[Lingtyp] Query re pronoun inventories
Volker Gast
volker.gast at uni-jena.de
Mon Feb 26 17:23:32 UTC 2018
There is a substantial body of recent literature on grammatical gender
in a 'weak relativity' context, see for instance
http://arhiiv.rakenduslingvistika.ee/ajakirjad/index.php/aastaraamat/article/view/ERYa13.14
which also contains a survey of other recent empirical studies.
Volker
Am 26.02.2018 um 19:15 schrieb Frans Plank:
> Or also Jan Baudouin de Courtenay’s ‘Einfluss der Sprache auf
> Weltanschauung und Stimmung’ (Prace Filologiczne 14. 185–256, 1929).
> Two parts, Part I general, Part II on gender. In B de C’s considered
> opinion, gender and what it does to your mind is “einerseits ein
> segen, andererseits ein fluch”. Probably more of the latter. Mature
> readers, enjoy.
>
> Frans
>
>
> Image result for jan baudouin de courtenay
> <https://www.google.de/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiH-IvxlsTZAhUFDewKHW52BzAQjRx6BAgAEAY&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdspace.ut.ee%2Fhandle%2F10062%2F22605&psig=AOvVaw1Dtl6ykXo6b43mB5EIm5Wx&ust=1519754969256203>
>
>
>
>> On 26. Feb 2018, at 17:23, Jan Rijkhoff <linjr at cc.au.dk
>> <mailto:linjr at cc.au.dk>> wrote:
>>
>> It might be relevant in this context to mention research by Lera
>> Boroditsky (et al.) on the influence of grammatical gender on
>> cognition, for example:
>> Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. 2003. Sex, syntax and
>> semantics.
>> In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (eds.),/Language in mind:
>> Advances in the study of language and cognition/, 61- 80. Cambridge:
>> Cambridge University Press.
>> Best, Jan R
>> *From:*Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org
>> <mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> on behalf of
>> Volker Gast <volker.gast at uni-jena.de <mailto:volker.gast at uni-jena.de>>
>> *Date:*Monday, 26 February 2018 at 12.08
>> *To:*"lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>> <mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>"
>> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>> <mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>>
>> *Subject:*Re: [Lingtyp] Query re pronoun inventories
>>
>> This is a nice example of how important the question of
>> "operationalization" is (a term which is still rarely used in
>> linguistic typology). You cannot measure attitudes such as 'sexism'
>> or 'gender equality', you can only measure symptoms of such
>> attitudes. In other words, you have to find an operationalization of
>> 'sexism'/'gender equality' if you want to make quantitative
>> statements/determine correlations. I am not familiar with the
>> literature you refer to, but 'nationwide protests of women against
>> societal sexism' doesn't seem to be a very good operationalization of
>> 'gender equality' to me, because it depends on many other factors
>> (factors other than individual or societal attitudes). For example,
>> in many societies nationwide protests are generally not common or
>> even forbidden, which would make these societies sexist irrespective
>> of the actual attitudes held by the people.
>>
>> Jumping to a more general level (and returning to a point I have made
>> before in a different context), the operationalizations used in an
>> empirical study are an important quality criterion, pertaining to the
>> question of 'validity'. If your operationalizations are not well
>> chosen, your results may be 'reliable' but perhaps not 'valid'.
>>
>> I believe that these questions are not only relevant to social
>> variables but also to linguistic ones, as we cannot observe
>> linguistic systems, we can only observe the ouput produced by
>> speakers on the basis of such systems (we can only observe "symptoms"
>> if you like).
>>
>> Best,
>> Volker
>>
>> On 26/02/18 10:19, Daniel Ross wrote:
>>
>> I don't disagree. However, I'm not judging it based on the
>> content of those linked articles at all, but the historical
>> movements they discuss: nationwide protests of women against
>> societal sexism. If that isn't a significant indication of sexism
>> in a country, then I don't know what would be (research aside). I
>> would be the first to admit that I know little about sexism in
>> Iceland, but what I do know if that the women there are
>> protesting it. I was genuinely confused when I read your message,
>> and I would like to know more.
>>
>> If that is the best example we can come up with for a lack of
>> sexism, then I'm very uncertain as to how we can pursue the
>> question of what grammatical features would correlate with sexism
>> in general.
>> On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 1:15 AM, ENRIQUE BERNARDEZ SANCHIS
>> <ebernard at filol.ucm.es<mailto:ebernard at filol.ucm.es>> wrote:
>>
>> SIL. Now I understand. Judging Icelandic society and its
>> history on yhe only basis of two journal articles is not very
>> scientific. The bibliography on Icelandic society and
>> language is immense.
>>
>>
>> El lunes, 26 de febrero de 2018, Don Killian
>> <donald.killian at helsinki.fi<mailto:donald.killian at helsinki.fi>>
>> escribió:
>>
>> 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
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>> --
>> Enrique Bernárdez
>> Catedrático de Lingüística General
>> Departamento de Lingüística, Estudios Árabes, Hebreos y de
>> Asia Oriental
>> Facultad de Filología
>> Universidad Complutense de Madrid
>>
>>
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