[Lingtyp] R: genifiers (gender markers/classifiers)

Wed Mar 22 19:39:33 UTC 2017

Dear Martin, dear all,

this is an exciting discussion.

First of all, I fully agree with Randy:

<<<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.>>>

We are not in a position to really understand how the different manifestations of "genifiers" are connected and we would certainly lose an enormous amount of information if we just look at whether a language is [±genifier]. In spite of this, a cover term would be useful. I actually wonder why not just talk about "class markers"?

I also think that we should take Mark's idea of looking at different functions very seriously. This looks to me like a potential semantic map for checking what functions individual "class markers/genifiers" can express. In some languages, they can express a lot of functions (cf. Sasha Aikhenvald's "multiple classifier languages").

I would also like to thank Ruth for her references - I am looking forward to reading these publications.

Best wishes,

Walter

________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Paolo Ramat <paoram at unipv.it>
Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2017 11:43:43 AM
To: Siva Kalyan; Elisa Roma
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] R: genifiers (gender markers/classifiers)

According to the excellent remarks by Elisa Roma why do not create the neologism regrouper from the verb to regroup “reassemble or cause to reassemble into organized groups”?
Best,
Paolo

Prof.Paolo Ramat
Università di Pavia (retired)
Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori (IUSS Pavia, retired)
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From: Siva Kalyan<mailto:sivakalyan.princeton at gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2017 10:58 AM
To: Elisa Roma<mailto:frisella at iol.it>
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] R: genifiers (gender markers/classifiers)

Would “tagger” work? It’s in the same semantic neighbourhood as “classifier” and raggruppatore; isn’t already used in grammatical theory (as far as I know); and has a suitably 21st-century ring to it :). It does of course have an existing usage in computational linguistics (e.g. “part-of-speech tagger”); but I think there’s little risk of confusion with this usage.

The hyperonym for “gender” and “class” would thus be “tag”.

Siva

On 22 Mar 2017, at 8:16 pm, Elisa Roma <frisella at iol.it<mailto:frisella at iol.it>> wrote:

Dear Martin, dear typologists,
thank you for this discussion.

I had a similar reaction to Sebastian Nordhoff’s, that is I felt (and feel) that the word genifier is too easily connected to genes. In fact looking at the way it was coined I had imagined, for what is worth, exactly the same alternatives, clander or clender. The morphological problem with genifier is that it is meant to be a blend, but in fact it’s made up as (or homonymous with) a derivative.  I had also thought that speakers of Romance languages may be more sensitive about this problem, but this may not be the case.
Still, there is  the semantic problem, because brunch and smog are not hyperonyms, as has already been noted.

IF we need a hyperonym as Martin has argued, but others have questioned, I feel that anyway this is not a very good one, and not simply for neophobic issues. As I am not a native speaker I feel somewhat uncomfortable in coining English words. If I had to coin something for what Martin has defined I’d use Italian raggruppatore (possibly to be translated with English grouper?). A raggruppatore is something that (generally) groups together (nouns in grammatical or semantic categories, but also words in phrases, referents in pragmatical kinds,…), like a sheep-dog does with sheep. Perhaps it’s too general a term, but that may have the advantage of not encouraging its (ab)use in descriptions , something which Randy La Polla has warned us against.
But we’ll have to look at new generations of linguists to see what happens with new words. So, I have to step out.

All the best,
Elisa

P.S. I asked my husband what could a word like genifier refer to for linguists and he said: “Genitive”.

Elisa Roma, PhD
General and Celtic Linguistics
Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici
Università di Pavia
Italia
elisa.roma at unipv.it<mailto:elisa.roma at unipv.it>

Da: Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] Per conto di Johanna NICHOLS
Inviato: mercoledì 22 marzo 2017 06.08
A: Randy John LaPolla (Prof) <RandyLaPolla at ntu.edu.sg<mailto:RandyLaPolla at ntu.edu.sg>>
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Oggetto: Re: [Lingtyp] genifiers (gender markers/classifiers)

Where, oh where, is the generation that gave us terms like "pied piping"?  We need that kind of creativity now.
Johanna Nichols

On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 7:42 PM, Randy John LaPolla (Prof) <RandyLaPolla at ntu.edu.sg<mailto:RandyLaPolla at ntu.edu.sg>> wrote:
Hi All,
Thanks to Sebastian, Walter, and Mark for bringing up important points. I also feel there are structural and functional differences between genders and “noun classifiers”. I put the latter in scare quotes because it is as Mark said, they aren’t really classifying the noun, but are specifying the referent of the noun, and so the same noun can take different classifiers in many cases depending on the referent involved. In some uses they are actually referential themselves, and so can also be modified in some languages.

