Grammatical Gender in Maltese 9783110603941, 9783110612400, 9783110609721, 2018951348

Table of contents :
Preface and Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Abbreviations
List of Figures
List of Tables
1. Introduction
2. What is grammatical gender?
3. Nominal classification
4. Grammatical gender in Maltese according to descriptive grammars and dictionaries
5. Grammatical gender in Maltese according to native speakers – the form of the noun
6. The conceptual underpinnings of gender assignment
7. Conclusions
References
Appendix I
Appendix II
Glossary
Index of Authors
Index of Languages
Index of Subjects

Citation preview

Grammatical Gender in Maltese

Studia Typologica

Beihefte / Supplements STUF – Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung Language Typology and Universals Editors Thomas Stolz, François Jacquesson, Pieter C. Muysken Editorial Board Michael Cysouw (München), Ray Fabri (Malta), Steven Roger Fischer (Auckland), Bernhard Hurch (Graz), Bernd Kortmann (Freiburg), Nicole Nau (Poznán), Ignazio Putzu (Cagliari), Stavros Skopeteas (Bielefeld), Johan van der Auwera (Antwerpen), Elisabeth Verhoeven (Berlin), Ljuba Veselinova (Stockholm)

Volume 23

George Farrugia

Grammatical Gender in Maltese

ISBN 978-3-11-060394-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-061240-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-060972-1 ISSN 1617-2957 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951348 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Alpha-C/istock/Thinkstock Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

| Lill-għeżież kollha tiegħi

Preface and Acknowledgments One of the most controversial topics in Linguistics concerns the relationship between language and the extra linguistic world. Humans organize the world around them by categorizing and classifying the objects they perceive in terms of specific natural and social features. One such conspicuous feature is sex and, specifically, perceived differences between male and female sex. In language, these differences are expressed in terms of categories such as male and female, which are then often expressed in language, i.e., grammaticalized, as grammatical gender, namely, as distinct feminine and masculine forms. Gender systems based on the masculine/feminine duality are found in many languages, including, for example, Maltese, which is the main source of data in this study on gender. The precise nature of grammatical gender systems, as well as the relationship between the linguistic categorization of gender and the real world categorization in terms of sex is still somewhat unclear and rather controversial. For this reason, many linguists, such as Corbett (1991: 1) consider grammatical gender to be: ... the most puzzling of the grammatical categories. It is a topic which interests nonlinguists as well as linguists and it becomes more fascinating the more it is investigated. In some languages gender is central and pervasive, while in others it is totally absent. One of its attractions for linguists is that there are interesting aspects of the study of gender in each of the core areas of linguistics.

The aim of this work is to investigate how the grammatical category of gender functions in Maltese and how native speakers of Maltese classify nouns by assigning to them one of two genders, masculine or feminine. Gender assignment involves various mental processes involving associations, analyses and generalizations which the speakers themselves are mostly unaware of. Consequently, although this study focuses on the grammar of Maltese, it also takes into consideration the wider psycholinguistic context that influences the choice of category, and thus shapes the system of gender assignment. Moreover, I also discuss in detail the various grammatical mechanisms and systems used by most languages to categorize nouns. In this wider perspective, the system used in Maltese can be compared to gender systems in other languages, and thus better understood. The Maltese data were obtained mainly through elicitation from native speakers, as well as from grammars and dictionaries. I am grateful to the hundreds of informants who accepted to participate in this study, mostly by completing questionnaires. I would also like to thank Mr Carmel Cachia, who helped

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110612400-202

VIII | Preface and Acknowledgments

me a great deal with the collection of data from the Gozitan participants. I also wish to express my thanks to Dr. Albert Gatt, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology at the University of Malta for his help with the data analysis and statistics, and for translating this work into English. I am also grateful to Prof. Jos van Berkum, Prof. Bernard Comrie, Prof. Herbert Schriefers, Prof. Anna Maria Thornton, Dr. Lauren Schmidt and Dr. Christel Stolz for sending me copies of their work dealing with different aspects of grammatical gender. I am greatly indebted to Prof. Ray Fabri, Chairman of the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology, and Prof. Manwel Mifsud from the Department of Maltese, who was also my Ph.D supervisor, for their valuable and continuous assistance and guidance throughout this work, and for discussing with me and scrutinizing the material in this book. I remain, of course, responsible for any remaining errors and blemishes. Last but not least, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my wife Catherine and my children Matthew, Robert and Sarah for their continuous encouragement and support and especially for being so patient with me.

Contents Preface and Acknowledgments  | VII List of Abbreviations  | XIII List of Figures | XIV List of Tables | XV

1

Introduction | 1

2 2.1 2.2 2.3

What is grammatical gender? | 4 Grammatical and natural gender | 4 The role of grammatical gender in language production | 5 The effect of word frequency and recency of acquisition of gender | 10 Is gender a conceptual or a grammatical property of nouns? | 17 Conceptual influences on gender agreement | 20 Gender priming and the “tip of the tongue” (TOT) phenomenon | 23 Linguistic determinism and grammatical gender | 25

2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.5.1 3.5.2 3.5.3 3.5.4 3.5.5 3.5.6

Nominal classification | 29 The principal nominal classification systems | 29 Classifiers | 30 Similarities between grammatical gender and nominal classes | 30 Nominal classes | 32 Grammatical gender | 34 The main characteristic of grammatical gender | 36 Grammatical agreement and concord | 37 The existence of grammatical gender | 39 The variety of grammatical gender systems | 40 Some misconceptions about grammatical gender | 42 Overt and covert gender | 44

X | Contents

3.6 3.6.1 3.6.1.1 3.6.2 3.6.2.1 3.6.2.2 3.6.3 4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.4.1 4.4.2 4.4.3 4.5 4.5.1 4.5.2 4.5.3 4.5.4 4.6 4.6.1 4.6.2 4.6.3 4.6.4 4.6.5 4.6.6

Classification criteria – different gender assignment systems | 45 Semantic systems | 46 Common models, criteria and semantic properties | 50 Formal systems | 54 Morphological systems | 54 Phonological systems | 56 Mixed systems and conflicts | 56 Grammatical gender in Maltese according to descriptive grammars and dictionaries | 62 The relationship between form and meaning | 62 Animate nouns | 62 Inanimate nouns | 67 Grammatical gender in Arabic | 73 Unmarked feminine nouns | 75 The relationship between sex and gender according to Drozdík | 79 Gender markers | 83 Grammatical gender in Italian | 84 Nouns that refer to inanimate objects | 84 Nouns that refer to people and animals | 86 Italian suffixes | 88 Other categories | 89 A quantitative analysis | 90 The collection of nouns | 91 Gender and noun ending | 92 The relationship between noun endings and gender in nouns of Arabic origin | 96 The relationship between noun endings and gender in nouns of Italian and Sicilian origin | 97 The relationship between noun endings and gender in nouns of English origin | 99 The relationship between noun endings and gender in nouns of unknown or uncertain origin, and nouns of diverse origins | 101

Contents | XI

5 5.1 5.2 5.2.1 5.3 5.3.1 5.4 5.5 5.6

6 6.1 6.2 6.2.1 6.2.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.5.1 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10

7

Grammatical gender in Maltese according to native speakers – the form of the noun | 108 The linguistic reality | 108 Methodology | 108 The questionnaire | 109 The relationship between gender assignment and noun ending | 111 Nouns with the endings -i, -e and -o | 122 Nouns with irregular gender | 133 Conflicting gender between subject and predicate nominals | 143 The conflict between nouns of different gender in the same noun phrase | 153 The conceptual underpinnings of gender assignment | 164 The minimalist and maximalist theories | 164 Methodology | 165 The questionnaires | 166 Types of nouns with human referents | 167 Gender assignment to nouns of types C, D, E and F in isolation | 172 The relationship between the form of the noun and the referent (nouns of type C and D) | 181 The relationship between the form of the noun, the referent and the gender of the noun (nouns of type C and D) | 185 The suspension of grammatical agreement | 192 The influence of conceptual information associated with the subject on the gender of predicate nouns (nouns of type E and F) | 200 The masculine with a generic meaning | 206 The form of the noun in the plural | 212 Epicene nouns in a syntactic context | 217 The feminine endings -a and -triċi with nouns referring to persons | 224 Conclusions | 235

XII | Contents

References | 247 Appendix I | 255 Appendix II | 259 Glossary | 291 Index of Authors | 295 Index of Languages | 297 Index of Subjects | 299

List of Abbreviations ACC

CA DEF F IPFV M

MSA OBJ PL POSS PRES PRO PRF SG

accusative Classical Arabic definite feminine imperfective masculine Modern Standard Arabic object plural possession present tense pronoun perfective singular

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List of Figures Figure 2.1

Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3

Figure 2.4

Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4 Figure 5.5 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 6.3 Figure A.1 Figure A.2 Figure A.3 Figure A.4 Figure A.5 Figure A.6 Figure A.7 Figure A.8 Figure A.9 Figure A.10

