inactive alignment rather than in nominative-accusative one. These non-canonical features, in accusative system, are required to overcome syntactic inability of the neuter nouns to occur in proto-typical agentive roles (for example, semantic role as Actor and syntactic role as A=transitive subject). From the data collected and analyzed, a common explanation could be recognized on the level of the semantic-syntactic interface. The parameters that interact in morpho-syntactic encoding collide with each other. These parameters are semantic role, syntactic role and position on animacy hierarchy. The “anomalous” morpho-syntactic constructions were analyzed into a theoretical framework, specially based on the Role and Reference Grammar. The aim is to explain non-canonical constructions of neuter gender nouns through this theoretical framework.