Dr Ziwen Wang

Research

I am a postdoctoral researcher holding a British Academy International Fellowship. I graduated in Spanish Studies at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, South China Business College (China), and went on to pursue a MA and a PhD in Spanish Philology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain). I am interested in the history of Romance languages, with a special interest in nominal morphology and the interaction between grammatical gender and grammatical number in the early history of western Romance varieties (e.g. Ibero-Romance). I joined the faculty in March, 2024, and am currently working on a BA funded project “How number shapes gender over time: number morphology and individuation in the diachrony of the genus alternans across Romance”. This project deals with the problematic and controversial phenomenon of genus alternans (a nominal inflectional pattern such that nouns select masculine agreement in the singular but feminine agreement in the plural) in the history of Romance languages, and aims at providing a psycholinguistically and semantically based account of the diachrony of the genus alternans from Latin to Romance, unifying pre-existing intra-linguistic accounts of this phenomenon under a Pan-Romance perspective.

Publications

• Wang, Z. (2023). Pérdida del género neutro del latín al hispanorromance altomedieval: una reconstrucción panrománica. PhD dissertation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

• Wang, Z. (2022). El clítico femenino la/las en las expresiones lexicalizadas del español: nueva propuesta de análisis diacrónico. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 138(3), 785-807.