A modified version of Levelt’s (1993) model of the processing components involved in language production (left) and comprehension (right) as adapted by Dietrich (2002) The recency effect in relation to retrieval of gender from the mental lexicon among Dutch speakers, after Jescheniak & Levelt (1994) The Serial model of the Production Processes (Levelt 1989) (adapted from Maria De Martino et al. – poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, July 2005) Schematic representation of the Independent Network model proposed by Caramazza (1997: 196), showing the relationship between semantic, syntactic and lexical representations Division of the nouns in the corpus by noun ending The division of nouns of Arabic origin according to their ending The division of nouns of Italian and Sicilian origin according to their ending The division of nouns of English origin according to their ending The relationship between the noun’s ending and the gender associated with it The relationship between frequency and the most frequently assigned gender among nouns ending in -e (excluding nouns referring to persons) The relationship between frequency and the most frequently assigned gender for nouns ending in -i (excluding nouns referring to persons) The relationship between frequency and the most frequently assigned gender for nouns ending in -o (excluding nouns that refer to persons) Percentage of times different genders were assigned to nouns of Semitic origin with irregular gender Plural nouns in descending order of their degree of association with a particular sex Plural nouns ordered by their degree of association with the male sex Plural nouns ordered by their degree of association with the female sex Nouns ending in -a, (-a’), -à Nouns ending in -e Nouns ending in -è Nouns ending in -i Nouns ending in -ì Nouns ending in -o Nouns ending in -ò Nouns ending in -u Nouns ending in -ù Nouns ending in a consonant

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110612400-205

List of Tables Table 3.1 Table 3.2

Table 3.3 Table 3.4 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4 Table 4.5 Table 4.6 Table 4.7 Table 4.8 Table 4.9 Table 4.10 Table 4.11 Table 4.12 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4 Table 5.5 Table 5.6 Table 5.7 Table 5.8

Table 5.9

The most common models of semantic criteria found in the languages with strictly semantic gender classification Other semantic criteria that determine the separation of nouns into specific gender classes and categories in languages with semantic gender systems The main semantic properties of inanimate nouns, according to Aikhenvald (2003: 272–274) Distinctions between epicene nouns, nouns with common gender and hybrid nouns Masculine suffixes and corresponding feminine suffixes according to Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander’s grammar Non-native masculine nominal suffixes according to Borg & AzzopardiAlexander Non-native feminine nominal suffixes according to Borg & AzzopardiAlexander The correlation between a noun ending and the gender the noun is assigned The relationship between a noun ending and a particular gender Gender assignment to nouns of Arabic origin with different endings Gender assignment among nouns of Italian and Sicilian origin with different endings Gender assignment among nouns of English origin with different endings Gender assignment to nouns with different ending of unknown or uncertain origin Gender assignment among nouns of varying origins with different endings The relationship between noun endings and gender, depending on the noun’s origin in the sample under consideration The relationship between noun ending and gender as a function of occurrence in mixed Maltese Division of non-words by their ending Gender assignment to non-words Gender assignment by non-word ending The association between noun ending and gender assignment according to the descriptive grammars, the dictionaries and the questionnaire Gender assignment to non-words by the sex of informants Gender assignment to non-words by respondent age Gender assignment to non-words by the locality of informants The distribution of masculine gender assignment according to students’ degree of contact with English (divided according to whether students are Maltese or Gozitan) Gender assignment to non-words according to informants’ degree of contact with English

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XVI | List of Tables

Table 5.10 Table 5.11 Table 5.12 Table 5.13 Table 5.14 Table 5.15 Table 5.16 Table 5.17 Table 5.18 Table 5.19

Table 5.20 Table 5.21 Table 5.22 Table 5.22a Table 5.23 Table 5.23a Table 5.24 Table 5.24a Table 5.25 Table 5.25a Table 5.26 Table 5.27 Table 5.28 Table 5.29 Table 5.30 Table 5.31

Words used in the second experiment of the questionnaire Gender assignment to words in the second experiment, according to respondent gender Gender assignment to words in the second experiment, by respondent age Gender assignment to words in the second experiment of the questionnaire, by respondent locality Gender assignment (percentages) to words in the second experiment of the questionnaire, according to degree of contact with English Gender assigned to nouns of Semitic origin with irregular gender, as well as filler items, by respondent sex Gender assignment to the noun ordni according to Serracino-Inglott (1979), Aquilina (1990) and informants in the present experiment Assignment of masculine gender to nouns of Semitic origin with “irregular” gender, and other filler nouns, by age group Gender assigned to nouns of Semitic origin with “irregular” gender, and other filler nouns according to the locality of informants Gender assigned to nouns of Semitic origin with “irregular” gender and other filler nouns according to the degree of contact that informants have with English The division of nouns used in the sentences in experiment III Gender assignment to nouns in experiment III Gender assignment to nouns in experiment III according to the sex of informants Gender assignment to the four filler nouns in experiment III, according to the sex of informants Gender assignment to nouns in experiment III by informant age group Gender assignment to the four filler nouns in experiment III by informant age Gender assignment to nouns in experiment III according to the locality of informants Gender assignment to the four filler nouns in experiment III by the locality of informants Gender assignment to nouns in experiment III according to the informants’ degree of contact with English Feminine gender assignment to the four filler nouns in experiment III according to informants’ degree of contact with English Division of noun phrases in the sentences of experiment IV Gender assigned to noun phrases in experiment IV according to the sex of informants The meaning of the phrase tazza nbid ħamra and the effect of distance/proximity on the same phrase Gender assigned to noun phrases in experiment IV according to the age groups of informants Gender assigned to noun phrases in experiment IV according to the locality of informants Gender assigned to noun phrases in experiment IV according to informants’ degree of contact with English

List of Tables | XVII

Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 6.4

Table 6.5 Table 6.6 Table 6.7 Table 6.8

Table 6.9

Table 6.10 Table 6.11 Table 6.12 Table 6.13 Table 6.14 Table 6.15 Table 6.16 Table 6.17

The form of the noun, its gender and the sex of the referent: possible schemata Gender assignment by informants compared to the gender assigned to the same nouns in the dictionary Gender assigned to nouns in the first experiment according to the sex of informants Classification of nouns in experiment 1 into type E or F based on the dictionary and the linguistic reality (isolated context) as shown in the first experiment Gender assignment to nouns in experiment 1 by informant age group The relationship between the form of the noun in the predicate and the subject by sex referent, and age group of informants The relationship between the subject referent, the form and the gender of the predicate noun, by informant age group and sex Gender assigned to nouns in isolation (experiment 1), compared to the gender assigned to the same nouns used in a sentential context (experiment 9) Classification by type of nouns in experiment 9 according to the dictionary and according to the linguistic evidence obtained in the present work Gender assigned to nouns in experiment 4 in sentential context, by sex and age of informants Gender assigned to nouns in experiment 4 according to the dictionary and according to informants, in isolation and in a sentential context Completions of the sentences used in experiment 5, by informant sex and age group Plural nouns by their degree of association with a particular sex, by informant sex Plural nouns according to their degree of association with a particular sex, by informant age group Semantic content (conceptual influence) vs. grammatical gender of the epicene noun in the sentences in experiment 6 Choice of feminine forms corresponding to the masculine form of the nouns in experiment 7, by informant sex Choice of feminine form corresponding to the masculine form of the nouns in experiment 7, by informant age group

1 Introduction In many languages, the grammatical category of gender appears to resist systematic treatment and can even cause problems for non-native learners. Indeed, in work on gender systems, the following quote from Bloomfield (1933: 280) is frequently encountered: “There seems to be no practical criterion by which the gender of a noun in German, French, or Latin could be determined”. On the other hand, native speakers of these languages appear to have no difficulty in assigning the correct grammatical gender to thousands of nouns in their language. According to Corbett (1991: 7), if these speakers learned the gender of each noun in their language individually, they would need to possess an impeccable memory system. That this is not the case is suggested by the following pieces of evidence: (a) if speakers had to learn the gender of each noun in their language by rote, they would surely make more errors in gender assignment than they in fact do; (b) many borrowed words are given a particular gender, suggesting that there is indeed a mechanism at work in gender assignment, rather than mere rote learning; (c) experimental work1 suggests that speakers of a particular language who are asked to assign a gender to “nonce” nouns, tend to agree in their choices to a significant extent. Thus, it appears that native speakers avail themselves of a number of criteria and systems for gender assignment in their language. But how do they put these strategies to work and how do they deploy their knowledge of nominal gender in relation to other grammatical categories in speech and writing, such as verbs, adjectives or participles? And is grammatical gender merely stored as a syntactic property of nouns, or is it computed according to a noun’s semantic, morphological and phonological properties every time it is required? Such questions have begun to be posed relatively recently in linguistics and their answers are frequently of a psychological nature. Indeed, many recent studies on grammatical gender have come from psycholinguistics. The second chapter of the present work gives an overview of grammatical gender from a psycholinguistic perspective. It therefore cites several psycholinguistic experiments, for example on language acquisition and language production. It also describes some psycholinguistic models of language production and

|| 1 See Farrugia (2003) for examples of experimental work on Maltese. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110612400-001

