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