[Lingtyp] nominal classification (gender and classifiers)
Martin Haspelmath
haspelmath at shh.mpg.de
Wed Mar 29 16:11:41 UTC 2017
This all makes very good sense, Johanna.
But I have three minor points (which we probably agree on as well):
-- one needs a definition of "gender"/"classifier" if one wants to "put
together a database on noun genders and classifiers" (and my definition
of "genifier" was intended to provide precisely this)
-- the discipline's concepts may always be "tentative, partial, and in
progress", but a specific project's definitions must be clear-cut --
especially if it's a Ph.D. dissertation or M.A. thesis project
-- "gender" and "classifier" may be convenience terms ("potentially
throwaway"), but the terms will not disappear, even if some of us stop
using them; so it may not be a bad idea to give them definitions that
correspond to their actual use
(And I'd argue that "gender" is defined with respect to the number of
markers in traditional practice; I suspect that Greville Corbett did not
count Kilivila as having gender <wals.info/feature/30A> because it has
over 100 "classifiers", even though it has gender-like agreement.)
Best,
Martin
On 28.03.17 02:28, Johanna NICHOLS wrote:
> Back to the question of defining gender/classifier systems on the
> number of classes:
> Suppose someone has put together a database on noun genders and
> classifiers. You want to test a hypothesis about correlations
> between the number of classes and some other property, and you turn to
> that database. But all you can find in the database is whether the
> number is under or over 20. Or suppose you want to test something
> about the correlation of number of classes with their semantics or
> places of agreement, and that's not fully laid out in the database
> because assumptions or theoretical stances on those things are in the
> definitions of survey entities and the coding procedures. All you can
> test with is the cutoff point that defined the types of classes in the
> first place, so if you're looking to refine the definitions it all
> gets circular. The laboriously constructed database contributes
> little to further growth of knowledge.
> The moral here: Arbitrary cutoffs like ±20 classes belong in the
> project-specific binnings or aggregations that individual researchers
> do on the exported data; they don't belong in the database itself.
> The database needs to contain the actual number of classes (plus notes
> on any uncertainties), full information on semantics, full information
> on agreement, etc. Database users export, sort, bin, calculate, repeat.
> That was about databases; where do theory and terminology come
> in? Typological theory needs to inform the database design, but the
> database categories will always continue to need changing, and that
> will be in response to novelties encountered and may or may not impact
> or be impacted by theory. A project-specific binning probably needs a
> project-specific term, and someone else may choose to use the same
> binning and the same term, but I'm not sure that should be anything
> but an ad hoc convenience. (I understand "SME" to be a binning that
> is convenient for policy-making, and not a technical term or
> theoretical notion in economics.) I'd opt for putting cutoffs and
> thresholds into terminology and theory only if they prove to have a
> variety of strong correlations. On this view, "gender" and
> "classifier" are convenience terms, potentially throwaway. Linguists
> can use these and other terms with perfectly adequate clarity, as long
> as the exact meaning is made clear and publications give some review
> of what other terms have been used for the same or similar phenomenon
> and describe some of their similarities and differences. When enough
> of that kind of work is done we can make a better-informed decision
> about what's to be considered a category.
> I think this is similar to what Grev said, except that I'd want
> even the canonical notions to be tentative, partial, and in progress.
> (Not just the set of referents but the actual notions and definitions.)
>
> Johanna
>
> On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 6:38 AM, Chao Li <chao.li at aya.yale.edu
> <mailto:chao.li at aya.yale.edu>> wrote:
>
> Dear Martin,
>
> I am sharing a thought and contributing a penny. For a term that
> covers genders, noun classes, and classifiers, I'd like to suggest
> "sorter". It is an existing English word and its meaning is
> intuitively accessible. On this understanding, genders, noun
> classes, and classifiers share the (grammatical) function of
> sorting out nouns or their referents.
>
> Best,
> Chao
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 3:30 AM, Martin Haspelmath
> <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de <mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>> wrote:
>
> Eva Lindström wrote:
>> I think class and classifier should be kept distinct. This is
>> because they refer to different things (as was pointed out
>> early in this thread):
>> - Class (as in gender or noun class) is a property of a
>> lexeme, involving sub-categorisation of the noun category in
>> the lexicon;
>> - Classifiers deal with properties of (groups of) referents.
>
> This is similar to the point made by Greville Corbett &
> Sebastian Fedden: Typical gender has rigid choice of markers
> (or values), while flexible marker choice is associated with
> "classifiers".
>
> But if we make this part of a definition, then we end up
> saying that the distinction between English "he" and "she" is
> a classifier distinction (because they classify referents, not
> nouns), which would be very confusing.
>
> We also don't want to say that rigid choice/assignment implies
> "gender", as pointed out by Walter Bisang:
>
>> This would mean that Thai has a canonical gender system and
>> that an example like the following (see my previous message)
>> is similar to Swahili:
>>
>>
>> rót [khan yàj] [khan níi]
>>
>> car CL big CL DEM
>>
>> 'this big car'
>>
>
> At the same time, we want to use the terms "gender" and
> "numeral classifier" in a sense that is very close to
> everyone's intuitions. We want to continue making comments
> like the following (from Corbett & Fedden's message):
>
>> there are tiny classifier systems and large gender systems.
>>
>
> We need definitions of these terms of we want to find out
> whether these claims are true. Can these definitions contain
> numbers? Corbett & Fedden think not:
>
>> Biologists don't say that legs must come in twos or fours,
>> and bar millipedes from having legs because they have too
>> many. Linguists allow for large tense systems and small
>> consonant inventories.
