[Lingtyp] Query re pronoun inventories

Mon Feb 26 09:19:40 UTC 2018

I don't disagree. However, I'm not judging it based on the content of those
linked articles at all, but the historical movements they discuss:
nationwide protests of women against societal sexism. If that isn't a
significant indication of sexism in a country, then I don't know what would
be (research aside). I would be the first to admit that I know little about
sexism in Iceland, but what I do know if that the women there are
protesting it. I was genuinely confused when I read your message, and I
would like to know more.

If that is the best example we can come up with for a lack of sexism, then
I'm very uncertain as to how we can pursue the question of what grammatical
features would correlate with sexism in general.

On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 1:15 AM, ENRIQUE BERNARDEZ SANCHIS <
ebernard at filol.ucm.es> wrote:

> SIL. Now I understand. Judging Icelandic society and its history on yhe
> only basis of two journal articles is not very scientific. The bibliography
> on Icelandic society and language is immense.
>
>
> El lunes, 26 de febrero de 2018, Don Killian <donald.killian at helsinki.fi>
> escribió:
>
>> Some thoughts in response (somewhat distant from the original question
>> I'm afraid):
>>
>> On 26.2.2018 6:52, David Gil wrote:
>>
>>> On 26/02/2018 04:51, Rikker Dockum wrote:
>>>
>>>> Responding to Ian's comments on Thai (which is often classed as a
>>>> 'natural gender' pronoun system but has no grammatical gender),
>>>>
>>> Indeed, it would be very strange to think of Thai as being a "gendered"
>>> language in the same way as, say, French or Hebrew, in which the
>>> masculine/feminine distinction permeates the grammar. Rather, the limited
>>> distinction between what are perhaps more appropriately referred to as
>>> "male" and "female" forms in Thai would seem to be more akin to the various
>>> terms of address in a language such as Malay/Indonesian, which reflect
>>> distinctions in biological sex, as well as age, social status, race and
>>> other features — and nobody would say that Malay/Indonesian has gender, any
>>> more than it has, say, race.
>>>
>>
>> This is actually something of a debated idea in studying grammatical
>> gender, and isn't quite as simple as you might think.
>>
>> I'll quote Francesca Di Garbo's thesis here, as it brings up some nice
>> points on the subject:
>>
>> "One – very often debated – problem in the literature on gender is how to
>> account for those languages, such as English, in which the only evidence
>> for gender distinctions appears on pronouns. In the literature on
>> agreement, pronouns are often defined as non-prototypical
>> agreement targets insofar as they “violate the expectation that agreement
>> targets should share a local domain with their antecedent, preferably the
>> phrase” (Audring 2009). However, in spite of their non-prototypical status,
>> in the literature on (gender) agreement, pronouns are considered to be
>> possible agreement targets (Audring 2009; Corbett 1991, 2006, 2012, 2013a).
>> Within the indexation model introduced in §2.1.2.1, pronominal and
>> np-internal indexes are also part of one and the same functional domain in
>> the sense that they all function as strategies for signalling reference
>> through the discourse (on the
>> functional continuum between np-internal and np-external indexing
>> strategies, see also Barlow 1992; Corbett 2006; Croft 2013; Siewierska
>> 1999, 2004).
>>
>> Based on these assumptions... languages like English are considered to be
>> gendered languages, despite their gender system being less pervasive in
>> discourse than gender systems in languages with richer indexation are...
>> gender systems of the English type are singled out through the use of the
>> label pronominal gender systems. Pronominal gender systems are
>> crosslinguistically very rare5 (Audring 2009; Corbett 2013b), and, as shown
>> in the typological survey carried out by Audring (2009), they tend to
>> pattern with strictly semantic principles of gender assignment. Applying
>> Dahl’s (2000a) dichotomy between lexical and referential gender, one could
