New project: 'Gender and classifiers in natural language'
Thursday 24 January 2013
In the new project “Gender and classifiers in natural language”, linguists from the Surrey Morphology Group are investigating languages which combine grammatical gender and classifiers.
Many languages categorize their nominal vocabulary but typically a language has either a gender system, as in Italian or German, or a system of classifiers, as in Mandarin or Vietnamese, but not both. In a very few languages we find both systems together. One of these, Mian, will be a special focus of the project. Mian is a Papuan language, spoken by 1,400 people in Papua New Guinea. Languages like Mian show us how two categorization systems interact both in the grammar of the language and in terms of the assignment of nouns to multiple classes. In addition to Mian, a larger sample of languages will be investigated. The linguists are using Canonical Typology to gauge how canonical the individual categorization systems are, and Network Morphology to model category assignment. Both of these theoretical approaches were developed by the Surrey Morphology Group. This three-year project is funded by the AHRC. Funding will support Sebastian Fedden, the postdoc on the project, and Penny Everson, part time administrator for the project, together with the investigators: Greville G. Corbett, Matthew Baerman and Dunstan Brown (York).