[Lingtyp] Query re pronoun inventories

[Don Killian]

Some thoughts in response (somewhat distant from the original question 
I'm afraid):

On 26.2.2018 6:52, David Gil wrote:
> On 26/02/2018 04:51, Rikker Dockum wrote:
>> Responding to Ian's comments on Thai (which is often classed as a 
>> 'natural gender' pronoun system but has no grammatical gender),
> Indeed, it would be very strange to think of Thai as being a "gendered" 
> language in the same way as, say, French or Hebrew, in which the 
> masculine/feminine distinction permeates the grammar. Rather, the 
> limited distinction between what are perhaps more appropriately referred 
> to as "male" and "female" forms in Thai would seem to be more akin to 
> the various terms of address in a language such as Malay/Indonesian, 
> which reflect distinctions in biological sex, as well as age, social 
> status, race and other features — and nobody would say that 
> Malay/Indonesian has gender, any more than it has, say, race.

This is actually something of a debated idea in studying grammatical 
gender, and isn't quite as simple as you might think.

I'll quote Francesca Di Garbo's thesis here, as it brings up some nice 
points on the subject:

"One – very often debated – problem in the literature on gender is how 
to account for those languages, such as English, in which the only 
evidence for gender distinctions appears on pronouns. In the literature 
on agreement, pronouns are often defined as non-prototypical
agreement targets insofar as they “violate the expectation that 
agreement targets should share a local domain with their antecedent, 
preferably the phrase” (Audring 2009). However, in spite of their 
non-prototypical status, in the literature on (gender) agreement, 
pronouns are considered to be possible agreement targets (Audring 2009; 
Corbett 1991, 2006, 2012, 2013a). Within the indexation model introduced 
in §2.1.2.1, pronominal and np-internal indexes are also part of one and 
the same functional domain in the sense that they all function as 
strategies for signalling reference through the discourse (on the
functional continuum between np-internal and np-external indexing 
strategies, see also Barlow 1992; Corbett 2006; Croft 2013; Siewierska 
1999, 2004).

Based on these assumptions... languages like English are considered to 
be gendered languages, despite their gender system being less pervasive 
in discourse than gender systems in languages with richer indexation 
are... gender systems of the English type are singled out through the 
use of the label pronominal gender systems. Pronominal gender systems 
are crosslinguistically very rare5 (Audring 2009; Corbett 2013b), and, 
as shown in the typological survey carried out by Audring (2009), they 
tend to pattern with strictly semantic principles of gender assignment. 
Applying Dahl’s (2000a) dichotomy between lexical and referential 
gender, one could think of gender systems of the English type as being 
referential in nature. In languages with pronominal gender systems, 
gender indexation signals salient properties of the np referents, e.g. 
male vs. female vs. sexually undifferentiated entities, rather than 
aspects of the lexical semantics of nouns."

> It's a bit like gender-resolution for mixed plural NPs.  If I remember 
> my Corbett correctly (I'm currently miles away from his books), given a 
> sentence such as "JOHN AND MARY CAME-AGR", there is no language with 
> gender agreement in which there is a special gender for mixed 
> male-and-female groups; usually, and sexistly, the resolution is to the 
> masculine. (I vaguely half-remember some Daghestanian(?) language in 
> which the resolution is to some 3rd or even 4th gender with other 
> inanimate(?) meanings, but this still doesn't constitute a special 
> gender for "male-plus-female").

Actually, the language I worked on for my MA, Griqua/Korana, does 
actually do something like this. It's not 100% strictly for mixed 
male-and-female groups, but they have a "common" or "indeterminate" 
gender used to denote a mixed group, or indicate the uncertainty or 
ignorance of the speaker as regards the sex of the human being(s) in 
question. Sierwierska included Korana in her study of pronouns, so its 
gender system is known... see e.g. http://wals.info/chapter/44.

Also, one additional rather interesting language to add to the 
discussion is Tainae, which has noun classes for all person forms, even 
1st/2nd.

According to Carlson (1991):

"Although all the examples and the charts listed up to this point have 
been restricted to masculine and feminine nouns, it is perfectly 
conceivable that personal pronouns could be derived from the other noun 
classes, though in practice this is rare, and generally restricted to 
address forms. An example might be in a situation where someone is doing 
some sort of work and a vine keeps getting in the way. The worker may 
get angry and say:

Aɨtɨkɨ nonauti !
a -ɨtɨkɨ nonau-ti
ANA-2SG.FLEX cease-2SG.FUT.IMP
ad -pro v -vm: tns
You rope, cut it out!

Note that in the above example, unlike the MASC and FEM 2SG pronouns, 
the anaphoric a appears. It may be that in the case of the MASC and FEM 
pronouns, because of frequent use, the a had dropped out. The remaining 
pronouns for the other noun classes could possibly be formed in a manner 
similar to the one in which those for masculine and feminine classes are 
formed, but I have no record of them in any text. I have also questioned 
a few people about their existence, and they don't seem to have any idea 
what I'm talking about. For reference, the 2SG forms for classes
other than masculine and feminine are listed below. Note that in each of 
these cases the anaphoric marker a is present:

Cls 2SG
ANI aikɨ
CYL aɨwakɨ
FLAT aɨnakɨ
LONG aaikɨ
FLEX aɨtɨkɨ
FLUID aɨpikɨ
TOOL aɨpakɨ
INDET aukɨ
RAIN aakɨ
"

So they're highly restricted in use, and potentially not even possible 
for some persons, but they nonetheless have dedicated forms for personal 
pronouns of all noun classes, even inanimate references.

References:

Di Garbo, Francesca. 2014. Gender and its interaction with number and 
evaluative morphology: An intra- and intergeneralogical typological 
survey of Africa. Doctoral dissertation, University of Stockholm.

Maingard, L. F. 1962. Korana folktales: grammar and texts. Johannesburg: 
Witwatersrand University Press.

Carlson, Terry. 1991. Tainae Grammar Essentials. Ukarumpa, Papua New 
Guinea: Unpublished Typescript, The Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Best,

Don