Parution : Aikhenvald (2025), A Guide to Gender and Classifiers
Title: A guide to Gender and Cllassifiers
Publication Year: 2025
Publisher: Oxford University Press
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Book URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-guide-to-gender-and-classifiers-9780198863601?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics
Author(s): Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
Hardcover: 9780198863601
- Provides a detailed account of noun categorization systems in a range of typologically diverse languages
- Shows that the use of gender and other classifiers reflects how people categorize and understand the world
- Includes guidelines on working on gender and classifiers in previously undescribed languages
Abstract:
This book explores the range of noun categorization devices found in the languages of the world, from the extensive systems of numeral classifiers in Southeast Asia to the highly grammaticalized gender agreement classes in Indo-European languages. Almost all languages use some type of noun categorization device in their grammar, with the most widespread being linguistic gender, whereby nouns are classified based on core semantic properties such as sex, animacy, humanness, or shape and size. Numeral classifiers are also common, and classify a noun in terms of its inherent nature, animacy, shape, and form, accompanied by a numeral or a quantifier. Other types of noun categorization devices include noun classifiers, possessive classifiers, verbal classifiers, and a number of rarer types such as locative and deictic classifiers. In this volume, Alexandra Aikhenvald investigates all facets of these nominal categorization systems, from their form and distribution to their origins, development, and loss.
Noun categorization devices provide unique insights into how people categorize the world through the language: in one language, a human might be classified in terms of orientation, hence as ‘vertical’, in another as male or female, and in another as simply ‘animate’ or even ‘rational’. They also change as society changes, reflecting the ways in which language and social environment are integrated into a single whole.