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Greville G. Corbett (Ed.) the Expression of Gender the Expression of Cognitive Categories

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Greville G. Corbett (Ed.) the Expression of Gender the Expression of Cognitive Categories Greville G. Corbett (Ed.) The Expression of Gender The Expression of Cognitive Categories Editors Wolfgang Klein Stephen Levinson Volume 6 The Expression of Gender Edited by Greville G. Corbett ISBN: 978-3-11-030660-6 e-ISBN: 978-3-11-030733-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: PTP-Berlin Protago-TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Contents Greville G. Corbett Introduction 1 Sally McConnell-Ginet Gender and its relation to sex: The myth of ‘natural’ gender 3 Michael Dunn Gender determined dialect variation 39 Peter Hegarty Ladies and gentlemen: Word order and gender in English 69 Greville G. Corbett Gender typology 87 Marianne Mithun Gender and culture 131 Niels O. Schiller Psycholinguistic approaches to the investigation of grammatical gender 161 Mulugeta T. Tsegaye, Maarten Mous and Niels O. Schiller Plural as a value of Cushitic gender: Evidence from gender congruency effect experiments in Konso (Cushitic) 191 Author index 215 Language index 219 Subject index 221 Greville G. Corbett Introduction Gender is an endlessly fascinating category. It has obvious links to the real world, first in the connection between many grammatical gender systems and biologi- cal sex, and second in other types of categorization such as size, which underpin particular gender systems and also have external correlates. While in some lan- guages the way in which gender is assigned to nouns is semantically transparent, for example, in Dravidian languages such as Tamil, others are rather opaque: though their systems still have a semantic core, there is much more to be said about gender in familiar languages like French or German. Of course, there are other grammatical categories with links to the real world, but compared with these gender is surprising in that it appears to be an “optional extra”. That is, many of the world’s languages have gender, but many (probably somewhat over half) do not. The differences continue: in some languages gender is a relatively superficial matter, while in others it is central, being found through the noun phrase and on the verb by agreement, and interacting in morphology with other features, typically number, case and person. Thus the description of some lan- guages requires constant detailed reference to gender, and for others it is absent. Given its links to the real world, gender is a feature that speakers are partly aware of. There is discussion of the appropriate use of gendered pronouns; learn- ers comment on the difficulty of acquiring gender in some languages; the gender of borrowings may arouse the curiosity of first language speakers. But gender is like an iceberg since most of its interest is not apparent to normal speakers. The authors of the volume take seven complementary perspectives on gender. Sally McConnell-Ginet tackles one of the most approachable and yet most diffi- cult issues: ‘Gender and its relation to sex: The myth of “natural” gender’, and asks what meaning can be attached to gender. It also seems evident that in some respects women and men speak differently. In some languages, such as Chukchi, the differences are dramatic, as documented and analysed by Michael Dunn in his chapter ‘Gender determined dialect variation’. In interesting contrast, Peter Hegarty homes in on the way in which gender affects an apparently small lin- guistic choice, the order of conjoined noun phrases, in his chapter ‘Ladies and gentlemen: word order and gender in English’. The core linguistic types of varia- tion between gender systems are laid out in ‘Typology of gender’ by Greville G. Corbett. One way of understanding complex systems is to examine their behav- iour over time. This is the approach of Marianne Mithun in ‘Gender and culture’, where she examines subtle gender distinctions and the ways they came about within the Iroquoian family, particularly in Mohawk. The variety found in gender 2 Greville G. Corbett has naturally attracted psycholinguists, and Niels Schiller reviews this field and presents recent research findings in ‘Psycholinguistic approaches to the inves- tigation of grammatical gender’. Finally these psycholinguistic techniques are applied to Konso, a language with a challenging gender/number system in ‘Plural as value of Cushitic gender: Evidence from gender congruency effect experiments in Konso (Cushitic)’ by Mulugeta Tarekegne Tsegaye, Maarten Mous and Niels Schiller. Some of the most exciting gender systems are found in languages whose sur- vival is uncertain; the proceeds from this volume are therefore going to the Foun- dation for Endangered Languages. We thank the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen) for funding and hosting a workshop on gender, which made it possible for authors to discuss each other’s presentations and