[systems-of-nominal-classification] Introduction: Ruth Singer

[Hedvig Skirgård]

Hi Ruth and everyone,

I just had a quick question, which are these 13 languages?

In the questionnaire we are using in the Nijmegen Typological Survey there
is a question that was also applied in the Sahul and Melansia-sample in
publications by Michael Dunn, Ger Reesink, yourself et al.

F116 Do verbs classify the shape, size, consistency or position of
absolutive arguments by means of incorporated nouns, verbal affixes or
suppletive verb stems?

Out of the 176 languages that were answered for that questions 165 are
coded as "no", 18 as "?" and 11 as  "yes". The questions is not limited to
the more specific questions of yours, but I was just curious about the
specific languages.

I'm not that surprised by what you describe, but perhaps I would be if I
had more experience. Isn't it expected from what we know of
grammaticalization paths of systems of nominal classification? Again,
please excuse my ignorance concerning the specifics of noun incorporation
in Australian languages.

/Hedvig


2014-07-14 1:47 GMT+02:00 Ruth Singer <ruth.singer at gmail.com>:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I am a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Melbourne (Australia). I
> have been interested in nominal classification since I began my PhD in
> 2002. That was a description of a few topics in the Mawng language, a
> non-Pama Nyungan language spoken in northern Australia. Mawng which has
> what is morphologically a straightforward semantically-based five gender
> system but the uses of the system is more similar to those described for
> nominal classifiers in other Australian languages - both those in NP
> classifier constructions and those that are analysed as incorporated nouns
> in verbs. In my PhD I looked at how verbal gender agreement is involved in
> the negotiation of meaning in discourse - how it interacts with the
> meanings of verbs and the discourse context. And also how gender agreement
> in verbs becomes lexicalised and what this says about its more productive
> functions.
>
> Officially I am working on projects that look at sociolinguistics and
> multilingualism at present but also intonation. But I have been revising a
> book manuscript that develops some of the ideas in my PhD called The
> dynamics of nominal classification: productive and lexicalised uses of
> gender agreement in Mawng. It includes a rather small typological survey
> which surprisingly suggests that there is a correlation between a language
> having verbal gender agreement for 3 or more strongly semantically-based genders
> and having noun-incorporation into verbs. In other words, if a language has
> one form of nominal classification it is more likely to also have another
> form. Does this surprise the rest of you? Maybe I am just hung up on
> old-fashioned typological ideas of complementarity - i.e. if a language has
> feature X it has no need of feature Y. The survey only included 13
> languages, because it was actually designed to look at another feature, and
> I since I did it by contactinglinguists I didn't know by email I didn't get
> a lot of responses.
>
> Look forward to many interesting discussions!
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ruth
>
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