Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations and symbols
- 1 Typological distinctions in word-formation
- 2 Lexical typologies
- 3 Inflectional morphology
- 4 Gender and noun classes
- 5 Aspect, tense, mood
- 6 Lexical nominalization
- Bibliography
- Language index
- Subject index
4 - Gender and noun classes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations and symbols
- 1 Typological distinctions in word-formation
- 2 Lexical typologies
- 3 Inflectional morphology
- 4 Gender and noun classes
- 5 Aspect, tense, mood
- 6 Lexical nominalization
- Bibliography
- Language index
- Subject index
Summary
Introduction
Gender is a fascinating category, central in some languages, absent in others. The term gender is normal in some traditions, in Indo-European and Dravidian studies for instance, while others use the term noun class (sometimes preferred by Caucasianists and Australianists). A language may have two or more such classes or genders. In many languages there is no dispute as to the number of genders, but there are other languages where the question is far from straightforward; consequently it is important to investigate how we solve such cases. Furthermore, the classification may correspond to a real-world distinction of sex, at least in part, but often too it does not (‘gender’ derives etymologically from Latin genus, via Old French gendre, and originally meant ‘kind’ or ‘sort’).
While nouns may be classified in various ways, only one type of classification counts as a gender system; it is one which is reflected beyond the nouns themselves through agreement. For example, in Russian we find: novyj dom ‘new house’, novaja gazeta ‘new newspaper’ and novoe taksi ‘new taxi’. These examples demonstrate the existence of three genders, because the adjective nov- ‘new’ changes in form according to the noun. There are numerous other nouns like dom ‘house’, together making up one gender. Since this gender includes many nouns denoting males, like otec ‘father’, it is known as the ‘masculine gender’.
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- Information
- Language Typology and Syntactic Description , pp. 241 - 279Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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