[systems-of-nominal-classification] Gender disagreement or superclassing

[Greville Corbett]

Hi Felicity, Hi everyone,

I think the Jingulu situation is particularly interesting for what it tells us about feature systems, and how they are structured. I have found few other examples. The obvious one is Nick Evans' 1997 account of Bininj Gun-wok (Mayali).

 It's worth pointing out that there can be a similar effect for number, and here the example is Tundra Nenets (as described by Irina Nikolaeva). I discuss both Rob Pensalfini's Jingulu gender data and Irina Nikolaeva's Tundra Nenets data in Features (CUP, 2012, pp. 22-26). I'd be very interested to learn of more examples.

Very best
Grev
Greville Corbett, Surrey Morphology Group

On 9 Oct 2014, at 01:46, Felicity Meakins <f.meakins at uq.edu.au<mailto:f.meakins at uq.edu.au>> wrote:

Hi all,

I am hoping some of you might be able to point me to some non-Australian cases of gender disagreement or superclassing. The sort of phenomena I (and Rob Pensalfini) are interested in occurs in Jingulu (Mirndi, non-Pama-Nyungan) in Australia.

Jingulu distinguishes four genders: masculine (I), feminine (II), vegetable (III) and neuter (IV). NP modifiers such as adjectives and demonstratives generally show agreement in gender with the head noun, as shown in (1), however modifiers can optionally 'disagree' with their head. Thus masculine-marked modifiers can optionally agree with heads of the feminine gender and neuter-marked modifiers can optionally agree with heads of the vegetable gender, for example (2). Masculine-marked modifiers can also optionally agree with heads of all four genders, as in (3) (apologies for the alignment of glosses).


(1) (I) Bininja bardakurr-a (III) Darrangku bardakurr-u
man(m) good-MASC tree(n) good-NEUT

(II) Nayurni bardakurri-rni (IV) Karnarinymi bardakurri-mi
woman(f) good-FEM spear(v) good-VEG

(2) (I) Bininja bardakurr-a (III) Darrangku bardakurr-u
man(m) good-MASC tree(n) good-NEUT

(II) Nayurni bardakurri-rni (IV) Karnarinymi bardakurri-mi
woman(f) good-FEM spear(v) good-VEG


(3) (I) Bininja bardakurr-a (III) Darrangku bardakurr-a
man(m) good-MASC tree(n) good-MASC

(II) Nayurni bardakurr-a (IV) Karnarinymi bardakurr-a
woman(f) good-MASC spear(v) good-MASC

Thanks! Felicity

_________________________________________
FELICITY MEAKINS  | ARC Research Fellow (DECRA)
Linguistics | SLCCS | University of Queensland |
Brisbane QLD 4072 | AUSTRALIA
RM 517 | Gordon Greenwood Bldg (32) |
' +61 7 3365 2877 | ' +61 411 404 546 | 7 +61 7 3365 6799 | * f.meakins at uq.edu.au<mailto:f.meakins at uq.edu.au> |
web www.slccs.uq.edu.au//index.html?page=127733&pid=124851<http://www.slccs.uq.edu.au//index.html?page=127733&pid=124851>



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