Sex/gender system and social hierarchization in Bell Beaker burials from Iberia

‘Gender’ is a manifold notion, at the crossroads between sociology, biology, and linguistics. The Introduction delimits the scope of linguistic (or grammatical) gender, which is an inherent morphosyntactic feature of nouns in about half of the world’s languages, introducing the definitions and notions which the present work utilizes to investigate gender. While focusing on grammar, this study has implications far beyond (e.g. for gender studies), and capitalizes on findings from other disciplines, such as cognitive neuropsychology. The chapter introduces the basic aim of the monograph, which intends to account for the steps through which the Latin three-gender system was reshaped into the binary systems shared today by most standard Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, and Italian). One crucial definitional tool, highlighted in this chapter, is the distinction between target and controller genders: the two need not coincide everywhere, and mismatches between the two may arise—and did arise in Romance—through change.

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Gender from Latin to Romance

10.1093/oso/9780199656547.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Michele Loporcaro

Keyword(s):

Grammatical Gender ◽

Concurrent Systems ◽

Fundamental Question ◽

Romance Languages ◽

Back Projection ◽

Linguistic Typology ◽

Romance Language ◽

Dialect Variation ◽

Main Culprit ◽

Gender System

The book addresses grammatical gender in Romance, and its development from Latin. It works with the toolbox of current linguistic typology, and asks the fundamental question of how the Latin grammatical gender system gradually changed into those of the Romance languages. To answer this question, the book capitalizes on the pervasive dialect variation of which the better-known standard Romance languages only represent a fragment. Indeed, inspection of dialect variation across time and space forces one to dismiss the handbook account proclaiming that the neuter gender, contrasting with masculine and feminine in Latin, was eradicated from spoken Latin by late Empire times. Both Late Latin evidence and data from several modern dialects show that this never happened, and that the vulgate account proceeds from unwarranted back-projection of the data from modern languages like French and Italian. Rather, the neuter underwent transformations which are the main culprit for the differences in the gender system observed today between, say, Romanian, Sursilvan, Neapolitan, and Asturian, to cite just a few types of system which turn out to differ significantly. A precondition for establishing the database for diachronic investigation is a detailed description of many such systems, which reveals data whose interest transcends the diachronic issue under consideration: the book thus addresses systems where ‘husbands’ are feminine and others where ‘wives’ are masculine; discusses dialects where nouns overtly mark gender, but only in certain syntactic contexts; and proposes an analysis according to which one Romance language (Asturian) has split inherited grammatical gender into two concurrent systems.

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Reassessing gender in Ogbe-Oloma

Language Typology and Universals ◽

10.1515/stuf-2021-1038 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 74 (2) ◽

pp. 387-403

Author(s):

Ronald P. Schaefer ◽

Francis O. Egbokhare

Keyword(s):

Sound Quality ◽

Form Class ◽

Nominal Form ◽

Grammatical Number ◽

Gender System

Abstract We re-assess the gender system of Ogbe-Oloma, an Edoid village variety of Nigeria. System exponents are prefixes that define form class and reflect grammatical number. We find that eight agreement classes undergird fourteen genders, while seventeen nominal form classes frame twenty-five number inflections. Prefix mapping from inflection to gender is non-isomorphic. Mapping is however constrained by syllable shape, CV- versus V-, and alliterative sound quality of prefix consonant, not vowel. In addition, several number inflections trigger agreement in multiple genders leading to one gender that exclusively refers to nouns with human reference.

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The gender system of Durop

Language Typology and Universals ◽

10.1515/stuf-2021-1039 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 74 (2) ◽

pp. 405-425

Author(s):

Bruce Connell

Keyword(s):

Grammatical Gender ◽

Present Approach ◽

Cross River ◽

University Of Leiden ◽

Nominal Classification ◽

And Gender ◽

Gender System ◽

Classification Agreement

Abstract This paper presents an analysis of grammatical gender and agreement in Durop, a language of the Upper Cross subgroup of Cross River. The data used are drawn from Kastelein (Kastelein, Bianca. 1994. A phonological and grammatical sketch of DuRop. Leiden: University of Leiden Scriptie), whose analysis treats gender as the singular – plural pairings of nouns different from the present approach. Kastelein identifies eight concord classes (agreement classes); these form the basis of gender in Durop in the present analysis; as many as 24 agreement classes are identified here. The various systems comprising nominal classification, agreement and gender in Durop are compared and discussed. The agreement system comprises three subsystems of differing numbers of agreement classes.

