{"title":"性别分配是地方性的:论语法性别与不可剥夺占有之间的关系","authors":"Luke James Adamson","doi":"10.1353/lan.2024.a929736","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The grammatical gender of a noun can be sensitive to a number of different factors, including the noun’s lexical semantics, nominalizing morphology, or arbitrary requirements imposed by particular roots (e.g. Corbett 1991, Kramer 2020), though the limits on possible factors are not currently understood, with some work proposing that a noun’s gender can even be valued ‘at a distance’ via agreement with other nominals. The current study explores the understudied phenomenon of gender-possession interactions (Evans 1994), investigating whether being possessed, or being possessable, can have an impact on which gender a noun is assigned. Evidence is provided from four unrelated languages supporting the existence of such interactions. Strikingly, however, these interactions are restricted to inalienable possession; no such interactions have been identified for alienable possession. I propose that this falls out from a general gender locality hypothesis (GLH), which restricts the domain of gender assignment within a phrase nP. The GLH captures the gender asymmetry between ‘local’, inalienable possessors introduced within nP and ‘nonlocal’, alienable possessors introduced outside of nP, for example, in a phrase PossP (Alexiadou 2003, Myler 2016). The GLH also makes further predictions for other features with respect to what may or may not factor into gender assignment, severely restricting or outright prohibiting gender-assignment effects from number, definiteness, and case. Broadly, the work expands our understanding of which types of elements can be relevant to gender assignment and sheds light on underexplored gender-, possession-, and agreement-related phenomena.","PeriodicalId":17956,"journal":{"name":"Language","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9000,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Gender assignment is local: On the relation between grammatical gender and inalienable possession\",\"authors\":\"Luke James Adamson\",\"doi\":\"10.1353/lan.2024.a929736\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"Abstract:The grammatical gender of a noun can be sensitive to a number of different factors, including the noun’s lexical semantics, nominalizing morphology, or arbitrary requirements imposed by particular roots (e.g. Corbett 1991, Kramer 2020), though the limits on possible factors are not currently understood, with some work proposing that a noun’s gender can even be valued ‘at a distance’ via agreement with other nominals. The current study explores the understudied phenomenon of gender-possession interactions (Evans 1994), investigating whether being possessed, or being possessable, can have an impact on which gender a noun is assigned. Evidence is provided from four unrelated languages supporting the existence of such interactions. Strikingly, however, these interactions are restricted to inalienable possession; no such interactions have been identified for alienable possession. I propose that this falls out from a general gender locality hypothesis (GLH), which restricts the domain of gender assignment within a phrase nP. The GLH captures the gender asymmetry between ‘local’, inalienable possessors introduced within nP and ‘nonlocal’, alienable possessors introduced outside of nP, for example, in a phrase PossP (Alexiadou 2003, Myler 2016). The GLH also makes further predictions for other features with respect to what may or may not factor into gender assignment, severely restricting or outright prohibiting gender-assignment effects from number, definiteness, and case. Broadly, the work expands our understanding of which types of elements can be relevant to gender assignment and sheds light on underexplored gender-, possession-, and agreement-related phenomena.\",\"PeriodicalId\":17956,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Language\",\"volume\":null,\"pages\":null},\"PeriodicalIF\":1.9000,\"publicationDate\":\"2024-06-01\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"\",\"citationCount\":\"0\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Language\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"98\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2024.a929736\",\"RegionNum\":1,\"RegionCategory\":\"文学\",\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"N/A\",\"JCRName\":\"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Language","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2024.a929736","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"N/A","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
Gender assignment is local: On the relation between grammatical gender and inalienable possession
Abstract:The grammatical gender of a noun can be sensitive to a number of different factors, including the noun’s lexical semantics, nominalizing morphology, or arbitrary requirements imposed by particular roots (e.g. Corbett 1991, Kramer 2020), though the limits on possible factors are not currently understood, with some work proposing that a noun’s gender can even be valued ‘at a distance’ via agreement with other nominals. The current study explores the understudied phenomenon of gender-possession interactions (Evans 1994), investigating whether being possessed, or being possessable, can have an impact on which gender a noun is assigned. Evidence is provided from four unrelated languages supporting the existence of such interactions. Strikingly, however, these interactions are restricted to inalienable possession; no such interactions have been identified for alienable possession. I propose that this falls out from a general gender locality hypothesis (GLH), which restricts the domain of gender assignment within a phrase nP. The GLH captures the gender asymmetry between ‘local’, inalienable possessors introduced within nP and ‘nonlocal’, alienable possessors introduced outside of nP, for example, in a phrase PossP (Alexiadou 2003, Myler 2016). The GLH also makes further predictions for other features with respect to what may or may not factor into gender assignment, severely restricting or outright prohibiting gender-assignment effects from number, definiteness, and case. Broadly, the work expands our understanding of which types of elements can be relevant to gender assignment and sheds light on underexplored gender-, possession-, and agreement-related phenomena.
期刊介绍:
Language, the official journal for the Linguistic Society of America, is published quarterly and contains articles, short reports, book reviews and book notices on all aspects of linguistics, focussing on the area of theoretical linguistics. Edited by Greg Carlson, Language serves a readership of over 5,000 and has been the primary literary vehicle for the Society since 1924.