Canonical gender

Abstract

Nominal classification remains a fascinating topic but in order to make further progress we need greater clarity of definition and analysis. Taking a Canonical Typology approach, we use canonical gender as an ideal against which we can measure the actual gender systems we find in the languages of the world. Building on previous work on canonical morphosyntactic features, particularly on how they intersect with canonical parts of speech, we establish the distinctiveness of gender, reflected in the Canonical Gender Principle: In a canonical gender system, each noun has a single gender value. We develop three criteria associated with this principle, which together ensure that canonically a noun has exactly one gender value; we give examples of non-canonicity for each criterion, thus gradually building the typology. This is the essential groundwork for a comprehensive typology of nominal classification: the Canonical Typological approach allows us to tease apart clusterings of properties and to characterize individual properties with respect to a canonical ideal, rather than requiring us to treat the entire system as belonging to a single type. This approach is designed to facilitate comparisons of different noun classification systems across languages.

Gender and classifiers in concurrent systems: Refining the typology of nominal classification

“…And in many (but not all instances), the gender of a noun can be read off its lexical entry (semantic and morphological information). Thus Italian, as suggested by these examples, has a gender system which is canonical to a great extent; for much more detail on canonical gender see Corbett & Fedden (2016).…”

“…The study of nominal classification needs greater clarity of definition and analysis. Corbett & Fedden (2016) suggest a way forward, adopting a canonical approach. They start by establishing the properties of a "canonical" or ideal feature and its values, and then take this as the baseline against which actual examples can be measured.…”

“…Corbett & Fedden 2016). The standard language has two gender values: masculine and feminine (examples from Pier Marco Bertinetto, p. c.): These examples illustrate ways in which the Italian gender system is largely canonical.…”

“…However, this criterion is much less sound than it might have appeared initially. It is the canonical situation for gender systems to assign each noun to one and only one gender (Corbett & Fedden 2016), but there are examples of systems which most would recognize as gender systems yet which are further away from the canonical ideal because they allow -at least for a subset of nouns -more than one gender value. An example is Savosavo, a Papuan language of the Solomon Islands (Wegener 2012), where all inanimates are masculine but can be feminine, thereby indicating that the referent is small compared to the norm or that it is in some way special.…”

“…We therefore order the theoretical space of nominal classification by using the notion of canonical gender, following Corbett & Fedden (2016), and use "classifier" as a label of convenience for a wide range of phenomena which have been named as such by various scholars in the literature, but which are impossible to unify under a single definition. Classifier systems can then be treated as various systems of nominal classification which are typically further away in the theoretical space from canonical gender.…”