2 | Introduction

how these models treat grammatical gender; studies on lexical priming which investigate whether prior information on the grammatical gender of a noun can influence the recognition of spoken or written words; and studies on the representation and processing of grammatical gender. Chapter 3 focuses on the grammatical mechanisms used by various languages to categorize nouns. This chapter focuses on three principal types of classification: (i) classifiers (ii) nominal classes and (iii) grammatical gender. It also discusses the relationship between grammatical and natural gender and how this varies from one language to another. Two extreme types of gender assignment systems are singled out, one based exclusively on semantic properties of the noun, and the other based directly on its formal (that is, phonological and morphological) features. Grammatical gender plays an extremely important role in Maltese, so that each noun needs to be assigned a masculine or feminine gender.2 This means that every borrowed noun also needs to be assigned gender in Maltese on the basis of some criterion, even if the language of origin does not have the grammatical category of gender. Chapter 4 discusses the criteria underlying gender assignment in Maltese on the basis of recently published descriptive grammars of the language. This chapter also offers an in-depth investigation of a database of thousands of nouns harvested from a dictionary, with a view to determining the nature of the relationship between a noun’s ending3 and the gender it is assigned – whether this relationship is arbitrary, or there is evidence for tendencies along the lines suggested by descriptive grammars. This quantitative analysis enables a more systematic investigation of the criteria for gender assignment of nouns in Maltese based on their origin (Semitic, Romance or English). Chapters 5 and 6 continue to flesh out the emerging picture of the gender assignment system of Maltese, by investigating how gender is assigned by native speakers. This is achieved through an analysis of questionnaires which were used in a series of experiments designed to elicit data from informants on various aspects of gender assignment to nouns in different contexts. Chapter 5 focuses primarily on the form of the noun, that is, mainly on its ending.

|| 2 Some nouns can take either masculine or feminine gender. Normally, in grammars of Maltese, these are referred to as nouns with a ‘common’ or ‘dual’ gender. Fabri (2009) refers to them as nouns which are underspecified for gender. 3 [Translator’s note: here and elsewhere, the term ending, rather than suffix is used for tarf, while suffix is reserved for the occasions when the original text uses the equivalent Maltese term suffiss. The difference is relevant since, in a number of instances, the ending in question is not a morphological suffix.]

Introduction | 3

Chapter 6 investigates the differences between nouns that refer to persons; most of them are frequently grouped together and assumed to have common gender. The criteria used by speakers to attribute a particular gender to these nouns are addressed, as is the question of whether this gender assignment is compatible with that given by standard dictionaries. This chapter also addresses the question of whether such conceptual knowledge affects morpho-syntactic agreement processes in different syntactic contexts, and whether conceptual and formal properties can jointly affect agreement, as has been found for other languages, such as Italian and French. The final chapter summarizes the principal themes and findings of each chapter, as well as the main conclusions that can be drawn from this work. The chapter also highlights some aspects of grammatical gender that have been addressed in the present work and suggests possible avenues for future work.

2 What is grammatical gender? 2.1 Grammatical and natural gender Grammatical gender is a phenomenon that we frequently tend to ignore. Indeed, native speakers of languages that have a grammatical gender system are hardly conscious of the existence of this category. Ironically, many people become aware of the category only in the process of learning a foreign language, such as French, Italian or German, when they have to memorize entire lists of nouns together with their grammatical gender, or many grammatical rules that are sensitive to gender in that particular language. Some linguists, such as Ibrahim (1973: 11) and Corbett (1991: 1), go so far as to speak of gender as an enigmatic phenomenon. This may explain the relative paucity of studies on this particular subject compared to other topics in linguistics. It is only in recent years that it has taken center stage in studies such as Corbett (1991) and Franceschina (2005). When native speakers reflect on gender in their language, they are more likely to be aware of gender as a natural category rather than as a grammatical system with its own inner workings. Grammatical gender is a linguistic property of words, while natural gender is a biological property of animate referents of words. Thus, for example, the natural gender of the referent of father is male, while that of the referent of mother is female. These facts are of a purely biological nature. The fact that the grammatical gender of words often corresponds to the natural gender of their referents can give rise to the illusion that natural and grammatical gender are the same thing. In this connection, it is worth noting that in writing about and explaining the grammar of Maltese, we frequently conflate or even confuse these two meanings of the term. For example, instances where the terms male/female are used instead of the grammatical terms masculine/feminine gender are not uncommon. In primary school classrooms, a teacher will often explain to children that siġġu ‘chair’ is male, while mejda ‘table’ is female. This continues to confirm, in spite of everything, that some association is being made between grammatical and natural gender, extending at times to our perception of inanimate objects. This leads us to the various controversies between linguists who have studied the phenomenon of gender.4

|| 4 In the present work, the word gender, used without further modification, will be taken to refer specifically to grammatical gender. Reference to biological (natural) gender will be made via the term natural gender or sex of the referent. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110612400-002

The role of grammatical gender in language production | 5

According to Corbett (1991), the link between grammatical and natural gender is not altogether arbitrary; there is some correlation between the two. However, even if a link between the two were assumed to exist, it would by no means be a direct one, whether one considers it within a particular language or cross-linguistically. For example, the word wicht ‘woman/servant’ in Dutch is assigned neuter gender, as shown by its agreement with the determiner in het wicht (Van Berkum 1996: 3). Furthermore, certain words referring to the same object can take different genders in different languages. Thus, the word for ‘house’ is feminine in Maltese, masculine in Russian and neuter in German, the ‘sun’ is feminine in Maltese, neuter in Russian and masculine in Italian, while ‘moon’ is masculine in Maltese and feminine in Italian. Furthermore, as the next section will show, some languages, such as those in the Bantu family, have between ten and twenty different grammatical gender classes.5 In such cases, the correlation between grammatical and natural gender can certainly not be said to be a direct one. This leads to another controversial topic. If there is no direct relationship between grammatical and natural gender, how can the speakers of the many languages that have a gender system effortlessly manage to learn the gender of thousands of nouns? And how do these speakers deploy their knowledge of nominal gender in relation to other grammatical categories in speech and writing, such as verbs, adjectives or participles? Answers to these questions are not provided by descriptive grammars; they can probably best be addressed via recourse to psychology. This is why many recent studies of grammatical gender have been of a psycholinguistic nature, especially in the context of language acquisition, for example the studies of Karmiloff-Smith (1979), Mills (1986), Pérez-Pereira (1991) and Grüter et al. (2012).

2.2 The role of grammatical gender in language production It is only recently that the mental representation and processing of grammatical gender has begun to be systematically investigated. According to Corbett (1991), one reason for this might be that English, which is the most widely studied language in psycholinguistics, does not have a grammatical gender system, but only a semantic one. Nevertheless, it is important to note that gender agreement is

|| 5 Grammatical gender class is used here in the sense in which it is used by linguists such as Bleek (1862–1869), Hjelmslev (1959), and Comrie (1999) who do not distinguish between grammatical gender and nominal classification systems. See Chapter 3 for further discussion.

6 | What is grammatical gender?

frequently attested in studies of language production in many languages. Thus, for example, Van Berkum (1996) estimates that a native speaker of Dutch needs to retrieve from memory the gender of a noun at least once every ten seconds. Language production does not only include the production of speech. Psycholinguistic research on language production also focuses on the cognitive processes that mediate between non-verbal communicative intentions and their verbalizations. These processes have to encode perceptions or thoughts into sounds, using the constituents made available by the rule system that constitutes the grammar of a language. Theories of language production attempt to explain how the mind can utilize this rule system in the process of encoding messages during spontaneous speech. Grammatical gender is a lexico-syntactic property of words (nouns). Since theories of language production explicitly address the storage, acquisition and use of such lexico-syntactic properties, grammatical gender is often used to shed light on the broader issues. Another reason for the interest in grammatical gender is that it provides a paradigm within which to study the acquisition of lexico-syntactic knowledge and its use during the grammatical encoding stage of language production. Given the relevance of grammatical gender to language acquisition, and given that language acquisition involves both production and comprehension; it is worth considering what happens during these stages and what the place of grammatical gender is. Levelt’s (1993) model can be used to explain this process. This model, which is depicted on the following page, illustrates the main processes underlying language production and comprehension. The left hand side of the figure represents the process of speech production, while the right hand side represents the process of comprehension. Production involves four main components: conceptualization, grammatical encoding, phonological encoding and articulation. The entire process is likely triggered by a speaker’s having the intention to communicate something to somebody. In order to achieve this, the speaker has to keep in mind certain information about the interlocutor, for example, their level of education or their interests. The speaker formulates a message by selecting the information that they wish to convey, giving it the right form depending on the language used (for example, the form of a question, a statement, etc.). This stage can be regarded as mediating between thought and language. The next stage is that of grammatical encoding, whose input is provided by the conceptualizer. The cognitive mechanisms that operate during this phase select abstract lexical representations for words. During this stage, the message is given a surface form and a hierarchically organized phrasal syntactic form

