[systems-of-nominal-classification] Presentation

Sun Jul 13 14:54:36 UTC 2014

Hi Marit and everyone else!

So, Harald, Suzanne van der Meer and myself are working on a project called
"Nijmegen Typological Survey (NTS)". We're surveying a wide variety of
structural features in African languages. The survey itself is based on
previous work by Ger Reesink, Michael Dunn et al on languages of Australia
and Melanesia. In other words, we have information on 198 languages from
the previous publications and are now expanding it with approximately 70
African languages. Included in the survey are a large set of questions
concerning systems of nominal classification, including a few on semantics.
I list those here below.

The features below have been filled in for approximately 200 languages,
mainly of Australia and Melanesia.

  F051 Is sex a relevant category in the noun class/gender system?  F052 Is
shape a relevant category in the noun class/gender system?  F053 Is animacy
(without reference to sex) a relevant category in the noun class/gender
system?  F054 Is plant status a relevant category in the noun class/gender
system?  F192 Are the phonological properties of the noun stem a relevant
category in the noun class/gender system?  F116 Do verbs classify the
shape, size, consistency or position of absolutive arguments by means of
incorporated nouns, verbal affixes or suppletive verb stems?  F177 Can the
verb carry a marker of animacy of argument, unrelated to the gender/noun
class of the argument?
If you or anyone else want to know anything more about features in our
survey that concern nominal classification or the distribution of languages
across these features, or just the NTS in general - I'd be happy to write a
longer post here or send you more information in another manner.

/Hedvig

2014-07-10 14:14 GMT+02:00 Marit Lobben <marit.lobben at psykologi.uio.no>:

>    Dear classifier system enthusiasts,
>
>  It was great fun to read all of your research foci! Now that we know
> each other better, it will be easier to know who to ask for what.
>
>  I and Hedvig took the initiative to form this group at the classifier
> conference in Surrey, and it proves now, although silent for a few months,
> that this was a good idea, and hopefully discussions will catch on.
>
>  Let me introduce myself. My background is on the West African language
> Hausa. I am a general linguist but have done several psycholinguistic
> fieldworks in Africa with Hausa-speaking children and adults (noun plurals
> and syntactic polysemy). After my PhD defense in 2010, I shifted grounds
> and started focussing on noun classifier systems. I have always been
> interested in the typology-universal properties interface, and the tension
> between those. As I grew more interested in the shared semantic aspects of
> classifier systems I pondered upon their causes. Is it acquired, because
> humans tend to live in similar habitats? Is it due to our shared biology
> and make-up of the body? Of course I am not naïve about cultural
> differences, or the fact that supposedly older systems more resembling noun
> classes and genders have a more mixed semantic make-up.
>  Nevertheless, my present approach to this is to investigate the
> biological basis for language, and classifiers in particular. So I trained
> for neuroscientific methods at a psychology department and applied for a
> scholarship. In my postdoctoral project "The embodied cognitive bases for
> classifier systems" I investigate numeral classifiers in Chinese, Japanese
> and Vietnamese by using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), and
> scan (for the moment) native Mandarin speaking subjects while they
> semantically process (read) various numeral classifiers embedded in noun
> phrases. The technology and statistical procedures are appalling, but I
> have good helpers.
>
>  I also have another project going on, where my research assistant
> register semantic classes of classifier system in an excel sheet. In
> addition to articles in linguistic journals, I gathered about 80
> dissertations on various classifier languages around the world, which will
> be the basis for a future conclusion on what semantic classes are more
> common, in what type of systems they are found, the dispersion of these
> systems around the world, and so on. Once the data are collected there
> should be many ways to use the material. At the moment we have about 200
> languages.
>  It might be a good idea to give you a list of the languages we have, so
> that if any of you know about other languages, we could add it?
>
>
>  Best regards,
>
>  Marit Lobben
>  Postdoctor
>  Office phone: +47 845242
>  Cell phone: +47 419 32 912
>  *Group for cognitive and neuropsychology*
>  Department of psychology
>  University of Oslo
>
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