[Lingtyp] Query re pronoun inventories
Volker Gast
volker.gast at uni-jena.de
Mon Feb 26 11:07:39 UTC 2018
This is a nice example of how important the question of
"operationalization" is (a term which is still rarely used in linguistic
typology). You cannot measure attitudes such as 'sexism' or 'gender
equality', you can only measure symptoms of such attitudes. In other
words, you have to find an operationalization of 'sexism'/'gender
equality' if you want to make quantitative statements/determine
correlations. I am not familiar with the literature you refer to, but
'nationwide protests of women against societal sexism' doesn't seem to
be a very good operationalization of 'gender equality' to me, because it
depends on many other factors (factors other than individual or societal
attitudes). For example, in many societies nationwide protests are
generally not common or even forbidden, which would make these societies
sexist irrespective of the actual attitudes held by the people.
Jumping to a more general level (and returning to a point I have made
before in a different context), the operationalizations used in an
empirical study are an important quality criterion, pertaining to the
question of 'validity'. If your operationalizations are not well chosen,
your results may be 'reliable' but perhaps not 'valid'.
I believe that these questions are not only relevant to social variables
but also to linguistic ones, as we cannot observe linguistic systems, we
can only observe the ouput produced by speakers on the basis of such
systems (we can only observe "symptoms" if you like).
Best,
Volker
On 26/02/18 10:19, Daniel Ross wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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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