Gender and Noun Classification

Edited by Éric Mathieu, Myriam Dali, and Gita Zareikar

Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics

Draws on data from a wide range of typologically diverse languages
Combines syntactic, semantic, morphological, and pragmatic approaches to gender and noun classification
Offers both theoretical analyses and typological exploration of gender-related phenomena

Gender and Noun Classification

Edited by Éric Mathieu, Myriam Dali, and Gita Zareikar

Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics

Description

This volume explores the many ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders or classes. A noun may belong to a given class because of its logical or symbolic similarities with other nouns, because it shares a similar morphological form with other nouns, or simply through an arbitrary convention. The aim of this book is to establish which functional or lexical categories are responsible for this type of classification, especially along the nominal syntactic spine.

The book's contributors draw on data from a wide range of languages, including Amharic, French, Gitksan, Haro, Lithuanian, Japanese, Mi'kmaw, Persian, and Shona. Chapters examine where in the nominal structure gender is able to function as a classifying device, and how in the absence of gender, other functional elements in the nominal spine come to fill that gap. Other chapters focus on how gender participates in grammatical concord and agreement phenomena. The volume also discusses semantic agreement: hybrid agreement sometimes arises due to a distinction that grammars encode between natural gender on the one hand and grammatical gender on the other. The findings in the volume have significant implications for syntactic theory and theories of interpretation, and contribute to a greater understanding of the interplay between inflection and derivation. The volume will be of interest to theoretical linguists and typologists from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

Gender and Noun Classification

Edited by Éric Mathieu, Myriam Dali, and Gita Zareikar

Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics

1. Humans, gods, and demons, Eric Mathieu
Part I. Gender and partition
2. Partitioning the nominal domain: The convergence of morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, Rose-Marie Dechaine
3. Categorization as noun construction: Gender, number, and entity types, Paolo Acquaviva
Part II. Locus of gender
4. Multiple facets of constructional Arabic Gender and 'functional universalism' in the DP, Abdelkader Fassi Fehri
5. Limiting gender, Christopher Hammerly
6. The double life of gender and its structural consequences: A case study from Standard Italian, Ivona Kučerova
7. On gender and agreement in Brazilian Portuguese, Danniel da Silva Carvalho
8. A novel kind of gender syncretism, Ruth Kramer
9. (Grammatical) gender troubles and the gender of pronouns, Phoevos Panagiotidis
Part III. Morphosemantic noun classification
10. Number, names, and animacy: Nominal classes and plural interactions in Gitksan, Clarissa Forbes
11. Plural marking on mass nouns: Evidence from Greek, Maria Kouneli
12. Productivity vs. predictability: Evidence for the syntax and semantics of Animate gender in four Northeastern-area Algonquian languages, Conor McDonough Quinn
13. How to phraseologize nominal number, Solveiga Armoskaite
References
Index

Gender and Noun Classification

Edited by Éric Mathieu, Myriam Dali, and Gita Zareikar

Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics

Author Information

Eric Mathieu is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on French (Modern and Old) and the Algonquian language Ojibwe. His work has appeared in journals such as Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Lingua, and Probus, and he is the co-editor, with Robert Truswell, of Micro-change and Macro-change in Diachronic Syntax (OUP, 2017).

Myriam Dali is a PhD student at the University of Ottawa. Her research interests include the syntax and semantics of number and gender, the structure of the DP, the singulative, and the diachronic evolution of number marking systems. She has recently worked on the competition between plural forms in Tunisian Arabic. Her work has been published in Lingvisticae Investigationes and she has a book in preparation with John Benjamins.

Gita Zareikar is a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa. Her research interests include the syntax and semantics of bare nominals and number interpretation in general number languages. She focuses on the syntax of noun phrases and more specifically on the evolution of classifiers in non-numeral-classifier languages. She has recently been working on telicity and viewpoint aspect and its interaction with number and specificity. Her work has been published in Linguistic Variation and in the conference proceedings of NELS 46 and CLA 2015.

Contributors:

Paolo Acquaviva, University College Dublin
Solveiga Armoskaite, University of Rochester
Danniel da Silva Carvalho, Federal University of Bahia
Myriam Dali, University of Ottawa
Rose-Marie Dechaine, University of British Columbia
Abdelkader Fassi Fehri, Mohammed V University Rabat
Clarissa Forbes, University of Toronto
Christopher Hammerly, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Maria Kouneli, New York University
Ruth Kramer, Georgetown University
Ivona Kučerova, McMaster University
Eric Mathieu, University of Ottawa
Conor McDonough Quinn, University of Southern Maine
Phoevos Panagiotidis, University of Cyprus
Gita Zareikar, University of Ottawa