Agreement as purely formal?

[Ardis Eschenberg]

Unfortunately, I cannot comment on French, but Russian agreement has been
shown in many instances to operate on pragmatic grounds, combining both
natural and grammatical gender in utterances dependent upon situation.  For
example,

Vrac  poshla.
Doctor-M left-F.
'The doctor left.'  (The doctor is female.)

This is discussed in 'Sex , Gender and the October Revolution,' an article
which I lack a better reference to as I'm doing fieldwork and it's home.
This is a particularly nice example because most doctors in Russia are
female.  Perhaps, this is less than an argument against agreement as a
formal property, because by and large it does operate according to
grammatical gender, but any study which did not take into account pragmatic
and social factors (such agreement is more likely to occur in certain
registers/keys) would fail to account for/even look at a common pattern in
Russian. Indeed, before I understood this was going on, people thought it
funny when I told them that I wanted to be a 'lingvist-ka' (linguist +
feminine ending, retains diminuitive meaning which is inappropriate for such
a profession).
Relatedly, much interesting work has been done on gender/nominal
classification systems showing underlying cognitive motivations for such
classifications.  Others would be much more qualified than I to comment upon
this.
Even in realms thought to be easily (best?) handled by purely formal
description, the functional creeps in.  But likely this is no news to anyone
on this list.
Sincerely,
Ardis Eschenberg
State University of New York at Buffalo
Wayne State College of Nebraska



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