The role of grammatical gender in language production | 7

that controls the order in which words are produced. Electro-physiological evidence suggests that grammatical information about words is accessed around 40ms before phonological information (Van Turennout et al. 1998). According to Levelt, not all properties of words are important during this phase. The most crucial are the word’s syntactic properties and information at the semantics-syntax interface. Some authors, such as Kempen & Huijbers (1983) and Levelt (1989) refer to this mental representation of the word in the mental lexicon as a lemma. These lemmas specify semantic and syntactic information about the word. Lemmas are distinct from lexemes in that they lack an abstract phonological specification. Some writers, such as Garrett (1992) and Levelt (1989), believe that the lemma includes the word’s grammatical category (e.g. noun, verb, adjective, etc.), its possible grammatical functions (i.e. subject, object, etc.), the syntactic structures that it can form part of (e.g. noun phrase, verb phrase, etc.) as well as language-specific syntactic features (e.g. grammatical gender). The syntactic information contained in the lemma guides the grammatical encoding of the sentence. According to Levelt, the selection of lemmas and their ordering according to their syntactic and relevant semantic properties, performed during grammatical encoding, is followed by phonological encoding, which determines the sound structure and pronunciation of the sentence. Lexemes become relevant during this phase. These lexemes are slotted into the order specified by the surface syntactic structure in order to trigger the articulatory system. The articulatory phase also codifies prosodic information, such as the intonation of the entire message. This is referred to as internal speech which is externally (audibly) manifested through the mediation of the articulatory mechanisms. This process is automatic and permits the speaker to perform various tasks incrementally and in parallel. Thus, for example, the formulator can begin working on one part of the message while another part is still being generated and yet another, earlier, part is being articulated. This means that, while we are speaking, we are also thinking and planning the remainder of our utterances. The right hand side of Levelt’s model is concerned with comprehension or, more accurately, message decoding. According to many theories of language processing, decoding begins with the processing of acoustic-phonetic properties that map sound to a phonetic representation that can be linked to entries in the mental lexicon. The next stage is that of phonological decoding, where this phonetic representation is used to retrieve word forms from the mental lexicon. Additionally, phonological decoding has to “recover” prosodic information, such as intonation, from the phonetic representation. This information func-

8 | What is grammatical gender?

tions as a cue to the understanding of the structural and communicative aspects of the message, for example, whether it is a question. Following lexical retrieval, the grammatical decoding stage begins by analyzing the syntactic and semantic specifications of the entries retrieved from the mental lexicon. This process maps the prosodic and lexical representation into a “message”, by interpreting it semantically and checking the semantic representation for consistency against the syntactic structure. According to Levelt (1993: 9), syntax and semantics are closely coupled during this process and are developed in tandem as sentential material is incrementally processed in the mind. The semantic analysis that is the outcome of grammatical decoding is unlikely to suffice for a final interpretation. In most cases, the message has to be unified with a non-linguistic representation of the discourse; this is handled by a discourse processing stage which, among other things, involves the identification of referents and finally, the decoding of the speaker’s communicative intention. A number of authors, including Levelt, believe that every retrieval stage has to be concluded before the next stage can begin; furthermore, processing involves no feedback from later to earlier stages. Others, such as Dell (1986), are of the view that some information at a given stage may influence the next one and that feedback from later to earlier stages can indeed take place. But where does grammatical gender fit into this process? It is worth pointing out that, although native speakers of a language that has a grammatical gender system use gender marking continuously in their written and spoken utterances, this need not imply that such marking will benefit their listeners or readers. Suppose, for example, that somebody utters the sentence Ilbieraħ Robert libset qmis abjad instead of Ilbieraħ Robert libes qmis bajda6 or Marija jsajjar ikel tajba instead of Marija ssajjar ikel tajjeb.7 Although these sentences may sound odd to a Maltese listener, and might even give them the impression that the speaker is being facetious or is not quite of sound mind, they would still be able to understand the message. This is so because in languages with a relatively fixed constituent order, generally speaking, lack of gender marking does not constitute a semantic barrier to understanding. Indeed, there are languages which lack a gender system altogether and users of such languages are certainly able to comprehend utterances without difficulty. This raises an important || 6 Ilbieraħ Robert libes qmis abjad / bajda yesterday Robert wear.3SG.M.PRF shirt white.SG.M / white.SG.F ‘Yesterday Robert wore a white shirt’ 7 Marija jsajjar / ssajjar ikel tajba / tajjeb Marija cook.SG.M.IPFV / cook.3SG.F.IPFV food good. SG.M / good. SG.F ‘Marija cooks good food’

The role of grammatical gender in language production | 9

question. If, as we have argued, speakers of those languages which lack a gender system are nevertheless able to communicate without problems, why can speakers of languages which do have such systems not ignore gender? Van Berkum (1996: 10) argues that this is not possible. According to him, if native speakers systematically incorporate gender in their utterances, they must also be capable of processing it during comprehension (see Figure 2.1), if only because this is a prerequisite to the acquisition of the correct gender system to use in production at a later stage. CONCEPTUALIZER communicative intention

message generation

inferred intention

monitoring

message

parsed speech/ derived message

FORMULATOR grammatical encoding

discourse processing

PARSER

LEXICON lemmas

grammatical decoding

lexemes surface structure phonological encoding

phonetic/articulatory plan (internal speech) ARTICULATOR

overt speech

lexical-prosodic representation phonological decoding & lexical selection phonetic representation ACCOUSTC-PHONETIC PROCESSOR speech

Figure 2.1: A modified version of Levelt’s (1993) model of the processing components involved in language production (left) and comprehension (right) as adapted by Dietrich (2002).

10 | What is grammatical gender?

For these speakers, gender has to be involved somehow in this process. He argues against the view that native speakers acquire the grammatical gender system of their language as it were accidentally, that is, by attempting to produce what they have heard. Another reason given by Van Berkum in support of his view that speakers of a language that marks gender cannot simply ignore the gender system, is that these speakers can perceive errors in gender assignment even if they do not consciously monitor input for this type of error, which implies that gender is processed during comprehension. Gender can automatically constrain the interpretation that a listener assigns to a sentence, as shown by the adjective pair ġdid/ġdida ‘new.SG.M/new.SG.F’ below. These examples also illustrate the way in which grammatical gender is used during the grammatical decoding phase: (1)

Toni kisser il-mejda Toni break.SG.M.PRF DEF-table ‘Toni broke the television table.’

(2)

Toni kisser il-mejda ta-t-televixin Toni break.SG.M.PRF DEF-table of-DEF-television ‘Toni broke the table of the new television.’

(3)

ta-t-televixin. of-DEF-television il-ġdid. DEF-new.SG.M

Toni kisser il-mejda ta-t-televixin il-ġdida. Toni break.SG.M.PRF DEF-table of- DEF-television DEF-new.SG.F ‘Toni broke the new television table.’

Sentence (1) is a simple declarative sentence, expressing the fact that Toni broke the (presumably unique) table on which the television was placed. In (2), the masculine form of the adjective modifies the masculine noun televixin ‘television’ and actually licenses the interpretation that Toni has or had more than one television set. In (3), the feminine form of the adjective modifies the feminine noun mejda ‘table’ and may suggest that Toni has or had more than one television table.

2.3 The effect of word frequency and recency of acquisition of gender Although some authors have doubted the relevance of gender for comprehension,8 its role in production9 is undisputed, given that speakers of languages

|| 8 See the right hand side of Levelt’s model in the above diagram.

The effect of word frequency and recency of acquisition of gender | 11

with a gender system use it all the time in expressions that are marked for gender. This raises a number of important questions. How do speakers retrieve the gender of those nouns that have been selected to form part of a message to be conveyed? And how does the particular gender of the noun exert its influence throughout the syntactic structure that is in the process of being built, as happens for example with Maltese adjectives, demonstrative pronouns, pronominal suffixes, verbal inflections and others, some of which are linearized and uttered prior to the noun itself? Is gender stored or is it computed on the fly? In other words, is grammatical gender simply stored as a syntactic property of nouns, or is it worked out on the basis of semantic, morphological and phonological properties of the noun every time it is required? Such questions have begun to be posed relatively recently in linguistics. Some psycholinguistic models of language production assume that gender is not computed, but stored as a property of the noun itself, part of the native speaker’s repository of linguistic knowledge. Schriefers & Jescheniak (1999) argue that this conclusion follows from the assumption that the relationship between a noun and its grammatical gender is, in principle, arbitrary. Thus, under this view, gender has to be stored as part of the grammatical description of every noun in the mental lexicon. However, it must be said that research on this topic (from the point of view of language production) is still in its infancy. The retrieval of grammatical gender during the process of production and comprehension remains a mystery. Studies such as that of Schriefers (1993) suggest that speakers take longer to retrieve the grammatical gender of a particular word when they are distracted by another word which is used in the same context but has different gender. However, Van Berkum (1996: 12) argues that nobody knows exactly how the retrieval mechanism for gender actually works. For example, once a speaker has selected a particular lemma to express a concept, is its associated grammatical gender information retrieved automatically, even if the speaker is not familiar with the gender of the chosen word, or is there a separate process that requires an additional amount of processing time10 to retrieve gender, a process that could depend, for example, on the frequency of the speaker’s past retrievals of this gender? During speech, a speaker has to process gender at the grammatical encoding phase. During this phase, two processes are accomplished in order to construct expressions marked for gender:

|| 9 See the left hand side of Levelt’s model in the above diagram. 10 The amount of time under discussion is a matter of milliseconds.

