[Lingtyp] nominal classification (gender and classifiers)

Tue Mar 28 00:28:22 UTC 2017

Back to the question of defining gender/classifier systems on the number of
classes:
    Suppose someone has put together a database on noun genders and
classifiers.  You want to  test a hypothesis about correlations between the
number of classes and some other property, and you turn to that database.
But all you can find in the database is whether the number is under or over
20.  Or suppose you want to test something about the correlation of number
of classes with their semantics or places of agreement, and that's not
fully laid out in the database because assumptions or theoretical stances
on those things are in the definitions of survey entities and the coding
procedures.  All you can test with is the cutoff point that defined the
types of classes in the first place, so if you're looking to refine the
definitions it all gets circular.  The laboriously constructed database
contributes little to further growth of knowledge.
    The moral here:  Arbitrary cutoffs like ±20 classes belong in the
project-specific binnings or aggregations that individual researchers do on
the exported data; they don't belong in the database itself.  The database
needs to contain the actual number of classes (plus notes on any
uncertainties), full information on semantics, full information on
agreement, etc.  Database users export, sort, bin, calculate, repeat.
    That was about databases; where do theory and terminology come in?
Typological theory needs to inform the database design, but the database
categories will always continue to need changing, and that will be in
response to novelties encountered and may or may not impact or be impacted
by theory.  A project-specific binning probably needs a project-specific
term, and someone else may choose to use the same binning and the same
term, but I'm not sure that should be anything but an ad hoc convenience.
(I understand "SME" to be a binning that is convenient for policy-making,
and not a technical term or theoretical notion in economics.)   I'd opt for
putting cutoffs and thresholds into terminology and theory only if they
prove to have a variety of strong correlations.  On this view, "gender" and
"classifier" are convenience terms, potentially throwaway.   Linguists can
use these and other terms with perfectly adequate clarity, as long as the
exact meaning is made clear and publications give some review of what other
terms have been used for the same or similar phenomenon and describe some
of their similarities and differences.  When enough of that kind of work is
done we can make a better-informed decision about what's to be considered a
category.
    I think this is similar to what Grev said, except that I'd want even
the canonical notions to be tentative, partial, and in progress.  (Not just
the set of referents but the actual notions and definitions.)

Johanna

On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 6:38 AM, Chao Li <chao.li at aya.yale.edu> wrote:

> Dear Martin,
>
> I am sharing a thought and contributing a penny. For a term that covers
> genders, noun classes, and classifiers, I'd like to suggest "sorter". It is
> an existing English word and its meaning is intuitively accessible. On this
> understanding, genders, noun classes, and classifiers share the
> (grammatical) function of sorting out nouns or their referents.
>
> Best,
> Chao
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 3:30 AM, Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>
> wrote:
>
>> Eva Lindström wrote:
>>
>> I think class  and classifier should be kept distinct. This is because
>> they refer to different things (as was pointed out early in this thread):
>> - Class (as in gender or noun class) is a property of a lexeme, involving
>> sub-categorisation of the noun category in the lexicon;
>> - Classifiers deal with properties of (groups of) referents.
>>
>>
>> This is similar to the point made by Greville Corbett & Sebastian Fedden:
>> Typical gender has rigid choice of markers (or values), while flexible
>> marker choice is associated with "classifiers".
>>
>> But if we make this part of a definition, then we end up saying that the
>> distinction between English "he" and "she" is a classifier distinction
>> (because they classify referents, not nouns), which would be very confusing.
>>
>> We also don't want to say that rigid choice/assignment implies "gender",
>> as pointed out by Walter Bisang:
>>
>> 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’
>>
>>
>> At the same time, we want to use the terms "gender" and "numeral
>> classifier" in a sense that is very close to everyone's intuitions. We want
>> to continue making comments like the following (from Corbett & Fedden's
>> message):
>>
>> there are tiny classifier systems and large gender systems.
>>
>>
>> We need definitions of these terms of we want to find out whether these
>> claims are true. Can these definitions contain numbers? Corbett & Fedden
>> think not:
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>> Yes, because we have definitions of "tense" and "consonant" that are
>> independent of the numbers. But economists define SMEs with arbitrary
>> numbers, so linguists might do so as well.
>>
>> Guillaume Segerer is worried that this might be reflected in the practice
>> of language describers:
>>
>> In France, when companies grow, they tend to split into smaller entities
>> to avoid such constraints. Here the arbitrary threshold influences the
>> observed reality. Along this line, the risk would be that
>> "typologically-oriented" descriptions might be influenced by the arbitrary
>> threshold posited by typologists.
>>
>>
>> But this is a discussion on LINGTYP, where we are talking about language
>> typology. Language description is a different matter – descriptive
>> linguists need a separate set of descriptive categories from the
>> typologists' comparative concepts.
>>
>> One could of course give up the goal of uniform terminology across the
>> discipline, as hinted by David Beck earlier:
>>
>> the key to terminological clarity is being clear about your terms at
>> point of use. I can see this being a useful term in many contexts, but I
>> don’t see this as being a one-size-fits-all kind of thing that everyone can
>> take up in every circumstance for something as messy and variable as
>> classificatory categories.
>>
>>
>> But this makes it very hard to communicate, and very hard for newcomers
>> to enter the discipline. Moreover, many concepts are built on other
>> concepts (like my proposed gender concept, built on the genifier concept,
>> which itself has a longish definition). There are at least some basic
>> concepts that everyone needs to agree on for the discipline to be able to
>> function and yield nonsubjective results.
>>
>> Best,
>> Martin
>>
>>
>> On 24 Mar 2017, at 08:36, Martin Haspelmath <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
>>
>>
>> --
>> 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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