Functions of nominal classification

Contini-Morava, Ellen; Kilarski, Marcin

doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2013.03.002

Cited by 70 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Foley & Van Valin (1984), for instance, claim that "gender functions as the dominant source of discourse cohesion" and others, including Corbett (1991), Heath (1983: 141), Huang (2000: 8) and Singer (2016), have also claimed that gender can function as a reference tracking device. Similar claims have also been made with regard to the function of nominal classifiers by Aikhenvald (2003: 329), Contini-Morava & Kilarski (2013) and Senft (2008).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 63%

“…As explained in section 2.2, this paper is concerned only with the issue of referent disambiguation in the context of discourse (i.e. across clauses) and does not purport to address other claimed functions of nominal classification, such as those outlined in Contini-Morava & Kilarski (2013). In this regard, then, when assessing the contribution that gender makes to referent disambiguation, the key question becomes: to what extent does gender aid in reducing competing referents?…”

Section: Contribution Of Gender Scorementioning

confidence: 99%

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Nominal classification

Feist

2020

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It is often claimed that reference tracking is a key function of nominal classification systems, not least because of the role such systems can play in referent disambiguation. This paper reports on the results of a comparative study of reference in texts from four languages, focusing specifically on the disambiguating function of nominal classification. The results strongly suggest that disambiguation is not a primary function of nominal classification systems. While gender and/or classifiers sometimes contribute to the avoidance of referential conflict, the reality is that the conditions have to be just right – all competing references must be of opposing genders, and those genders must be formally distinct – and this happens with surprisingly low frequency. We are better off viewing disambiguation as a convenient by-product of nominal classification systems that a language can exploit when conditions allow.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 63%

Section: Contribution Of Gender Scorementioning

confidence: 99%

Nominal classification

Feist

2020

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“…Finally, from a functional point of view gender has been defined as a grammatical device for the management of reference in discourse, its functions being often related to reference tracking (Heath 1975;Foley & Van Valin 1984) and/or discourse redundancy (Dahl 2004). The debate over the discourse functions of gender is huge and cannot be extensively surveyed here (for an overview, see Kilarski 2013: chapter 6, as well as Contini-Morava & Kilarski 2013). For the sake of this paper, suffice it to say that scholars usually disagree on whether the complex redundancies that gender indexation introduces in discourse facilitate communication (Dahl 2004) or exist beyond communicative necessity (McWhorter 2001).…”

Section: Gender As a Grammatical Domainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring Grammatical Complexity Crosslinguistically

Garbo¹

2016

Linguistic Discovery

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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.

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“…One key issue in gender assignment, or indeed in any linguistic categorization system, is what is being categorized: a linguistic entity (nouns in this instance) or the extra-linguistic reality (the referents of the phrases headed by these nouns). Some suggestions can be found in Senft (2000a: 27, 36–37; 2007: 689–690), though Senft is more concerned with the related issue of classifiers; see also Dahl (2000), Croft (2013), and Contini-Morava & Kilarski (2013) for discussion. It will often be the case that categorization could apply equally well to the semantics of a noun or to a referent (otherwise the mechanism of reference could not work so well).…”

Section: Assignmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Canonical gender

Corbett

Fedden

2015

J. Ling.

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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.

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Functions of nominal classification

Cited by 70 publications

References 47 publications

Nominal classification

Nominal classification

Exploring Grammatical Complexity Crosslinguistically

Canonical gender

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