12 | What is grammatical gender?

1. the gender of the noun has to be found in the mental lexicon; and 2. this gender has to be projected onto the syntactic structure, that is, on all those elements that have to agree for gender with the noun in the surface form under construction. The projection of gender onto the syntactic structure is a special case of the production of agreement, an area that is witnessing a steady accretion of psycholinguistic studies, such as those of Bock & Eberhard (1993) and Vigliocco et al. (1995). Although a lot of this work focuses on number agreement (singular/plural), there are many who believe that common mechanisms underlie the projection of number and gender onto the surface form under construction. Nevertheless, the manner in which gender is retrieved from the mental lexicon has still not been completely determined. According to Van Berkum, we still do not know whether speakers retrieve gender directly from the mental lexicon or compute it with the aid of other information that is retrieved with the noun. In addition, hardly anything is known about the mechanism for gender retrieval. Does the gender of other nouns in the lexical context affect the retrieval of the correct gender and the speaker’s retrieval speed? And if a speaker has recently used the gender of a particular noun, does this facilitate its re-use with that noun? Two researchers who have contributed to this field are Jescheniak & Levelt (1994). In their work on Dutch, they showed a group of subjects pictures of simple objects, such as a snail, a star and a house, and asked them to choose the gender of each object as fast as possible by pressing one of two buttons which were associated with the two types of gender responses available in Dutch. According to Jescheniak & Levelt, their results show evidence for a recency effect during production; the authors conclude that the time required to retrieve the gender of a noun from the mental lexicon depends on the recency of the speaker’s last retrieval of the gender for that noun; the more recent the last retrieval, the faster the access. In another experiment, Jescheniak & Levelt asked participants to name a picture of an object as fast as possible. Half of the objects had relatively rare names such as slak ‘snail’ and snavel ‘beak’, while the other half had highfrequency names in Dutch, such as ster ‘star’ and tafel ‘table’. These nouns, all of which required a particular gender (de), were interspersed in the experiment with filler items that required a different gender (het). Participants were exposed to the list of words three times and they had to name the picture each time. The results showed that naming latencies for high frequency items were 62ms shorter on average than those for low frequency items. Hence, based on this experiment, Jescheniak & Levelt concluded that there is a Word Frequency Effect (WFE). Other experiments showed that speakers are faster at uttering high fre-

The effect of word frequency and recency of acquisition of gender | 13

quency words compared to low frequency ones, because frequent use strengthens the phonological representation of a word and hence makes it easier to access during the phonological encoding stage. Jescheniak & Levelt were of the view that the WFE can also originate during the first stage of lexical access, that is, when the lemma is retrieved. Since lemma retrieval is affected by word frequency, they predicted that its grammatical gender will also be affected by the frequency of the word. However, this was not confirmed by their experiments. They found a strong effect of lexical frequency on naming latencies, but a minimal effect of frequency on the association of gender with a particular word. Thus, the word frequency effect on gender assignment disappeared after participants had named experimental items twice before together with the correct form of the definite article (which depends on the gender of the noun); hence, it was not the naming per se which had the strongest effect on the retrieval of gender. Thus, Jescheniak & Levelt (1994) concluded that the time taken by a native speaker of Dutch to retrieve grammatical gender information for a noun from the mental lexicon during speech production depended primarily on how recently the speaker had accessed that gender, rather than the frequency of the noun itself. In other words, the more recently it had been accessed, the greater the speed with which the speaker could retrieve the gender associated with a noun. This has come to be known as the Recency Effect (RE – see Figure 2.2 below). Under this view, gender is assumed to be stored in the speaker’s mental lexicon. However, some authors, including Zubin and Köpcke (1986) and Corbett (1994), disagree with this conclusion. Van Berkum (1996: 185) conducted a series of experiments to replicate the findings of Jescheniak and Levelt. He found no evidence of the RE, at least during speech production. Thus, his experiments suggest that gender is not stored. However he also adds that “… evidence against the abstract gender recency hypothesis does not immediately falsify the storage account. What has been falsified is the hypothesis that gender is stored in a particular way, one that facilitates repeated access.” Even if we had to accept the hypothesis that gender is stored, this raises another question, namely, how is it stored? The debate on this question centers on the relationship between the representation of syntactic information related to gender at the level of the lemma, and phonological information on the word at the level of the lexeme. At this point, it is worth recalling that the term lemma is used with a somewhat different meaning in the context of these psycholinguistic studies from that used in the context of studies of morphology or lexicography. In the latter, lemma usually means the particular form of a lexeme that is conventionally used as its citation form. Thus, for example, the lemma is used in a dictionary entry as the headword, with other forms listed later in the same

14 | What is grammatical gender?

entry. On the other hand, the term in psycholinguistics is used to refer to the abstract conceptual form that is chosen in the early stages of utterance formation, before it is actually bound to the specific phonological form that is eventually uttered. This means that in this context, the lemma only includes information stored in the mind related to the meaning of the word and its syntactic relationship to other words in the sentence, but not its pronunciation. Hence, the lemma is considered an intermediate level of representation between the semantic and phonological levels.

lexicon

Low frequency nouns

the mental

High frequency nouns

to retrieve gender from

Recent retrieval of gender

Time taken

Non-recent retrieval of gender

10.2

Frequency and retrieval of gender for a noun

Figure 2.2: The recency effect in relation to retrieval of gender from the mental lexicon among Dutch speakers, after Jescheniak & Levelt (1994).

According to one model of language production, that is proposed by Levelt (1989), nouns which have the same grammatical gender cluster together in nodes.11 This implies that the gender of nouns is not specified separately for each noun in their lexical entries; rather, each grammatical gender exists as an abstract point. In this model, known as the Serial model of the Production Process, there are three distinct levels of representation relevant to gender: the semantic, the syntactic and the phonological levels. The semantic level is the conceptual level and provides information for the lexical stage in language production, that is, lemma retrieval. Lemmas are present at the syntactic level,

|| 11 See also Levelt et al. (1999: 1–38).

The effect of word frequency and recency of acquisition of gender | 15

at which each lemma node is unified with other nodes that represent the syntactic properties of words (for example, the noun category) and, in case of nouns, their grammatical gender (for example, masculine/feminine/neuter). Nouns with the same gender are linked to the same gender node. Furthermore, every lemma is linked to a node at the phonological level that specifies the word’s phonological form. Finally, gender nodes are linked to other elements that have the same gender, such as pronouns and adjectives.

Conceptual level

L e x i c a l c h o i c e

Lexical concept

Lemma selection

Lemma Syntactic factors

Grammatical properties

Retrieval of morpho-phonological encoding

Phonological encoding Syllabification Phonological word Phonetic encoding

F o r m e n c o d i n g

Articulation Figure 2.3: The Serial model of the Production Processes (Levelt 1989) (adapted from Maria De Martino et al. – poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, July 2005).

This model brings to the fore two principal properties. First, the phonological form of a particular word is only activated after lemma selection. Hence, the correct choice of grammatical gender does not depend on its phonological form. Second, activation from the lemma to the phonological form, as well as from the lemma to its lexico-syntactic properties, spreads in one direction only. Accord-

16 | What is grammatical gender?

ing to Levelt, this means that the retrieval and selection of a noun’s grammatical gender and the computation of gender agreement with other elements that require it (such as adjectives) cannot be affected by the noun’s phonological form. Hence, according to this model, information about gender exists at the level of the lemma. Dell (1986),12 although largely in agreement with the basic structure of Levelt’s model, that is, with the link between conceptual/semantic representations and lemma representations and then word form representations, argues that the phonological level can also influence and be influenced by the lemma level. Caramazza (1997) has proposed an alternative model known as the Independent Network (IN) model. Caramazza’s model holds that the phonological form of the word is required in order for the syntactic properties of the word (including gender) to be activated; thus, the lemma level does not play a central role in this process. Hence, according to Caramazza, gender information can be retrieved from the phonological form of the word even during the production of nouns in isolation.

Semantic representation

Orthographic lexemes

Syntactic factors

Phonological lexemes

Figure 2.4: Schematic representation of the Independent Network model proposed by Caramazza (1997: 196), showing the relationship between semantic, syntactic and lexical representations.

This model is composed of three networks, a lexical-semantic network, a phonological-orthographic network, and a syntactic network. Each one is linked to the other, but the connection between the semantic and syntactic networks is weak (as indicated by the dashed line in Figure 2.4). This connection accounts for

|| 12 See also Dell & O’Seaghdha (1991).

