Exploring Grammatical Complexity Crosslinguistically

Abstract

This paper proposes a set of principles and methodologies for the crosslinguistic investigation of grammatical complexity and applies them to the in-depth study of one grammatical domain, gender. The complexity of gender is modeled on the basis of crosslinguistically documented properties of gender systems and by taking into consideration interactions between gender and two other grammatical domains: nominal number and evaluative morphology. The study proposes a complexity metric for gender that consists of six features: "Gender values", "Assignment rules", "Number of indexation (agreement) domains", "Cumulative exponence of gender and number", "Manipulation of gender assignment triggered by number/countability", and "Manipulation of gender assignment triggered by size". The metric is tested on a sample of 84 African languages, organized in subsamples of genealogically related languages. The results of the investigation show that: (1) the gender systems of the sampled languages lean towards high complexity scores; (2) languages with purely semantic gender assignment tend to lack pervasive gender indexation; (3) languages with a high number of gender distinctions tend to exhibit pervasive gender indexation; (4) some of the uses of manipulable gender assignment are only attested in languages with a high number of gender distinctions and/or pervasive indexation. With respect to the distribution of the gender complexity scores, the results show that genealogically related languages tend to have the same or similar gender complexity scores. Languages that display exceedingly low or high gender complexity scores when compared with closely related languages exhibit distinctive sociolinguistic profiles (contact, bi-or multilingualism). The implications of these findings for the typology of gender systems and the crosslinguistic study of grammatical complexity and its distribution are discussed.

Gender shift in a Norwegian diminutive construction

“…In certain languages, then, we can observe the following meaning shift caused by shifting gender: masculine inanimate → feminine = diminutive feminine inanimate → masculine = augmentative The first shift can be exemplified with Tachawit (Berber) (quoted here exactly from Di Garbo 2016:58, adapted from Penchoen 1973.…”

Language Structures May Adapt to the Sociolinguistic Environment, but It Matters What and How You Count: A Typological Study of Verbal and Nominal Complexity

“…The second study deals with the number of grammatical genders in a language. Recent research regards the number of gender distinctions as one of the three main dimensions of complexity variation in gender systems (Audring, 2014 , 2017 ; Di Garbo, 2016 ). Both degree of inflectional synthesis on the verb and number of gender distinctions can be interpreted straightforwardly from the perspective of language complexity as the number of parts in a system.…”

“…In addition, our impression is that, particularly in the case of grammatical gender, the confounding effect of data and data coding may even be a reflection of the type of variable chosen as a proxy of complexity. As outlined in section 3, recent research (Audring, 2014 , 2017 ; Di Garbo, 2016 ) posits that number of gender distinctions is one of the three main dimensions of complexity variation in gender systems, along with gender assignment rules (whether gender assignment is semantic/formal, rigid/flexible), and formal marking (which word classes inflect for gender in a given language). These studies show that complexity at the level of gender distinctions predicts complexity in other domains of the gender system.…”

“…These studies show that complexity at the level of gender distinctions predicts complexity in other domains of the gender system. For instance, Di Garbo ( 2016 ) observes that out of a sample of 84 African languages, particular instances of flexible gender assignment are only attested in languages with a high number of gender distinctions or a high degree of formal marking. Similarly, Audring ( 2014 ) observes that in languages with a high number of gender distinctions, complexity in the domain of formal marking (i.e., presence of gender marking on different types of targets in the clause) may facilitate the learning and use of gender distinctions (the more occurrences of gender marking within the utterance the easier to remember the gender of a noun).…”

Reassessing gender in Ogbe-Oloma

“…It is not uncommon for Niger-Congo languages in West Africa to exhibit gender systems that are complex (Di Garbo 2016;Güldemann and Fiedler this volume;Heine 1982). In certain respects Ogbe-Oloma is typical.…”