[Lingtyp] genifiers (gender markers/classifiers)

[Martin Haspelmath]

On 23.03.17 19:21, Alan Rumsey wrote:
>
> Those of us who have worked on languages with 2-5 such classes (in my 
> case Ungarinyin) have sometimes called them ‘genders’, while those who 
> have worked on languages with more have called them ‘noun classes’.
>

I had presupposed in my earlier messages that there is no distinction 
between these two types, and that they should be called "genders" – I 
took this as established by Corbett (1991). As Johanna Nichols noted, 
the term "noun class" is vague, so for cross-linguistic purposes, 
"gender" is surely better.

(One might feel that neglecting the sex-based vs. non-sex-based 
distinction is not such a good idea, as in Bernhard Wälchli's message, 
but it seems to me that one really shouldn't use the term "gender" 
anymore for sex-based distinctions, at least in typology. I take Corbett 
(1991) as foundational for all of us.)

But the problems with Corbett (1991) are

– that his definition of gender is based on the notion of "agreement" 
(for which there is no clear definition, cf. Corbett (2006), who only 
provides a definition of canonical agreement)

– that the distinction between "gender" and "numeral classifier" is (in 
part) based on the idea that gender markers are affixes and numeral 
classifiers are free forms, but there is no clear definition of "affix" 
(there is a definition of "free form", as occurring on its own in a 
complete utterance – and numeral classifiers are surely bound by this 
criterion)

– that the distinction between "features" (like gender) and markers 
(like classifiers) is far from clear-cut

Moreover, Corbett himself has given up the distinction between gender 
and other classifiers (there's only a canonical definition of gender 
now), as have others such as Ruth Singer, Sasha Aikhenvald, and Frank 
Seifart. But I still want to talk about "gender" as a comparative 
concept (as well as about "numeral classifiers" – a student of mine just 
wrote a nice MA thesis about this topic).

Guillaume Segerer points out that some Atlantic languages have up to 31 
classes, and it would seem odd to exclude them from having gender on the 
basis of a definition that arbitrarily stops at 20. I agree that this 
would seem odd, but I need to point out that *it wouldn't matter*. 
Comparative concepts are not designed to give the same results in all 
cases that seem similar enough to us (or some of us), but *to allow 
rigorous, intersubjective cross-linguistic comparison*. Comparative 
concepts must sometimes be arbitrary, because the world consists of many 
continuities, and if we still want to discuss differences with words, we 
need to make arbitrary cuts (think of the importance of SMEs in 
economics – small and medium-size enterprises, defined arbitrarily as 
having fewer than 250 employees).

Maybe it will turn out that some other, less arbitrary concept will give 
even better cross-linguistic generalizations. But for the time being, we 
have the term "gender" as a comparative concept (especially in legacy 
works such as Corbett's WALS maps), and my definition ("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") seems to be the only definitional proposal currently 
available.

Best wishes,
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





-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20170324/3d13f75b/attachment.htm>