[Lingtyp] Query re pronoun inventories

Mon Feb 26 16:23:22 UTC 2018

It might be relevant in this context to mention research by Lera Boroditsky (et al.) on the influence of grammatical gender on cognition, for example:

   Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. 2003. Sex, syntax and semantics.

   In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and cognition, 61- 80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Best, Jan R

From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Volker Gast <volker.gast at uni-jena.de>
Date: Monday, 26 February 2018 at 12.08
To: "lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org" <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Query re pronoun inventories

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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