4.1226 Gender (3/67)
Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Thu, 11 Apr 91 00:27:59 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 1226. Thursday, 11 Apr 1991.
(1) Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1991 00:43 CDT (19 lines)
From: 6160LACYA@MUCSD.BITNET
Subject: gender; envelopes
(2) Date: 10 April 91, 14:52:05 SET (17 lines)
From: Marc Eisinger +33 (1) 40 01 51 20 EISINGER at FRIBM11
Subject: Gender
(3) Date: Wed, 10 Apr 91 08:07:38 -0400 (31 lines)
From: William J Frawley <billf@brahms.udel.edu>
Subject: Gender
(1) --------------------------------------------------------------39----
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 91 08:07:38 -0400
From: William J Frawley <billf@brahms.udel.edu>
Subject: Re: 4.1220 Rs: Unix Concording; De Italia; Stoned PC; &c. (4/60)
Some comments on Lambert's and Varonis' comments on gender. I think it
is safe to say that languages have gender because it is a reflection of
a more general device that langauges have to encode and track nouns and
their structural dependents. Hence, gender systems are like the systems
of animacy markers we see in African languages, for example. In fact,
if I remember Lehman's work on Proto-Indoeuropean correctly,
Indo-European languages' gender systems derive from a PIE animacy system.
The acquisition of gender in a second language has not been studied
much, as far as I know.
But a student here at Delaware is writing a diss. on on the role of
universals of agreement in the acquisition of French as a second
language. Her name is Radmilla Vuchic (c/o Linguistics, University of
Delaware: no e-mail for her, as far as I know). Her diss. discusses
gender.
Zubin and Kopcke (spelling?) have a paper in a book edited by Collette
Craig on noun classes on the relationship between gender and
categorization. They argue, if I remember correctly, that neuter gender
tends to encode superordinates and masculine/feminine gender encodes
subordinates. If they are right, then gender, which is otherwise
semantically arbitrary for the most part, has a conceptual/semantic
motivation. this leads to an interesting question following Varonis'
query/observation: is gender in a second language difficult because of
morpho-syntactic factors, or because of the semantic/conceptual factors
associated with it? Or both?
Bill Frawley
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1991 00:43 CDT
From: 6160LACYA@MUCSD.BITNET
Subject: gender; envelopes
1) I don't have an answer to the question on gender origin either (and I
doubt anyone does), but the comments by Jean Veronis remind me of an
article I read some years ago about German. The investigators made up a
series of nonsense words, presented them to native speakers of German,
and asked them to give the gender for each of the words. As I recall,
there was something like 80-90% agreement in their answers.
Unfortunately I can't give you any kind of source for this presently.
Maybe someone else remembers the study?
2) The query regarding "pushing the envelope" by Beverly Madron was
addressed a few weeks ago by William Safire in his column "On Language"
in the New York Times (Sunday) Magazine Section. It's a term from
flying, where the envelope surrounds the plane.
Alan Lacy
6160lacya@vmsf.csd.mu.edu
(3) --------------------------------------------------------------20----
Date: 10 April 91, 14:52:05 SET
From: Marc Eisinger +33 (1) 40 01 51 20 EISINGER at FRIBM11
Subject: Gender
Naturaly the question "Why do some languages have gender" comes from
someone whose native language has (almost) no gender. As a gender
sensitive language native speaker, I could ask : "Why do some languages
have no gender" ...
Nevertheless is there any answer to that kind of question ?
In fact what is puzzling me is the non-generality of the
schema. English has gender (he/she, ship, etc.) but uses it in
very seldom cases, Nahuatl has no plural except for animate items
(human beings, animals) plus some exceptions like the "stars", etc.
In short, my point is that, to my knowledge, most of the languages
have all these features but differs in the way they use them.
Marc Eisinger