[Lingtyp] nominal classification (gender and classifiers)

Fri Mar 24 15:47:53 UTC 2017

I couldn't agree more about nominal classification being an interesting topic.

But I am not so sure about the role of flexibility (see Grev Corbett's message):

<<< We would argue that the canonical gender system has rigid assignment. >>>

This would mean that Thai has a canonical gender system and that an example like the following (see my previous message) is similar to Swahili:

rót  [khan  yàj]  [khan  níi]

car  CL       big     CL       DEM

‘this big car’

To me the most important distinction is rather that a gender system does not add information on grammatical function. In the above Thai example, the classifier marks contrastive focus with stative verbs and (mostly) singular with the demonstrative. Moreover it is not obligatory (in contrast to its occurrence with numerals).

In contrast, a Swahili class marker on its modifiers does not add any new information on grammatical function. In my view, this is due to the agreement status of gender/noun-class markers. If one sees agreement as an indicator of syntactic units, the semantics of their markers become irrelevant. What matters is that the markers do their job reilably, i.e. they are obligatory and they lack flexibility. This function can also be exhibited by markers of other categories (e.g. number, case, ...) as long as these markers are semantically general enough to be compatible with the meaning of any of the potential modifiers (see Bisang 2002). Let me add that  it was probably not such a good idea to abandon agreement after all.

As for arbitrary restrictions on the number of distinctions, I fully agree with Grev. We may lose important information.

All the best,

Walter

________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of g.corbett at surrey.ac.uk <g.corbett at surrey.ac.uk>
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 3:43:32 PM
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] nominal classification (gender and classifiers)

Good to see so much interest in nominal classification. Consider this example:

 mi-na-si-na                            na-yu               na-manabweta           vivila
DEM-FEMALE-PL-DEM     FEMALE-two  FEMALE-beautiful    girl
‘these two beautiful girls’

Easy! Plenty of agreement, obviously a gender system. We agree. But not so fast. Gunter Senft, THE expert on Kilivila, calls this a classifier system (the example is from Senft 1986: 69, that’s his Mouton Grammar). And there are reasons for that: for instance, there is flexibility in the choice of values.

Nominal classification is complex. One difficulty is that it’s easy to get hung up on sterotypes (French gender, Mandarin classifiers) and we think it’s time to pull apart the different criteria in nominal classification systems. The particular clusterings that we find in French, Chichewa, Archi and Burmese, aren’t the whole story.

Please let’s not define by the number of values: there are tiny classifier systems and large gender systems. (By the way, the Kilivila system has at least 177 members.) Biologists don’t say that legs must come in twos or fours, and bar millipedes from having legs because they have too many. Linguists allow for large tense systems and small consonant inventories.

We would argue that the canonical gender system has rigid assignment. That’s a principled baseline to measure from. Then we find some that are much more flexible (like Mawng as mentioned by Ruth Singer, or Savosavo, Wegener 2012). And there are “classifier” systems where the speaker has little choice. Do check your favourite system using Gerald Gazdar’s orange test. If orange takes the ‘sphere’ classifier, step on one and then ask your speaker. You may be surprised to find it’s still classified as ‘sphere’, because the lexeme for orange takes that classifier (sounds like agreement?). Mike Franjieh’s work on relational classifiers in North Ambrym is significant here (see Oceanic Linguistics 2016).

So nominal classification systems can be more or less close to canonical gender. Exotica are still turning up, even in Europe (see Paciaroni & Loporcaro’s recent work on Ripano). As we weaken the constraint of agreement (and Steele’s definition is still a helpful one), we get to the exotic system of Dutch (see Jenny Audring on this) and to noun classifiers (which Nick Reid has shown nicely grammaticalizing into genders in Ngan’gityemerri). The markers may be more bound (as in French and Kilivila) or less bound (as in Ngan’gityemerri). There is a wonderfully rich variety of systems out there, since the different criteria vary independently of each other (but not absolutely so, of course, or where would we typologists be?). And in many respects, the different types of classifier are more different from each other than they are from canonical gender.

The issues have occupied us (Sebastian Fedden and Greville Corbett) for quite some while. If anyone has time to comment, we’ll gladly send you a paper or two. It’s work in progress.
Very best
Grev and Sebastian

On 24 Mar 2017, at 08:36, Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>> wrote:

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

—
Greville G. Corbett

Surrey Morphology Group
English (I1)
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
University of Surrey
Guildford
Surrey, GU2 7XH
Great Britain
email: g.corbett at surrey.ac.uk<mailto:g.corbett at surrey.ac.uk>
www.smg.surrey.ac.uk<http://www.smg.surrey.ac.uk>

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