Non Canonical Gender Systems

This book explores the boundaries of the category of gender and their theoretical significance within the framework of Canonical Typology. Grammatical gender is a famously puzzling category: although it has been widely explored from a typological perspective, studies are constantly identifying exciting and unexpected patterns in gender systems, many of which cannot be easily classified or straightforwardly analysed. Some of these patterns stretch or even threaten to cross the largely unexplored outer boundaries of the category. In the canonical approach, morphosyntactic features like gender are established in terms of a canonical ideal: the clearest instance of the phenomenon. The canonical ideal is a clustering of properties that serves as a baseline to measure the actual examples observed. In this volume, international experts use this approach to analyse a range of gender systems that diverge from the canonical ideal, and to determine to what extent each component property of these systems can be considered canonical. Chapters explore a wide range of typologically diverse languages from all over the world, from South America to Melanesia, and from Central Italy to Northern Australia. The book will be of interest to all linguists working in the field of typology, from graduate level upwards, as well as to morphologists and syntacticians of all theoretical stripes who have an interest in grammatical gender.

This book explores the boundaries of the category of gender and their theoretical significance within the framework of Canonical Typology. International experts analyse a variety of gender systems from a range of typologically diverse languages from across the world, from South America to Melanesia, and from Central Italy to Northern Australia.

As one of the most debated categories of Tocharian nominal morphology, grammatical gender is in this book investigated from the point of view of Indo-European comparative reconstruction, by applying the methods of historical linguistics, Tocharian philology, and typological linguistics.

In a field still dominated by syntactic perspectives, it is easy to overlook the words that are the irreducible building blocks of language. Morphological Perspectives takes words as the starting point for any questions about linguistic structure: their form, their internal structure, their paradigmatic extensions, and their role in expressing and manipulating syntactic configurations. With a team of authors that run the typological gamut of languages, this book examines these questions from multiple perspectives, both the canonical and the non-canonical. By taking these questions seriously, and letting loose a full battery of analytical techniques, the following chapters not only celebrate the pioneering work of Greville G. Corbett but present new thinking on traditional approaches, including the paradigm, deponency and morphological features.

This volume investigates the nature of grammatical representations in speakers who master multiple languages. Since the early days of modern formal approaches to grammar, most work has been based on the language of monolingual humans. Less work has been conducted based on data from speakers who possess more than one language. Although important insights have been gained from a monolingual focus, there is every reason to believe that bi- and multilingual data can inform linguistic theory. A lot of ongoing work demonstrates that this is indeed the case, and the current volume contributes to this growing literature. Thus, the research topic addresses a number of questions relating to grammatical structures in multilingual speakers as well as the methodological issues that arise in the context of studying such speakers. A better understanding of the grammatical sides of multilingualism is crucial for understanding the human language capacity and in turn for offering better advice to the public concerning issues of language choice for multilingual children and adults, education, and language deficits in multilingual individuals.

This book presents a critical overview of current work on linguistic features and establishes new bases for their use in the study and understanding of language. Features are fundamental components of linguistic description: they include gender (feminine, masculine, neuter); number (singular, plural, dual); person (1st, 2nd, 3rd); tense (present, past, future); and case (nominative, accusative, genitive, ergative). Despite their ubiquity and centrality in linguistic description, much remains to be discovered about them: there is, for example, no readily available inventory showing which features are found in which of the world's languages; there is no consensus about how they operate across different components of language; and there is no certainty about how they interact. This book seeks at once to highlight and to tackle these problems. It brings together perspectives from phonology to formal syntax and semantics, expounding the use of linguistic features in typology, computer applications, and logic. Linguists representing different standpoints spell out clearly the assumptions they bring to different kinds of feature and describe how they use them. Their contrasting contributions highlight the areas of difference and the common ground between their perspectives. The book brings together original work by leading international scholars. It will appeal to linguists of all theoretical persuasions.

This volume offers a major reconceptualization of linguistic theory through the lens of morphology, crucially collapsing the distinction between the lexicon and the grammar. This approach accounts for both productive and non-productive morphological phenomena, and moreover integrates linguistic theory into psycholinguistics and human cognition.