Is gender a conceptual or a grammatical property of nouns? | 17

priming of syntactic properties but does not allow the semantic network to select syntactic properties directly. Summarizing the empirical evidence on the psycholinguistic aspects of the representation, retrieval and use of grammatical gender in language production, Schriefers & Jescheniak (1999) list the following conclusions: 1. Grammatical gender is represented as an abstract lexico-syntactic property. 2. The connection between the lemma and grammatical gender is likely to be uni-directional, from the lemma to the gender feature. 3. The choice of lemma for a noun does not automatically entail the selection of its gender and other lexico-syntactic properties. Rather, gender seems to be selected if it is required by the noun’s local syntactic environment, that is, if there are constituents that have to be marked for gender in the presence of the noun. 4. If there is a constituent that requires gender marking in the noun’s syntactic environment, gender has to be selected before phonological encoding. This means that gender agreement has to be computed at an abstract level of grammatical processing that does not rely on the phonological form of the utterance. In spite of the differences between them, the main language production models agree that lexical information (semantic, syntactic and phonological properties of words) is retrieved piecemeal rather than in one fell swoop. Thus, it would be wrong to think of the process of “finding” and uttering a word as a single, unitary act. In fact, it is a fast, complex process that involves the assembly of separate, mutually influencing, pieces of information.

2.4 Is gender a conceptual or a grammatical property of nouns? An important question related to the role of gender in language production is whether gender is a conceptual or a grammatical property of the noun. This information about the noun could help the speaker during production due to the necessity of ensuring agreement between the noun and other elements in the sentence, such as adjectives, participles, etc. This is the case whether or not gender is based on the sex of the referent. Corbett (1991) observes that, according to typological classifications, the languages of the world represent gender in linguistic form either (i) as a conceptual property arising from the sex of the referent, for example missier ‘father’ (masculine) – omm ‘mother’ (feminine), ziju ‘uncle’ (masculine) – zija ‘aunt’ (feminine), or (ii) as a grammatical property

18 | What is grammatical gender?

(that is, a formal one such as the ending of the noun) that has no relationship with the sex of the referent, for example persunaġġ ‘character/protagonist’ (masculine), vittma ‘victim’ (feminine), persuna ‘person’ (feminine). English is frequently considered a language whose gender system is entirely conceptual, where gender marking is by and large reserved for animate, mostly human, referents and where, with some exceptions (such as the noun ship being considered feminine), there is a reasonably clear relationship between the sex of the referent and the gender of the noun. By contrast, the Romance languages are considered to have a grammatical gender system where all nouns are marked for gender. While the relationship between the gender of the noun and the sex of the referent is clear enough for nouns referring to humans and some animals, gender assignment for nouns that refer to objects, abstract entities and even animate entities does not appear to have a sound conceptual basis (Harris & Vincent 1990). The Maltese language too belongs in this class. The fact that gender agreement is based on the same types of rules in both cases (that is, both when gender is a formal linguistic property as well as when it is a conceptual property) has motivated some researchers, including Bock (1995), to investigate a central aspect of language production, namely whether conceptual information about the sex of the referent is used or not during the process of grammatical encoding, following the choice of lexical items for that referent. Producing a sentence involves processing at multiple levels. According to Vigliocco & Nicol (1998), the phonological encoding stage that determines the sound and pronunciation of a sentence is preceded by a syntactic processing stage. This occurs at the level of grammatical encoding, during which abstract lexical representations for words are retrieved and the hierarchical structure of the sentence is computed. Thus, gender agreement, which is a syntactic operation, is codified during this stage. During the process of grammatical encoding, lemmas are first retrieved according to the speaker’s intention, then assigned grammatical functions (such as subject and object) as the first step in the construction of the sentence’s tree structure. Agreement occurs after grammatical functions are assigned to the various constituents, but before word order is determined. According to Vigliocco & Franck (1999), the factors that are relevant to agreement are retrieved from conceptual representations and assigned to lemmas when they are conceptually motivated. These authors therefore argue that, in the case of gender, there are two different processes, corresponding to the distinction between conceptual and grammatical gender: 1. if the noun refers to an entity whose sex is biologically determined, the gender of the noun depends on whether the speaker wants to talk about a feminine or a masculine entity;

Is gender a conceptual or a grammatical property of nouns? | 19

2. if the noun refers to an entity that does not have gender as a semantic property, the noun is not assigned gender on the basis of the speaker’s intention but is stored instead in the mental lexicon as an integral property of the word. However, theories of language production tend to stress that conceptual information has very limited impact on syntactic processes (Garrett 1976, Bock 1995, and Levelt 1989). According to these theories, agreement is a purely syntactic operation that takes the syntactic properties (such as gender and number) of the controlling element (for example, the subject of the sentence) and copies them onto other elements that are subject to agreement (such as the verb). Conceptual connotations (male or female) are used to establish syntactic properties (e.g. masculine or feminine) of the controlling element (the noun). Once these syntactic properties are established, no other conceptual information is retrieved. Such models are based on the so-called minimal input hypothesis, or Minimalist perspective, which holds that the grammatical encoder is only sensitive to the conceptual information that it “requires”. This perspective assumes that the same processes apply both to nouns with a conceptual basis underlying their gender assignment, and those without. Under this hypothesis, when there is a clash between conceptual and syntactic information, agreement is based on grammatical, not conceptual factors. This position is adopted primarily in models of language production such as that of Garrett (1976) and Levelt (1989). There is, however, an alternative possibility, referred to as maximal input or the Maximalist perspective (Vigliocco & Franck 1999). This assumes that the role of conceptual factors in the processing of gender agreement goes beyond merely determining syntactic properties. Accuracy is achieved when the encoder uses all the information available from other accessible processing levels, including the conceptual. In this context, conceptual information can strengthen syntactic information. Evidence for this claim comes from various languages which display agreement, where conceptual agreement is preferred over purely syntactic agreement. For example, in polite forms of address in French, as in the sentence Vous êtes arrivé ‘you have arrived’, there is syntactic agreement (on the basis of number) between the verb and the subject pronoun, but the passive participle in the predicate is in the singular and hence exhibits conceptual agreement with the pronoun, which refers to a single individual. As far as gender agreement is concerned, this perspective holds that gender can be accurately assigned by using conceptual information as well as establishing the gender and form of the noun. This information is assumed to provide further aid and thus affects the agreement process when the sex of the referent

20 | What is grammatical gender?

and the gender of the noun are compatible. On the other hand, it can also create difficulties when there is a lack of agreement between conceptual and syntactic information. In this case, the conflict between the two types of information hinders the encoding process. This view is compatible with various theories and suggestions regarding the influence of non-syntactic factors on sentence processing, among them those of Bates & MacWhinney (1989) and McDonald et al. (1994).

2.5 Conceptual influences on gender agreement Several studies, among them that of Vigliocco & Franck (1999) have investigated whether congruency between conceptual information and the gender of the noun confers an advantage, compared to situations where there is only syntactic information. These cases are illustrated by the following examples: (4)

Dak it-tifel fi-l-bitħa that.SG.M DEF-boy in-DEF-yard ‘That boy in the yard is new.’

(5)

Dak il-bank fi-l-bitħa that.SG.M DEF-bench in-DEF-yard ‘That bench in the yard is new.’

ġdid. new.SG.M ġdid. new.SG.M

In both cases, the adjective in the predicate agrees with the subject noun. However, while in (4) the gender of the noun is assigned on the basis of the sex of the referent, in (5) it is not conceptually motivated. If conceptual information is really used during the agreement process, errors such as (6) should be less frequent than those exemplified in (7). (6)

*Dak that.SG.M

it-tifel DEF-boy

(7)

*Dak that.SG.M

il-bank DEF-bench

fi-l-bitħa in-DEF-yard fi-l-bitħa in-DEF-yard

ġdida. new.SG.F ġdida. new.SG.F

Studies of gender agreement have investigated the influence of conceptual information by comparing those cases where the noun is assigned gender on the basis of speaker intentions (i.e. nouns whose gender has a conceptual basis) to those where gender is a formal property of the noun (i.e. nouns whose gender has no conceptual basis). Vigliocco & Franck (1999) investigated the presence of facilitatory and inhibitory effects of conceptual information on syntactic information in gender agreement in Italian and French. They investigated the pro-

Conceptual influences on gender agreement | 21

cessing of gender agreement between nouns and adjectives in sentence predicates. Their study was based on sentences which had epicene nouns as their subject. These nouns, such as vittima, victim ‘victim’ (feminine) and prodigio, prodige ‘prodigy’ (masculine) have a fixed grammatical gender but can refer both to males and females. Agreement between such nouns in subject position and adjectival predicates should take place on the basis of the noun’s grammatical gender, whether or not it refers to a male or a female. In their first two experiments (one in Italian, the other in French), Vigliocco & Franck presented speakers with sentential contexts such as (8), which they had to read silently. (8)

Un camion ha investito Fabio/Fabiola che correva in bicicletta ascoltando musica. ‘A lorry hit Fabio/Fabiola who was riding a bicycle while listening to music.’