>>
>
> Yes, because we have definitions of "tense" and "consonant"
> that are independent of the numbers. But economists define
> SMEs with arbitrary numbers, so linguists might do so as well.
>
> Guillaume Segerer is worried that this might be reflected in
> the practice of language describers:
>>
>> In France, when companies grow, they tend to split into
>> smaller entities to avoid such constraints. Here the
>> arbitrary threshold influences the observed reality. Along
>> this line, the risk would be that "typologically-oriented"
>> descriptions might be influenced by the arbitrary threshold
>> posited by typologists.
>>
>
> But this is a discussion on LINGTYP, where we are talking
> about language typology. Language description is a different
> matter -- descriptive linguists need a separate set of
> descriptive categories from the typologists' comparative concepts.
>
> One could of course give up the goal of uniform terminology
> across the discipline, as hinted by David Beck earlier:
>
>> the key to terminological clarity is being clear about your
>> terms at point of use. I can see this being a useful term in
>> many contexts, but I don't see this as being a
>> one-size-fits-all kind of thing that everyone can take up in
>> every circumstance for something as messy and variable as
>> classificatory categories.
>>
>
> But this makes it very hard to communicate, and very hard for
> newcomers to enter the discipline. Moreover, many concepts are
> built on other concepts (like my proposed gender concept,
> built on the genifier concept, which itself has a longish
> definition). There are at least some basic concepts that
> everyone needs to agree on for the discipline to be able to
> function and yield nonsubjective results.
>
> Best,
> Martin
>
>
> On 24 Mar 2017, at 08:36, Martin Haspelmath
> <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de <mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 23.03.17 19:21, Alan Rumsey wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Those of us who have worked on languages with 2-5 such
>>>> classes (in my case Ungarinyin) have sometimes called them
>>>> 'genders', while those who have worked on languages with
>>>> more have called them 'noun classes'.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I had presupposed in my earlier messages that there is no
>>> distinction between these two types, and that they should be
>>> called "genders" -- I took this as established by Corbett
>>> (1991). As Johanna Nichols noted, the term "noun class" is
>>> vague, so for cross-linguistic purposes, "gender" is surely
>>> better.
>>>
>>> (One might feel that neglecting the sex-based vs.
>>> non-sex-based distinction is not such a good idea, as in
>>> Bernhard Wälchli's message, but it seems to me that one
>>> really shouldn't use the term "gender" anymore for sex-based
>>> distinctions, at least in typology. I take Corbett (1991) as
>>> foundational for all of us.)
>>>
>>> But the problems with Corbett (1991) are
>>>
>>> -- that his definition of gender is based on the notion of
>>> "agreement" (for which there is no clear definition, cf.
>>> Corbett (2006), who only provides a definition of canonical
>>> agreement)
>>>
>>> -- that the distinction between "gender" and "numeral
>>> classifier" is (in part) based on the idea that gender
>>> markers are affixes and numeral classifiers are free forms,
>>> but there is no clear definition of "affix" (there is a
>>> definition of "free form", as occurring on its own in a
>>> complete utterance -- and numeral classifiers are surely
>>> bound by this criterion)
>>>
>>> -- that the distinction between "features" (like gender) and
>>> markers (like classifiers) is far from clear-cut
>>>
>>> Moreover, Corbett himself has given up the distinction
>>> between gender and other classifiers (there's only a
>>> canonical definition of gender now), as have others such as
>>> Ruth Singer, Sasha Aikhenvald, and Frank Seifart. But I
>>> still want to talk about "gender" as a comparative concept
>>> (as well as about "numeral classifiers" -- a student of mine
>>> just wrote a nice MA thesis about this topic).
>>>
>>> Guillaume Segerer points out that some Atlantic languages
>>> have up to 31 classes, and it would seem odd to exclude them
>>> from having gender on the basis of a definition that
>>> arbitrarily stops at 20. I agree that this would seem odd,
>>> but I need to point out that *it wouldn't matter*.
>>> Comparative concepts are not designed to give the same
>>> results in all cases that seem similar enough to us (or some
>>> of us), but *to allow rigorous, intersubjective
>>> cross-linguistic comparison*. Comparative concepts must
>>> sometimes be arbitrary, because the world consists of many
>>> continuities, and if we still want to discuss differences
>>> with words, we need to make arbitrary cuts (think of the
>>> importance of SMEs in economics -- small and medium-size
>>> enterprises, defined arbitrarily as having fewer than 250
>>> employees).
>>>
>>> Maybe it will turn out that some other, less arbitrary
>>> concept will give even better cross-linguistic
>>> generalizations. But for the time being, we have the term
>>> "gender" as a comparative concept (especially in legacy
>>> works such as Corbett's WALS maps), and my definition ("A
>>> *gender system* (= a system of gender markers) is a system
>>> of genifiers which includes no more than 20 genifiers and
>>> which is not restricted to numeral modifiers") seems to be
>>> the only definitional proposal currently available.
>>>
>>> Best wishes,
>>> Martin
>
> --
> Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de <mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>)
> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
> Kahlaische Strasse 10
> D-07745 Jena
> &
> Leipzig University
> IPF 141199
> Nikolaistrasse 6-10
> D-04109 Leipzig
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> <mailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
> <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> <mailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
> <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp>
>
>
--
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10
D-07745 Jena
&
Leipzig University
IPF 141199
Nikolaistrasse 6-10
D-04109 Leipzig
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20170329/333189f8/attachment.htm>
More information about the Lingtyp
mailing list