[Lingtyp] Query re pronoun inventories

Mon Feb 26 11:14:40 UTC 2018

Du hast recht. Man muss zuerst die soziale und anthropologische Analyse der
Gesellschaft fertig machen, um DANN in der Sprache eine Korrelation finden
zu können.
Enrique

2018-02-26 12:07 GMT+01:00 Volker Gast <volker.gast at uni-jena.de>:

> 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> 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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>>
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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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