Grammatical Gender in BSL

[ingeborg]

Susan Fischer wrote:
>To follow up on Ulrike's point, the phenomenon in NS (NihonSyuwa)  is not,
>however, grammatical gender in the sense of assigning a near-arbitrary
>classification to a noun;

This is exactly the kind of grammatical gender that according to Inge
Zwitserlood and me IS present in all signed languages. In our work on
agreement we argue for classifiers (in classifier predicates) being gender
agreement markers, because these classifiers are reminiscent of the gender
markers (or noun class markers) in Bantu languages. These languages have
sets of markers to indicate the shape characteristics of entities, to
indicate males and females, animates, etc.

For the set of classifiers in NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands) which
forms are determined by the shape characteristics of the referent, Inge and
I have proposed a set of three features [±straight, ±small, ±narrow] to
account for all the occuring handshapes in classifier predicates. This kind
of gender marker seems to be present in all signed languages. Besides this
marker, some signed languages have some fixed gender markers, e.g. the
vehicle-classifer in ASL, the thumb and pinky classifiers for male and
female human beings, resp., in NS, Taiwanese and Korean SL, the V or bend V
handshape for legged entities in NGT, etc.

Groeten,
Ingeborg van Gijn
(University of Amsterdam)

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Ingeborg van Gijn
Department of General Linguistics
University of Amsterdam
Spuistraat 210
1012 VT  Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Tel: +31 (0)20 525 3107
Fax: +31 (0)20 525 3021
E-mail: ingeborg at hum.uva.nl
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