[Lingtyp] genifiers (gender markers/classifiers)

[Martin Haspelmath]

I fully agree with Mark on this:

On 22.03.17 00:25, Mark W. Post wrote:
>
> 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.
>

Genifiers may of course cumulate with other functions, e.g. referential 
specification (as in Mark's Yi examples), or definiteness (as in Spanish 
definite articles /el/la/), or number. These forms are thus 
simultaneouly articles and/or number markers, but from the perspective 
of genification, they are genifiers.

I also agree with Randy:

On 22.03.17 03:42, Randy LaPolla wrote:
>
> 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.
>

Of course we "lose" information when we generalize across languages. But 
one needs to understand that typological categorization is very 
different from description. It may be that "there is the danger that 
this usage filters back into descriptions of languages", but this is so 
only if describers think that describing a language means putting 
pre-established labels on them. They should be warned against this, by 
emphasizing that comparative concepts are meant for comparison, and can 
be used for description only if there is no significant cross-linguistic 
variation in the relevant domain (e.g. "1st person", or "fricative").

To get back to my original question: Does anyone know a reason why one 
shouldn't define "gender" as a comparative concept in the following way:?

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.

I'm not very comfortable with a definition that makes reference to an 
arbitrary number, but I'm even less comfortable with a situation where 
we have no definition for "gender" at all, because this makes much of 
the earlier literature unreadable. It seems to me that Corbett (1991) is 
about gender systems roughly in the above sense.

Best,
Martin

-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10	
D-07745 Jena
&
Leipzig University
IPF 141199
Nikolaistrasse 6-10
D-04109 Leipzig





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