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Gender Assignment in Six North Scandinavian Languages: Patterns of Variation and Change

Journal of Germanic Linguistics ◽

10.1017/s1470542720000173 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 33 (3) ◽

pp. 264-315

Author(s):

Briana Van Epps ◽

Gerd Carling ◽

Yair Sapir

Keyword(s):

Statistical Analysis ◽

Word Frequency ◽

Old Norse ◽

Gender Assignment ◽

Feminine Gender ◽

The Feminine ◽

Old Swedish ◽

Gender System ◽

Gender Change

This study addresses gender assignment in six North Scandinavian varieties with a three-gender system: Old Norse, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Old Swedish, Nysvenska, Jamtlandic, and Elfdalian. Focusing on gender variation and change, we investigate the role of various factors in gender change. Using the contemporary Swedish varieties Jamtlandic and Elfdalian as a basis, we compare gender assignment in other North Scandinavian languages, tracing the evolution back to Old Norse. The data consist of 1,300 concepts from all six languages coded for cognacy, gender, and morphological and semantic variation. Our statistical analysis shows that the most important factors in gender change are the Old Norse weak/strong inflection, Old Norse gender, animate/inanimate distinction, word frequency, and loan status. From Old Norse to modern languages, phonological assignment principles tend to weaken, due to the general loss of word-final endings. Feminine words are more susceptible to changing gender, and the tendency to lose the feminine is noticeable even in the varieties in our study upholding the three-gender system. Further, frequency is significantly correlated with unstable gender. In semantics, only the animate/inanimate distinction signifi-cantly predicts gender assignment and stability. In general, our study confirms the decay of the feminine gender in the Scandinavian branch of Germanic.

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Grammatical Gender in the German Multiethnolect

Journal of Germanic Linguistics ◽

10.1017/s1470542720000082 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 33 (1) ◽

pp. 5-29

Author(s):

Peter Auer ◽

Vanessa Siegel

Keyword(s):

Second Language ◽

First Language ◽

Spontaneous Speech ◽

Grammatical Gender ◽

Grammatical Category ◽

Immigrant Background ◽

Frequent Use ◽

Bare Nouns ◽

Gender System ◽

Germanic Languages

While major restructurings and simplifications have been reported for gender systems of other Germanic languages in multiethnolectal speech, this article demonstrates that the three-way gender distinction of German is relatively stable among young speakers from an immigrant background. We investigate gender in a German multiethnolect based on a corpus of approximately 17 hours of spontaneous speech produced by 28 young speakers in Stuttgart (mainly from Turkish and Balkan background). German is not their second language, but (one of) their first language(s), which they have fully acquired from childhood. We show that the gender system does not show signs of reduction in the direction of a two-gender system, nor of wholesale loss. We also argue that the position of gender in the grammar is weakened by independent innovations, such as the frequent use of bare nouns in grammatical contexts where German requires a determiner. Another phenomenon that weakens the position of gender is the simplification of adjective-noun agreement and the emergence of a generalized gender-neutral suffix for prenominal adjectives (that is, schwa). The disappearance of gender and case marking in the adjective means that the grammatical category of gender is lost in Adj + N phrases (without a determiner).

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The gender system of Longuda

Language Typology and Universals ◽

10.1515/stuf-2021-1035 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 74 (2) ◽

pp. 327-346

Author(s):

Julius-Maximilian Elstermann ◽

Ines Fiedler ◽

Tom Güldemann

Keyword(s):

Historical Reconstruction ◽

Classifier System ◽

Class System ◽

Nominal Form ◽

Noun Class ◽

Nominal Classification ◽

Gender System

Abstract This article describes the gender system of Longuda. Longuda class marking is alliterative and does not distinguish between nominal form and agreement marking. While it thus appears to be a prototypical example of a traditional Niger-Congo “noun-class” system, this identity of gender encoding makes it look morpho-syntactic rather than lexical. This points to a formerly independent status of the exponents of nominal classification, which is similar to a classifier system and thus less canonical. Both types of class marking hosts involve two formally and functionally differing allomorphs, which inform the historical reconstruction of Longuda noun classification in various ways.

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