Subjects were then asked to complete sentences such as (9a) and (9b). These consisted of a head noun as subject and a local noun in a prepositional phrase, for example, (9)

a. b.

La vittima dello scontro … ‘The victim of the accident ...’ La vittima della fatalità … ‘The victim of the fatality ...’

The head noun was used every time with two local nouns, one with the same grammatical gender, as in (9b) and one with a different grammatical gender, as in (9a). The local noun had grammatical, not conceptual, gender. Finally, subjects were given two forms of an adjective (masculine and feminine) which they needed to use to complete the sentences, for example distratto/distratta ‘distracted.SG.M/SG.F’. In sentences such as (9a) and (9b), the noun vittima can refer to both males and females. The sentential context introduces the main actor, whose sex is either congruent or incongruent with the gender of the noun in the continuation sentence (for example, Fabiola = congruent, Fabio = incongruent). Thus, if information related to the sex of the referent is indeed utilized by the encoder to determine subject-adjective agreement (as predicted by the Maximalist hypothesis), then there should be more errors in incongruent contexts, compared to congruent ones. The first two experiments showed that in both French and Italian, errors in gender agreement were more frequent when there was a lack of congruence between conceptual information (the sex of the referent of the head noun) and syntactic information (the grammatical gender of the local noun). This supports

22 | What is grammatical gender?

the Maximalist hypothesis, insofar as during the encoding of gender, speakers pay attention to both conceptual and syntactic information. In their third and fourth experiments, Vigliocco & Franck used the same sentence beginnings as they had used in the previous two, but this time did not provide sentential contexts. Thus, speakers could not rely on the conceptual information about the sex of the referent which in the earlier experiments had been provided by the context. In this case, the Maximalist theory predicts that there should be more errors than in Experiments 1 and 2 in those conditions where the sex of the referent and the gender of the subject noun were congruent; furthermore, the errors in these experiments should be less frequent compared to Experiments 1 and 2 when the sex of the referent and the gender of the subject noun were incongruent. In fact, in these experiments, errors in gender agreement (between the head of the subject noun phrase and the correct form of the predicate adjective) were more frequent when the head noun and the local noun did not have the same gender. This implies that, in the absence of context, errors were being made because of the congruence or lack thereof of the gender of the subject head noun. This effect was absent in the first two experiments because of the greater impact of conceptual information compared to syntactic information. This suggests that the information provided by context affects the agreement process. Vigliocco & Franck therefore concluded that incongruent contexts can negatively affect the gender assignment process, while congruent contexts can be beneficial. However, the dis/advantages conferred by context are not symmetrical, because the interference observed with a lack of congruence is greater than the facilitation observed with congruent referents. The results of the study by Vigliocco & Franck show that both conceptual and syntactic information sources are taken into account during the grammatical encoding process; hence, this information is also used in the computation of gender agreement, for example between a subject and a predicative adjective. Their conclusions suggest that syntactic factors that reflect conceptual information are retrieved and used for different sentential constituents. This information source, which might be considered “additional”, ensures accuracy and facilitates the encoding of the sentence. Thus, this study provides evidence for the Maximalist theory, which holds that conceptual (non-syntactic) information is indirectly involved in the mechanisms underlying the encoding of a phrase, that is, the grammatical encoding system can consult this information source in the process of computing agreement. At the same time, this study also provides evidence against the Minimalist theory, which assumes a strict division between conceptual processing and grammatical encoding.

Gender priming and the “tip of the tongue” (TOT) phenomenon | 23

2.6 Gender priming and the “tip of the tongue” (TOT) phenomenon Psycholinguistic studies, such as Grosjean et al.’s study (1994) on French speakers and Bates et al.’s (1994) on gender priming in Italian, have investigated whether grammatical gender information that precedes the noun affects spoken and written word recognition. In other words, if a word that is assigned a particular gender is preceded by a marker with the same gender, is it recognized faster, compared to when it is preceded by a marker with a different gender or no marker at all? That is, does the pre-activation of the gender of the noun facilitate the retrieval of the noun itself? In their study, Grosjean et al. presented subjects with a group of nouns (the target nouns) that were preceded by adjectives with invariant gender, for example jolie plage (‘pretty bay’) and another group that were preceded by another element (a determiner) that was explicitly marked for gender, for example une jolie plage (‘a pretty bay’). They found that recognition latencies were shorter when nouns were primed by an element marked for gender. In other words, the process of word recognition was primed when it is preceded by some form of gender information. The authors therefore concluded that the recognition of a gender-marked word activates nouns with the same gender in the mental lexicon. Although studies in this area do not always agree in their conclusions, it can be stated in general that works based on visual stimuli, such as those used by Gurjanov et al. (1985) and Carello et al. (1988) conclude that gender information which is presented prior to a word does not affect the recognition of the word. On the other hand, studies using auditory stimuli, such as that conducted on French by Colé & Segui (1994), conclude that information preceding the noun does affect its recognition. Van Berkum (1996: 88) investigated gender priming in Dutch in three experiments, and did not find evidence for the effect of this kind of information preceding the word, at least where written words are concerned. This means that gender in itself does not prime word recognition, at least in Dutch. However, Van Berkum states that this does not warrant the conclusion that a gender priming effect does not exist. At the very least, it would be necessary to investigate this effect in spoken language, as it has been in other languages such as French and Italian. According to Van Berkum (1996: 91), it remains an open question whether the differences are due to the differences between languages or due to the modality of stimulus presentation in these experiments. Another area of research relevant to the representation and processing of grammatical gender is the so-called TOT (tip of the tongue) state. This phenom-

24 | What is grammatical gender?

enon occurs when speakers have a particular word in mind – indeed, it is on the tip of their tongue – but cannot “find” it and use it at that particular moment. When this happens, speakers are normally able to retrieve partial phonological information, for example the number of syllables in the word or its onset. This phenomenon could be counted as evidence for the distinction between lemma and lexeme, as well as for speakers’ lack of ability at specific moments to retrieve a lexeme once the corresponding word has been selected (Levelt 1992). Sometimes, speakers in a TOT state can provide correct information about the gender of a noun while at the same time being unable to provide complete information about its phonological form. Vigliocco et al. (1997) found that Italian speakers in a TOT state were able to correctly specify the grammatical gender of words that they couldn’t actually utter even in those cases when they could provide no information about the form of the word. The gender of these nouns was correctly specified in 84% of cases. The evidence from these experiments, that was also replicated in Spanish by Gonzales & Miralles (1997)13, suggests that there are different representations for lexical-semantic and phonological properties of words. In fact, speakers in a TOT state could report lexicalsyntactic properties of a word they were trying to identify while at the same time being unable to identify its entire phonological form. An interesting case that further supports this point was reported by Johns Hopkins University.14 William Badecker, a research scientist in this university’s Department of Cognitive Science, conducted a study on a 24-year old patient who had a cerebral lesion. This patient, who was called Dante in the study, had spent two weeks in a coma, following which he seemed to have convalesced and begun to speak normally. However, he continued to suffer from anomic aphasia, a condition in which persons are unable to retrieve words. Thus, this patient was often unable to recall the names of familiar objects when these were presented to him in pictures. He was also unable to speak about the form of these words, such as for example whether they rhymed with others, or how many syllables they contained. However, scientists were greatly surprised to discover that this patient, who was unable to identify any of a word’s formal properties, was in nearly all cases able to tell whether the gender of a word was masculine or feminine. This implies that the brain does not retrieve all information as a single unit, as happens when one looks up a word in a dictionary. The brain uses a complex network to transform thoughts into language. According to Badecker, the brain

|| 13 Cited by Vigliocco & Nicol (1998). 14 See Headlines @ Hopkins news release, 19th of October, 1995 “Brain Injury Provides Strong Evidence for Mind’s Language Machinery”.

Linguistic determinism and grammatical gender | 25

transforms conceptual representations into linguistic form in two stages, namely the lemma and the lexeme.15 Thus, for example, when someone is shown a picture of an object, the brain selects a specific lemma and retrieves information about it, but the word itself is not actually “named”. The lemma includes syntactic and grammatical factors about the chosen word, including its gender. However, according to Badecker, the information at this stage does not include the word form. The lemma level apparently provides an “address” in the network associated with the lexeme whereby the correct form of the word can be retrieved.

2.7 Linguistic determinism and grammatical gender One question which over the years has exercised the minds of many linguists, philosophers, anthropologists and psychologists is whether the language we speak influences the way in which we perceive and interpret the world around us. This issue originally arose as a result of the observation that speakers of different languages speak about the world in different ways. Although several studies have addressed this question, it still lacks a definitive answer. The name of Benjamin Lee Whorf is associated with linguistic determinism, that is, the idea that thought is determined by language. Whorf (1956) in Caroll (1997 [1956]) believed that speakers of different languages perceive similar situations in different ways and that this was a direct result of their linguistic differences. In its extreme form, the hypothesis of linguistic determinism has been strongly rejected. Two factors in particular may have contributed to a general decline in the importance attributed to Whorf’s hypothesis, namely, Chomsky’s hypothesis of a universal grammar, which has been discussed by Pinker (1994 and 2007) among others; and the work of Munnich & Landau (2003) which shows that languages does not in fact affect thought. However, other studies have shown some degree of correlation between the language we speak and the way we think. Studies focusing on the conceptualization of time have shown differences between languages. According to Boroditsky (1999), language is a powerful tool in the formulation of thought and our native tongue is central to the way we formulate habitual thoughts, for example those related to time, but does not determine all thought in the extreme fashion hypothesized by Whorf. This is probably due to the fact that language exercises a greater influence on the con-

|| 15 See http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/home95/oct95/brain.html.

