[systems-of-nominal-classification] Workshop on non-canonical gender at SLE 2015 in Leiden

[Hedvig Skirgård]

Hello everyone,

I just thought I'd spread this message below, in case there was anyone who
hadn't seen it. It sounds most interesting and I wish I could go, but
unfortunately I think that wouldn't be possible.

Best
Hedvig

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sebastian Fedden <s.fedden at surrey.ac.uk>
Date: 2014-09-02 14:37 GMT+02:00
Subject: Non-canonical gender systems - Workshop
To: LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org


*Non-canonical gender systems - Workshop*



Gender is famously "the most puzzling of the grammatical categories"
(Corbett 1991: 1), yet gender systems across the world's languages share a
number of characteristics.  Some of these are definitional. For example,
since gender is defined as a morphosyntactic feature, the presence of
agreement is a necessary condition – the gender of a noun must be marked on
at least one element other than the noun itself.



Other properties, by contrast, are expected rather than required.
Canonically, a gender system conforms to the following expectations:



-        any noun belongs to at least one gender

-        each noun only belongs to exactly one gender

-        the number of genders in a language is small and finite

-        the gender system has a semantic core, typically based on the
conceptual features sex, humanness or animacy

-        gender is marked on more than one lexical category

-        gender is marked in more than one syntactic domain

-        markers that express gender are morphologically bound

-        given the same noun, all gender markers are consistent across
target categories and utterances.



For this workshop, we are looking for gender systems that are non-canonical
in that they violate one or more of these expectations. This could, for
example, include systems with unusually numerous or highly variable
genders, or with exceptionally sparse agreement systems. In particular, we
are looking for languages in which gender appears to shade into other
feature systems, like number or classifier systems, or strategies of
diminuation and augmentation. Examples are the system of Miraña (Seifart
2005), which is intermediate between a gender and a classifier system and
the diminutive/gender markers in Walman (Brown & Dryer 2008). Abstracts
addressing such phenomena are particularly welcome.



We invite presentations elucidating data from individual languages and
discussing the analytical and theoretical difficulties. The scientific aim
of the workshop is to chart the outer limits of a fascinating phenomenon
and its place within the family of grammatical features.



*Selected abstracts will be submitted as part of a workshop proposal to the
Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), to be held at the '48th Annual Meeting
of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2015)' in Leiden, 2-5 September
2015. *



Keynote speaker will be Professor Greville G. Corbett (University of
Surrey).



The convenors of the workshop are Jenny Audring (University of Amsterdam)
and Sebastian Fedden (University of Surrey).



People wishing to present a paper at the workshop are invited to submit a
one-page anonymous abstract in electronic form (pdf or Word document) to
Sebastian Fedden at the following address:



s.fedden AT surrey.ac.uk



*Deadline for submission of abstracts: 17 October 2014*

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