36.1809, Books: A Guide to Gender and Classifiers: Aikhenvald (2025)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1809. Wed Jun 11 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1809, Books: A Guide to Gender and Classifiers: Aikhenvald (2025)

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Date: 10-Jun-2025
From: Rachel Havard [Rachel.HAVARD at oup.com]
Subject: A Guide to Gender and Classifiers: Aikhenvald (2025)


Title: A Guide to Gender and Classifiers
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Oxford University Press
           http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-guide-to-gender-and-classifiers-9780198863601?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Author(s): Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald

Hardcover: 9780198863601

Abstract:

This book explores the range of noun categorization devices found in
the languages of the world, from the extensive systems of numeral
classifiers in Southeast Asia to the highly grammaticalized gender
agreement classes in Indo-European languages. Almost all languages use
some type of noun categorization device in their grammar, with the
most widespread being linguistic gender, whereby nouns are classified
based on core semantic properties such as sex, animacy, humanness, or
shape and size. Numeral classifiers are also common, and classify a
noun in terms of its inherent nature, animacy, shape, and form,
accompanied by a numeral or a quantifier. Other types of noun
categorization devices include noun classifiers, possessive
classifiers, verbal classifiers, and a number of rarer types such as
locative and deictic classifiers. In this volume, Alexandra Aikhenvald
investigates all facets of these nominal categorization systems, from
their form and distribution to their origins, development, and loss.
Noun categorization devices provide unique insights into how people
categorize the world through the language: in one language, a human
might be classified in terms of orientation, hence as 'vertical', in
another as male or female, and in another as simply 'animate' or even
'rational'. They also change as society changes, reflecting the ways
in which language and social environment are integrated into a single
whole.

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
                     Morphology
                     Sociolinguistics
                     Syntax
                     Typology




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