so to shape the different contributions into a single volume, as well as to gain from the helpful comments of the audi- ence. We are also grateful to Lisa Mack and Penny Everson for their help in pre- paring the typescript and to Wolfgang Konwitschny for seeing the volume through to publication. Sally McConnell-Ginet Gender and its relation to sex: The myth of ‘natural’ gender 1 ‘Grammatical’ vs ‘natural’ gender systems: First pass In McConnell-Ginet ([1988], 2011), I included the following: The word gender in the title of this chapter refers to the complex of social, cultural, and psychological phenomena attached to sex, a usage common in the behavioral and social sciences. The word gender also, however, has a well-established technical sense in linguis- tic discussions. Gender in this technical sense is a grammatically significant classification of nouns that has implications for various agreement phenomena. The title of the present chapter also includes the word gender: my thesis is that something like sociocultural gender as delineated in the first sentence of the extract above mediates connections between sex and pronoun choice in English (often said to be based on ‘natural’ gender, discussed below) and also, though less straightforwardly, between sex and the technical notion of ‘grammatical’ gender in linguistics. The word sex includes the division of humans and many other animals into female and male classes, based on reproductive potential; it also includes matters of sexuality, not just sexual identity but also sexual desire and activity. Sociocultural gender is not a matter of the sexual division of people into female and male as such, what people typically mean by ‘natural’ gender, but of the significance attached to that division, the institutions and ideologies, the pre- scribed and claimed identities, and the array of social practices that sustain those institutions, ideologies, and identities. What we have in English, I argue, is not a ‘natural’ gender system but what Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brun- berg (1994) call a ‘notional’ gender system: concepts and ideas about biological sex matter at least as much as sex itself to the choice of English third-person pro- nouns. (In principle there could be ‘notional’ gender systems involving first- or second-person pronouns – Japanese might illustrate – or even agreement beyond pronouns, but this chapter just contrasts the English notional gender system with grammatical gender systems in earlier stages of English and in various Indo- European languages.) As a technical linguistic notion, gender is about agreement. Nouns are assigned to classes such that which class a noun belongs to determines or ‘con- 4 Sally McConnell-Ginet trols’ formal properties of other expressions linked to the phrase it heads, what Corbett 1991 calls ‘agreement targets’. Agreement targets include articles and attributive adjectives, often also adjectival and verbal expressions predicated of that phrase, numerals, and relative pronouns and, importantly for my purposes, anaphoric pronouns for which a phrase headed by the noun in question serves as antecedent. The technical issue of most direct relevance to this chapter involves what Corbett (this volume) dubs the assignment problem. How nouns get assigned a gender is, as Corbett’s chapter documents in detail, a very complex matter, and it varies considerably cross-linguistically. For some languages, the main principles for assignment are formal; for others, they are semantic in the sense of involving features of a noun’s referents; for many, both semantic and formal features play a role in assignment. Not surprisingly, assign- ment principles may shift over time, and at any given time there may be some lexical items whose gender cannot be determined by the general principles then operative in the language more broadly (and there may be variation in gender assignment). Mithun’s illuminating discussion in this volume of gender in Iro- quoian languages, especially Mohawk, shows this very clearly. Nonlinguists do not always realize that gender semantic assignment principles need not connect to sex at all: animacy, shape, and many other features figure in grammatical gender systems crosslinguistically. Still, as Corbett’s chapter points out, sex is far and away the most common feature to figure semantically in gender assignment. What is of interest in this chapter are languages where sex and, crucially, ideas about it play some sort of role in either a full-blown grammatical gender system such as is found in many Indo-European languages (e.g., German, French, Russian, Hindi) or in a limited system like that of English where only pronouns show gender agreement. In languages with grammatical gender linked to sex, it is often the case that inanimates for which sex is irrelevant can be assigned to the same gender classes as sexed humans (or, for that matter, that nouns designating sexed humans can on occasion be assigned to the ‘wrong’ gender class).
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