>> think of gender systems of the English type as being referential in nature.
>> In languages with pronominal gender systems, gender indexation signals
>> salient properties of the np referents, e.g. male vs. female vs. sexually
>> undifferentiated entities, rather than aspects of the lexical semantics of
>> nouns."
>>
>> It's a bit like gender-resolution for mixed plural NPs.  If I remember my
>>> Corbett correctly (I'm currently miles away from his books), given a
>>> sentence such as "JOHN AND MARY CAME-AGR", there is no language with gender
>>> agreement in which there is a special gender for mixed male-and-female
>>> groups; usually, and sexistly, the resolution is to the masculine. (I
>>> vaguely half-remember some Daghestanian(?) language in which the resolution
>>> is to some 3rd or even 4th gender with other inanimate(?) meanings, but
>>> this still doesn't constitute a special gender for "male-plus-female").
>>>
>>
>> Actually, the language I worked on for my MA, Griqua/Korana, does
>> actually do something like this. It's not 100% strictly for mixed
>> male-and-female groups, but they have a "common" or "indeterminate" gender
>> used to denote a mixed group, or indicate the uncertainty or ignorance of
>> the speaker as regards the sex of the human being(s) in question.
>> Sierwierska included Korana in her study of pronouns, so its gender system
>> is known... see e.g. http://wals.info/chapter/44.
>>
>> Also, one additional rather interesting language to add to the discussion
>> is Tainae, which has noun classes for all person forms, even 1st/2nd.
>>
>> According to Carlson (1991):
>>
>> "Although all the examples and the charts listed up to this point have
>> been restricted to masculine and feminine nouns, it is perfectly
>> conceivable that personal pronouns could be derived from the other noun
>> classes, though in practice this is rare, and generally restricted to
>> address forms. An example might be in a situation where someone is doing
>> some sort of work and a vine keeps getting in the way. The worker may get
>> angry and say:
>>
>> Aɨtɨkɨ nonauti !
>> a -ɨtɨkɨ nonau-ti
>> ANA-2SG.FLEX cease-2SG.FUT.IMP
>> ad -pro v -vm: tns
>> You rope, cut it out!
>>
>> Note that in the above example, unlike the MASC and FEM 2SG pronouns, the
>> anaphoric a appears. It may be that in the case of the MASC and FEM
>> pronouns, because of frequent use, the a had dropped out. The remaining
>> pronouns for the other noun classes could possibly be formed in a manner
>> similar to the one in which those for masculine and feminine classes are
>> formed, but I have no record of them in any text. I have also questioned a
>> few people about their existence, and they don't seem to have any idea what
>> I'm talking about. For reference, the 2SG forms for classes
>> other than masculine and feminine are listed below. Note that in each of
>> these cases the anaphoric marker a is present:
>>
>> Cls 2SG
>> ANI aikɨ
>> CYL aɨwakɨ
>> FLAT aɨnakɨ
>> LONG aaikɨ
>> FLEX aɨtɨkɨ
>> FLUID aɨpikɨ
>> TOOL aɨpakɨ
>> INDET aukɨ
>> RAIN aakɨ
>> "
>>
>> So they're highly restricted in use, and potentially not even possible
>> for some persons, but they nonetheless have dedicated forms for personal
>> pronouns of all noun classes, even inanimate references.
>>
>> References:
>>
>> Di Garbo, Francesca. 2014. Gender and its interaction with number and
>> evaluative morphology: An intra- and intergeneralogical typological survey
>> of Africa. Doctoral dissertation, University of Stockholm.
>>
>> Maingard, L. F. 1962. Korana folktales: grammar and texts. Johannesburg:
>> Witwatersrand University Press.
>>
>> Carlson, Terry. 1991. Tainae Grammar Essentials. Ukarumpa, Papua New
>> Guinea: Unpublished Typescript, The Summer Institute of Linguistics.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Don
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>
>
> --
> Enrique Bernárdez
> Catedrático de Lingüística General
> Departamento de Lingüística, Estudios Árabes, Hebreos y de Asia Oriental
> Facultad de Filología
> Universidad Complutense de Madrid
>
>
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