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I fully agree with Mark on this:<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 22.03.17 00:25, Mark W. Post wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:28a60b28-89a9-64b8-ab4c-5764c77257cd@gmail.com"
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<p>It seems to me that what we're really talking about here is the
same thing that we usually talk about, which is that there are
no cross-linguistically watertight categories, but we want to do
typology anyway, so what do we do? We can select a semantic
parameter (a "comparative concept") in terms of which categories
may be similar across languages, but they will differ in other
respects. If we focus on those other respects, we can end up
with a different typology. It may be that the real difficulty
here is that our traditional category-labels, and the categories
they are designed to capture, are multi-dimensional.<br>
</p>
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<br>
Genifiers may of course cumulate with other functions, e.g.
referential specification (as in Mark's Yi examples), or
definiteness (as in Spanish definite articles <i>el/la</i>), or
number. These forms are thus simultaneouly articles and/or number
markers, but from the perspective of genification, they are
genifiers.<br>
<br>
I also agree with Randy:<br>
<br>
On 22.03.17 03:42, Randy LaPolla wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:28a60b28-89a9-64b8-ab4c-5764c77257cd@gmail.com"
type="cite">
<p>Whenever we make a higher abstraction we are moving one more
step away from the facts of the languages. The terms “gender”
and “noun classifier” are already abstractions across a range of
different phenomena, and so there is some loss of information
about the diversity of forms when we use such terms, and if we
then make a categorial merger of these two forms, as suggested,
we then lose even more information.</p>
</blockquote>
<br>
Of course we "lose" information when we generalize across languages.
But one needs to understand that typological categorization is very
different from description. It may be that "there is the danger that
this usage filters back into descriptions of languages", but this is
so only if describers think that describing a language means putting
pre-established labels on them. They should be warned against this,
by emphasizing that comparative concepts are meant for comparison,
and can be used for description only if there is no significant
cross-linguistic variation in the relevant domain (e.g. "1st
person", or "fricative").<br>
<br>
To get back to my original question: Does anyone know a reason why
one shouldn't define "gender" as a comparative concept in the
following way:?<br>
<br>
A <b>gender system</b> (= 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.<br>
<br>
I'm not very comfortable with a definition that makes reference to
an arbitrary number, but I'm even less comfortable with a situation
where we have no definition for "gender" at all, because this makes
much of the earlier literature unreadable. It seems to me that
Corbett (1991) is about gender systems roughly in the above sense.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Martin<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath (<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:haspelmath@shh.mpg.de">haspelmath@shh.mpg.de</a>)
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
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