Claire Bowern: Gender in DM (reply to Martha McGinnis)

[Martha McGinnis]

Can I disagree a little with this definition of classes and genders?

The answer given here amounts to morphological class = noun class and
semantic class = gender. This isn't the way the terminology is used in
languages with large numbers of semantic noun classes/genders, such as
Bantu languages or the Torricelli languages of PNG. Here 'class' is used
rather than 'gender' because some senses of 'gender' (the real-world ones)
make having 15 "genders" (in the sense of masculine, feminine, neuter,
flat, round, leaf-products, roads, houses, etc) in your language is a bit
incongruous. in these languages, gender and class are the same thing, but
classes are what you have when you run out of gender labels. These
semantic noun "classes" still affect agreement on agreeing items (in the
Torricelli languages, 3rd person verbs, adjectives, etc); but they also
have morphological classes. If I remember rightly (for Arapesh and Olo, at
least), there are morphological classes for both nouns and adjectives. The
morphological classes affect the plural form of the noun and are
independent to a certain extent from the semantic classes.

So, as far as I can see, gender = noun class in a lot of uses of this
terminology, but "noun class" can also be used for _morphological_ class
(ie, declension in traditional grammar).

Claire Bowern


On Mon, 2 Oct 2000, Martha McGinnis wrote:

> I thought I'd answer despite not being Jonathan.  Gender affects
> agreement (e.g., on determiners and adjectives), but noun declension
> class just determines the form of the inflections on the noun.  For
> example, Spanish has both noun declension classes and gender, but
> they don't completely overlap: 'mano' (hand) and 'muchacho' (boy) are
> both in declension class 1 (ends in -o), but 'mano' is feminine and
> 'muchacho' is masculine.
>
>    El muchacho es feo. 'The boy is ugly.'
>    La mano es fea. 'The hand is ugly.'
>
> This snippet of information is brought to you from Rolf Noyer's
> morphology class notes, 1/11/99.