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<p>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.</p>
<p>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'. <br>
</p>
<p>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).<br>
</p>
<p>Best,<br>
Volker<br>
</p>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 26/02/18 10:19, Daniel Ross wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAAm4d-4cUXq_coXyXL-CxMG4OaQ3WmAzqt-0J2F8ngFy8WU0uA@mail.gmail.com">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>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.<br>
<br>
</div>
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.<br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 1:15 AM,
ENRIQUE BERNARDEZ SANCHIS <span dir="ltr"><<a
href="mailto:ebernard@filol.ucm.es" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">ebernard@filol.ucm.es</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">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.
<div class="HOEnZb">
<div class="h5"><br>
<br>
El lunes, 26 de febrero de 2018, Don Killian <<a
href="mailto:donald.killian@helsinki.fi"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">donald.killian@helsinki.fi</a>>
escribió:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Some
thoughts in response (somewhat distant from the
original question I'm afraid):<br>
<br>
On 26.2.2018 6:52, David Gil wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
On 26/02/2018 04:51, Rikker Dockum wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Responding to Ian's comments on Thai (which is
often classed as a 'natural gender' pronoun system
but has no grammatical gender),<br>
</blockquote>
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.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
This is actually something of a debated idea in
studying grammatical gender, and isn't quite as simple
as you might think.<br>
<br>
I'll quote Francesca Di Garbo's thesis here, as it
brings up some nice points on the subject:<br>
<br>
"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<br>
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<br>
functional continuum between np-internal and
np-external indexing strategies, see also Barlow 1992;
Corbett 2006; Croft 2013; Siewierska 1999, 2004).<br>
<br>
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."<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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").<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
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. <a
href="http://wals.info/chapter/44" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">http://wals.info/chapter/44</a>.<br>
<br>
Also, one additional rather interesting language to
add to the discussion is Tainae, which has noun
classes for all person forms, even 1st/2nd.<br>
<br>
According to Carlson (1991):<br>
<br>
"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:<br>
<br>
Aɨtɨkɨ nonauti !<br>
a -ɨtɨkɨ nonau-ti<br>
ANA-2SG.FLEX cease-2SG.FUT.IMP<br>
ad -pro v -vm: tns<br>
You rope, cut it out!<br>
<br>
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<br>
other than masculine and feminine are listed below.
Note that in each of these cases the anaphoric marker
a is present:<br>
<br>
Cls 2SG<br>
ANI aikɨ<br>
CYL aɨwakɨ<br>
FLAT aɨnakɨ<br>
LONG aaikɨ<br>
FLEX aɨtɨkɨ<br>
FLUID aɨpikɨ<br>
TOOL aɨpakɨ<br>
INDET aukɨ<br>
RAIN aakɨ<br>
"<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
References:<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Maingard, L. F. 1962. Korana folktales: grammar and
texts. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.<br>
<br>
Carlson, Terry. 1991. Tainae Grammar Essentials.
Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea: Unpublished Typescript,
The Summer Institute of Linguistics.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
<br>
Don<br>
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</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
</div>
</div>
<div class="HOEnZb">
<div class="h5">-- <br>
<div dir="ltr">
<div>
<div>Enrique Bernárdez</div>
Catedrático de Lingüística General
<div>
<div>Departamento de Lingüística, Estudios Árabes,
Hebreos y de Asia Oriental</div>
<div>Facultad de Filología</div>
<div>Universidad Complutense de Madrid</div>
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