[Lingtyp] genifiers (gender markers/classifiers)

[Eitan Grossman]

Hi all,

With regard to the concern about losing information when abstracting, I
think that this is mainly a problem if indeed all typologists did was to
say whether a language does or doesn't have a particular category. While
it's true that this is a problem in some frameworks (language X has some
but not all of the properties associated with account Y of phenomenon Z,
therefore X doesn't really "have" Z but rather "pseudo-Z"), this doesn't
have to be a problem for typology.

That's because given a broad definition of a phenomenon, one can treat
properties of grams/constructions as variables to be typologized over
rather than as criteria for belonging to a category. For example, one could
(1) say that since a particular construction has to be limited to noun
roots, Warembori doesn't "have" incorporation. Or one could say (2) that
the nature of the incorporand is not a criterion for whether a given
construction is or isn't incorporation, but rather a variable that can have
different values. Balthasar Bickel and his colleagues have called this
"multivariate analysis," and have applied it to a few domains (for example,
clause linkage). Of course, this is also basically what other typologists
have always done, e.g., Joan Bybee and her colleagues in their pioneering
Evolution of Grammar, where TAM categories were defined explicitly and
rather broadly, and then particular functional and formal properties of
grams were typologized over, thereby giving typology tremendous insights
into the diachronic typology of TAM.

In this way, individual categories in particular languages don't lose their
particularity (Bickel argues for this explicitly in his paper on
clause-linkage), and typologists have lots of material to work with, with
lots of space for new insights about language. To go back to the matter at
hand, I think Martin's suggestion of a unified notion of genifiers is a
salutary one (and this is orthogonal to the actual name chosen), but it's
possible that a more bottom-up approach to typologizing over the properties
associated with individual grams in individual languages might lead to a
non-arbitrary clustering of properties, thereby alleviating the concern
over the arbitrariness of where one puts the cut-off point.

Best,
Eitan





Eitan Grossman
Lecturer, Department of Linguistics/School of Language Sciences
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Tel: +972 2 588 3809
Fax: +972 2 588 1224

On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 10:18 PM, Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>
wrote:

> 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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