But my main reason for writing is to mention that this discussion is relevant to our discussion last year about classification in typology and language description.

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. It may be that some typologists find this useful, and are willing to pay this price to be able to make grand generalisations, but the loss of information must be kept in mind, and there is also the danger that this usage filters back into descriptions of languages. We already have the case of the introduction of “converb”, which was a categorial merger of different types of non-finite verb constructions that may have been useful for some people, but what happened is that some people doing descriptions of languages now feel it is enough to say something is a converb construction without going into the details of what sort of converb it is. So we have a loss of information in the descriptions as well.

As a number of people said, it may be we don’t have enough terminology in linguistics, but for me it is a lack of terms for doing fine-grained analysis of actual linguistic structures, not a lack of terms for high level abstractions that obscure the diversity of actual structures.

If one wants to talk about these types together, I recommend keeping something like “noun classification devices” (even though as I said they aren’t necessarily classifying the noun, but the referent) because it is transparent and also has the plural marker, keeping us aware that we are talking about a plurality of devices and not one single type. The fact that it is not short and catchy will also help prevent the problem of it being used as a descriptive label.

Randy
-----
Prof. Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA （羅仁地）| Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies | Nanyang Technological University
HSS-03-45, 14 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637332 | Tel: (65) 6592-1825 GMT+8h | Fax: (65) 6795-6525 | http://randylapolla.net/
Most recent book:
https://www.routledge.com/The-Sino-Tibetan-Languages-2nd-Edition/LaPolla-Thurgood/p/book/9781138783324

On 22 Mar 2017, at 7:25 AM, Mark W. Post <markwpost at gmail.com<mailto:markwpost at gmail.com>> wrote:

Martin/All -

As others have already pointed out, there are two related issues here, one terminological and the other typological. I consider the terminological issue pretty trivial - I certainly agree that we have less terminology than we need for the number of concepts that we want to talk about in a more-or-less contrastive way, and while I'm willing to bet that even those of us who share this view probably blanched (at least initially) at the sight of the term "genifier", at the end of the day it doesn't matter - "grammaticalization" has more suffixes than it needs, and if you unpack them all they don't actually add up to what we use the term to mean, but the world keeps turning regardless.

But I'd take issue with the motivation for a categorical merger in the first place (which is what I take the introduction of a superordinate label to amount to - if that's wrong, then I've misunderstood something). It seems to me that most of the literature on classifiers focuses on the semantic dimension of classification, probably because this is what stands out as exotic from a European perspective - and, indeed, the label "classifier" itself suggests this. And it's the semantic dimension that is mostly being focused on when an alignment between gender systems and classifier systems is proposed - even, and especially, when superordinate labels like "noun classification" are proposed. But this is only part of the story. The *function* of classifiers - and here, I *only* mean the "numeral classifiers" of Greater Mainland Southeast Asia - is not classification, but referential specification. They function, that is, to individuate entities as instances of types. That is why the most frequently-used classifier by far in Mandarin Chinese, for example, is (almost) semantically empty, and cliticizes to demonstratives and the numeral 'one' in most mentions. Other languages take matters further, by deputizing the generic classifier itself as a de facto indefinite article - consider, for example, Nuoso Yi (data from Liu and Gu 2011 DOI: 10.1075/tsl.96.11liu<http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/tsl.96.11liu> - apologies if the glosses don't align properly).

i33ti34  gu33    ʑo33       si44        la33 .
coat       CL        catch       take        come
‘Bring a coat (to me).’

Hence the frequent observation that languages with classifiers tend to lack articles (though it's true that they don't always).

Given these facts, it seems that there's an at least equal argument in favor of merging classifiers with other referential markers, and in particular articles, so: clarticles? classicles? artifiers? Hmmm...

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.

Mark

On 22/03/2017 8:34 AM, Sebastian Nordhoff wrote:

And the term “gen-ifier” is completely parallel to “class-ifier” – it’s

a marker that puts a noun in a genus.

if "genifier" is used to put a noun in a *genus*, it is out as a marker

for the superordinate concept encompassing both noun class and gender.

Best

Sebastian

(Actually, since English distinguishes between “gender” and “genus”, one

might even introduce “genus” as a new feature term, a cover term for

gender and classifierhood. That would certainly be found more acceptable

to neophobics than "clender".)

