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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.
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.
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