35.262, Calls: Workshop "Grammatical Gender in Diachrony" at the LLcD Conference (Langues et langage à la croisée des disciplines),

Mon Jan 22 15:05:04 UTC 2024

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-262. Mon Jan 22 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.262, Calls: Workshop "Grammatical Gender in Diachrony" at the LLcD Conference (Langues et langage à la croisée des disciplines),

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Date: 19-Jan-2024
From: Neige Rochant [neige.rochant at icloud.com]
Subject: Workshop "Grammatical Gender in Diachrony" at the LLcD Conference (Langues et langage à la croisée des disciplines), 

Full Title: Workshop "Grammatical gender in diachrony" at the LLcD
Conference (Langues et langage à la croisée des disciplines), 9-11
September 2024 (Sorbonne Université, Paris)

Date: 09-Sep-2024 - 11-Sep-2024
Location: Paris, France
Contact Person: Neige Rochant
Meeting Email: neige.rochant at icloud.com
Web Site: https://llcd2024.sciencesconf.org/

Linguistic Field(s): History of Linguistics; Typology

Call Deadline: 28-Jan-2024

Meeting Description:

Workshop organizers:
• Neige Rochant (Université de Lausanne)
• Marc Allassonnière-Tang (CNRS - Museum d'Histoire Naturelle)

Languages can rely on various strategies to categorize nouns in the
lexicon (Seifart 2010; Kemmerer 2017a). Grammatical gender, whose
definition used for this workshop encompasses noun class systems, is
one of the most common of these strategies (Corbett 2007). In gender
systems, each noun of the lexicon is assigned to a specific category
manifested by grammatical agreement patterns (Corbett 1991), with
gender marking on elements associated with the noun in the noun phrase
and/or the verb phrase, e.g. on the adjectives or verbs. The term
‘noun class’ tends to be used for languages with a larger set of
categories in which other semantic features (such as humanness, shape,
or plants) are primary.

Grammatical gender has attracted much attention from multiple areas of
linguistics, e.g., typology (for its distribution and structural
variation: Corbett 1991; Aikhenvald 2000; Grinevald 2000; Kilarski
2014), psycholinguistics (for the cognitive structures supporting it:
Contini-Morava & Kilarski 2013: 291–293), neuroscience (for how it is
processed: Kemmerer 2017a,b), sociolinguistics (for how it reflects
sociocultural gender: Hall 2002; Aikhenvald 2016a). This interest may
be attributed to the wealth of information grammatical gender provides
regarding human cognition and cultures by reflecting how the human
brain categorizes its experience. This sphere of knowledge can be
supplemented by the study of the evolution of gender systems, which is
all the more interesting as the latter are held to result from long
evolutionary chains and are in this sense “among the more clearly
mature elements of language” (Dahl 2004).

Although gender systems of the world have been extensively studied in
synchrony, the origins and details of their development remain highly
hypothetical. The questions that still may be asked for a given subset
of related languages pertain to multiple aspects of the evolution of
gender:

Locus of gender-marking, e.g.: where was gender first marked and how
did it spread to other parts of speech? Where is gender marked with
higher diachronic stability?
Inventory of gender categories, e.g.: which gender categories are
older, which have developed later on and how?
Gender assignment, e.g.: how and why does a lexeme change its gender?
How did a gender become dominant?

Some of these questions have been investigated for the Indo-European
family and several of its branches (Carling & Van Epps 2019; Carling
et al. 2021; Allassonnière-Tang & Dunn 2020). It is generally held,
for example, that the feminine gender emerged from an original
two-gender (animate/inanimate) system in early Indo-European (Luraghi
2011). Besides, typological hypotheses on the development of gender
systems in general have been made. For instance, the most frequent
trajectory involves several-stage grammaticalization from lexical
nouns that develop into classifiers (Grinevald 2002; Aikhenvald
2016b). From then on, it has been proposed that classifiers can be
repeated within the noun phrase or beyond, which gives rise to
agreement via intermediate stages (Corbett 1991: 310–312; Givón
1976), e.g. as a result of the recruitment of classifying
demonstrative pronouns as third-person personal pronouns (Greenberg
1978). Hence, gender typically starts from within the noun phrase
(Tang & Her 2019). On the other hand, Luraghi (2011) established a
correlation between the way a gender system arises and its primary
function, arguing that systems born from the grammaticalization of
classifiers fulfill a classificatory function and are primarily
non-sex based, whereas those performing a referent-tracking function
are born from the establishment of agreement following different
morphosyntactic behavior of groups of nouns and are often sex-based.

Call for Papers:

As regards the development of the motivations for gender assignment,
it is believed that all gender systems start out as semantics-based
(Audring 2016). Furthemore, the enrichment and reduction of gender
systems has been shown to proceed in cross-linguistically predictable
ways (Demuth et al. 1986; Marchese 1988; Priestly 1983), with the
birth of new agreement targets frequently resulting from
grammaticalization, new gender values arising by reanalysis of
existing morphological markers (Corbett 1991: 313–314) or being lost
by syncretism or loss of the markers (very common in Indo-European,
e.g. Polinsky & Van Everbroeck 2003) while distinctions are typically
retained longest on personal pronouns (Corbett 1991: 143) and, in
languages that lost grammatical agreement, gender markers generally
still being found on nouns (Kießling 2018). Finally, the role of
intra- and extra-linguistic factors in the evolution of gender systems
has been little researched. Seifart (2018) proposed that semantically
more opaque classification is less likely to diffuse through language
contact. In addition, Allassonnière-Tang et al. (2021) showed that
gender systems spread more by historical language expansion than
classifier systems, which spread more by feature diffusion because
they are less grammaticalized.

The evolution of gender in families other than Indo-European is much
less researched, especially with quantitative methods. Di Garbo &
Verkerk (2022), a typological investigation of northwestern Bantu
gender, suggests that animacy-based agreement contributes to the
erosion of gender-marking and spreads in ways that are suggestive of a
hierarchy of syntactic integration between nouns and adnominal
modifiers. Rochant, Allassonnière-Tang & Cathcart (2022) investigated
the evolutionary trends of noun class marking in Atlantic
(Niger-Congo) using phylogenetic comparative methods.

This workshop aims to foster discussion on the diachrony of gender
(including so-called ‘noun class’) systems in language families and/or
areas from a typological perspective. It intends to bring together
perspectives from different language families (including and beyond
Indo-European) and different approaches, whether qualitative or
quantitative.

————————————————————————

Submission guidelines:

We are inviting abstracts for 20-minute presentations (in French or
English) that address the topic of this workshop. To participate,
please submit preliminary abstracts (300 words, in docx format,
including your affiliation) to the workshop organizers by January
28th, 2024, at these email addresses: neige.rochant at icloud.com and
marc.allassonniere-tang at mnhn.fr.

This workshop proposal has not yet been accepted by the conference
organizers. We will submit it together with your preliminary abstracts
by January 30th, 2024.

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