Martin

On 21.03.17 20:38, Sebastian Nordhoff wrote:

Dear all,

as someone who has not worked extensively on either of these concepts, I

still have to say that the term "genifier" strikes me as odd. My first

thought upon seeing the subject of the mail was "OK, this will be about

making something a gender, or a gene, or a knee-like thing maybe, let's

see". I was misled by terms such as "intensifier", used to make

something more intense, and certainly also, albeit more on phonological

grounds, by "gentrification", which is a widely debated topic where I

live.

The attempt to blend "GEnder" and "classiFIER" is not successful in my

view, as "-fier" is not really the important formative here; "class" is.

If there is a desire for a blend, I would rather go for "Clender" or

"Clander", which would not lead to misparsings/misinterpretations as the

one I had.

As a final note, a "classifier" does something to an X, while "gender"

is a property of an X.

(1)  /ladida/ is of gender X

(2) ?/ladida/ is of classifier X

(3) ?/-dada/ is a gender

(4)  /-dada/ is a classifier

It is unclear to me whether the two concepts "gender" and "classifier"

do actually have a superordinate concept. Possibly, one has to use

"gender marker" and "classifier", or "noun class" and "gender" as

subordinate concepts to arrive at a good superordinate concept.

Best wishes

Sebastian

On 03/20/2017 04:05 PM, Martin Haspelmath wrote:

Dear typologists,

Cross-linguistic terminology (comparative concepts) should be both clear

and conform to the tradition, in order to preserve continuity with the

older literature.

In the case of the terms "gender" and "classifier", it seems that these

two goals cannot be achieved simultaneously without coining a new term

("genifier").

There is quite a bit of general literature on gender/classifiers (e.g.

Dixon 1986; Grinevald 2000; Aikhenvald 2000; Seifart 2010; Corbett &

Fedden 2016), but none of these works provide clear definitions of these

terms, and the more recent literature (e.g. Corbett & Fedden, and also

Seifart & Payne 2007) actually emphasizes that there is no reason to say

that gender markers and classifiers are distinct phenomena in the

world's languages.

Thus, it seems to me that we need the new term "genifier", perhaps

defined as follows:

A *genifier system* is a system of grammatical markers which occur on

nominal modifiers, predicates or anaphoric pronouns, and each of which

expresses (i.e. normally reflects, but sometimes contributes) a broad

property other than person and number of the controlling noun (i.e. for

nominal modifiers: the modificatum, for predicates: an argument, for

anaphoric pronouns: the antecedent).

The alternative to coining a new term, it seems to me, would be to

extend the meaning of the term "gender" or of the term "classifier" in

such a way that there would be no more continuity with the earlier

literature.

Given the above definition of genifier, we can perhaps define "gender"

and "numeral classifier" as follows (as arbitrary subcategories of

genifiers, defined just to preserve continuity with the older

literature):

A *gender system* (= 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.

A *numeral classifier system* is a system of genifiers which is

restricted to numeral (plus optionally other adnominal) modifiers.

I wonder if the above definitions have any obvious defects, i.e. any

cases that everyone would call gender or numeral classifier and that

wouldn't fall under the definitions, or cases that fall under them and

that nobody would call gender or numeral classifier.

Note that the new term "genifier" also has the advantage that the whole

domain can be called *genification* (rather than the cumbersome "noun

classification/nominal classification", which is also vague because

there are all kinds of "classes" or "classifications" of nouns which

have nothing to do with genifiers).

Any comments?

Thanks,

Martin

*************************

References

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2000. /Classifiers: A typology of noun

categorization devices/. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Corbett, Greville G. & Sebastian Fedden. 2016. Canonical gender.

/Journal of Linguistics/ 52(3). 495--531.

Dixon, R. M. W. 1986. Noun classes and noun classification in

typological perspective. In Colette Grinevald Craig (ed.), /Noun classes

and categorization/, 105--112. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Grinevald, Colette G. 2000. A morphosyntactic typology of classifiers.

In Gunter Senft (ed.), /Systems of nominal classification/, 50--92.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Seifart, Frank. 2010. Nominal classification. /Language and Linguistics

Compass/ 4(8). 719--736.

Seifart, Frank & Doris L. Payne. 2007. Nominal classification in the

North West Amazon: Issues in areal diffusion and typological

characterization. /International Journal of American Linguistics/ 73(4).

381--387.

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