Gender and Noun Classification

by Eric Mathieu (Editor), Myriam Dali (Editor), Gita Zareikar (Editor)

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 nominalsyntactic 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 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 greaterunderstanding of the interplay between inflection and derivation. The volume will be of interest to theoretical linguists and typologists from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

336 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 1, 2018

About the author

Éric Mathieu est professeur de linguistique à l’Université d’Ottawa et écrivain. Il réside à Ottawa depuis 2004. Salué par la critique, Les suicidés d’Eau-Claire, son premier roman, a été finaliste au prestigieux Prix littéraire Trillium en 2017 et s’est mérité le Prix littéraire émergence de l'Association des auteur-e-s de l'Ontario français. Il a publié des nouvelles dans Icarus, Glitterwolf, Bref ! et Le Sabord. Le Goupil est son second roman.