26 | What is grammatical gender?

ceptualization of abstract entities than it does on conceptualization of sensory experiences. Boroditsky & Schmidt (2000) studied this factor by analyzing the impact of grammatical gender on the way in which people conceive of inanimate objects. This study focused on whether gender assignment is indeed entirely arbitrary or whether the gender that nouns are assigned also has consequences at the semantic level. There are many things that do not have a biological gender. Hence, perceptual information does not provide conclusive evidence for the grammatical gender they are assigned. Boroditsky & Schmidt addressed the question of whether there is some relationship between the gender assigned to objects in different languages and the way speakers of these languages associate grammatical gender with natural gender in their conceptual representations for these objects, in spite of the fact that their gender lacks a biological basis. Their starting point was the premise that gender assignment to the names of objects is arbitrary and is unrelated to the conceptual properties of a referent. At a glance, this would seem to be the case, for example in languages such as German where das Mädchen ‘the girl’ and das Fräulein ‘the young woman’ have neuter gender, while several inanimate objects are either masculine or feminine, as shown by the examples of der Stein ‘the stone’, which is masculine and die Gabel ‘the fork’, which is feminine. Boroditsky & Schmidt ran their experiments on three groups of speakers of English, Spanish and German. Speakers of Spanish and German, both of which have a grammatical gender system, were compared to speakers of English, where the gender system is based entirely on semantic, rather than formal, criteria. If gender assignment is indeed arbitrary, there should be no correlation between English speakers’ intuitions about the gender of an object and the intuitions of speakers of the other two languages. On the other hand, if grammatical gender reflects the referent’s properties to some extent, there should be a correlation between gender assignment by speakers of German and Spanish, and also agreement on intuitions about gender among speakers of all three languages. Boroditsky & Schmidt in fact concluded that gender assignment to nouns (mostly nouns referring to animals) might not be so arbitrary and is probably influenced at least partially by the subjects’ perception of the referents. These conclusions appear somewhat implausible. However, in a later study, Boroditsky et al. (2003: 77) confirmed these findings: “It is striking that even a fluke of grammar (the arbitrary designation of a noun as masculine or feminine) can have an effect on how people think about things in the world”. According to Corbett (1991), the distinction between the two sexes is fundamental to all human beings. Thus, it should come as no surprise that languages

Linguistic determinism and grammatical gender | 27

have evolved to reflect these gender distinctions, which in turn reflect biological ones. The fact that we learn the gender of nouns means that it’s possible that language influences that phase of our thinking that Slobin (1996) has termed “thinking for speaking”. Language can cause its speakers to pay greater attention to the grammatical gender associated with an object by making gender grammatically obligatory. In fact, speakers of languages with a grammatical gender system often need to mark objects with grammatical gender, for example through the selection of definite articles, by referring to the object using masculine or feminine pronouns, and/or by inflecting adjectives or verbs. The fact that we frequently refer to inanimate objects as grammatically masculine or feminine may imply that we associated masculine or feminine qualities to these objects. Studies such as those of Jakobson (1966) and Sera et al. (1994) suggest that this might indeed be possible. Thus, for example, Jakobson found that speakers of Russian personify the days of the week that have masculine gender as male, while those with feminine gender are personified as female. In their study, Sera et al. (1994) found that speakers of Spanish consistently classify objects according to their grammatical gender in Spanish. Thus, when speakers were shown pictures of objects and asked to associate them with a man or woman, there was significant agreement with the grammatical gender of these objects in Spanish. This agreement was stronger when the name of the object was also displayed beneath the picture. This effect was also found when speakers were asked to associate the voice of a woman or man with the picture of an object. Another interesting finding was that speakers of English were relatively consistent in judging the gender of objects, in spite of the fact that their language does not have a grammatical gender system. However, the results of experiments that show evidence of linguistic determinism need to be interpreted with great caution. First, one must keep in mind that speakers of different languages are likely to be tested only with words in their native tongue. This means that any differences found might only reflect the impact of that specific language on thinking. Second, studies conducted across different languages may raise an even more serious problem: we cannot be certain that the stimuli and instructions given are completely identical in all of them. It could be that the instructions contain words, however rare, which carry different connotations for speakers of different languages. An objective overview of the evidence requires us to also consider studies such as that of Bowers et al. (1999), which paint a rather different picture. In fact, Bowers et al. dispute the notion that grammatical gender may influence the conceptual representation of inanimate objects and that our ideas about inanimate objects are influenced by the grammatical gender that we assign these

28 | What is grammatical gender?

objects in our language, as the studies cited above conclude. According to Bowers et al. the conclusions of these studies can only be explained under the assumption that syntactic properties such as grammatical gender, which are lexically specified and have an affinity with important conceptual distinctions (for example the male-female distinction), can be used by speakers to make semantic judgments. Thus, for example, when these speakers are asked to judge a word on a semantic scale, such as a scale that includes strength as one of its dimensions, they would consider the grammatical gender of that word in the process of making their judgment, even though syntax is encoded separately from semantics. According to Bowers et al. syntactic properties such as grammatical gender are more tightly bound to the lexical representation of a word than with its corresponding concept.

3 Nominal classification 3.1 The principal nominal classification systems One of the tenets of Cognitivism is that humans frequently organize knowledge using internal mental structures. Thus, linguistic categories can also be considered as products of this organizational capacity and, by the same token, these structures should also be evinced in the case of nominal classification. The majority of languages have some grammatical means whereby nouns can be linguistically categorized. The study of nominal classification is of particular interest to linguists and anthropologists because, if the logic underlying the grouping of particular nouns can be discerned, it would shed light on the way people think and reason within their cultural milieu. Indeed, many believe that linguistic classification systems have a cognitive and cultural basis. Normally, three types of nominal classification are distinguished which, one way or the other, categorize nouns along the relevant parameters of how we perceive the world as well as how we perceive the properties of the entities themselves. These classifications occur in different forms. Thus, for example, in some languages there are categories and classes that work through grammatical agreement and that are based on semantic characteristics such as sex, animacy or inanimacy. In the present work, the following terms and their meanings are distinguished: system is used both in the general sense (for example, semantic systems, formal systems etc.) and for particular types of nominal classification, namely, the system of classifiers, that of nominal classes and that of grammatical gender; category is used in the general sense for some particular grammatical category (for example, the category of nouns) or else to refer to those groups of nouns that are assigned a particular gender, for example masculine, feminine, neuter, etc.; finally, class is used specifically for the nominal classifier system. According to Dixon (1982 and 1986)16, classifications or nominal systems consist in: (i) grammatical gender, (ii) nominal classes, and (iii) classifiers. It is worth noting that languages that classify nouns need not do so via only one of these systems. Indeed, some of the languages spoken in the Amazon have mixed systems with both classifiers and nominal classes (Derbyshire & Payne 1990). Termi-

|| 16 See also Craig (1986b). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110612400-003

30 | Nominal classification

nology in this area is often confusing, with frequent disagreement among authors, especially with regards to the distinction or lack thereof between the terms “grammatical gender” and “nominal class”. There are also linguists such as Aikhenvald (2003: 1) who use the term “classifier” as a general term that encompasses a large number of mechanisms for nominal classification.

3.2 Classifiers Some languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Burmese and some of the East and South-East Asian languages use a classifier system. In this system, a classifier has to be placed before the noun. Typically, the number of classifiers in languages with such systems is somewhat large. For example, it is quite normal for a language to have around a hundred classifiers; in one case, that of Tzeltal, around 400 have been reported (Trask 1993: 44). These classifiers can be considered separate lexemes or free morphemes that are associated, to some extent, with the properties of the noun, although the association is not morphological and is never evinced through grammatical agreement between the verb and other sentential constituents. Noun classifiers characterize the noun and occur with it within the noun phrase; thus, their presence is independent of other constituents inside or outside the noun phrase. The example below is of a classifier in Malay: (10)

dua ekor two [tail] ‘two rats’

tikus rat

In this example, taken from Trask (1993: 44), the word ekor (‘tail’) serves as a classifier before the noun tikus (‘rat’). In fact, in this language, this classifier is used with the names of all (non-human) animals. In these systems, the phrase containing the classifier is sometimes marked with grammatical number. Furthermore, a noun isn’t obligatorily classified. On the other hand, some nouns can belong to more than one set of classifiers, allowing for fine distinctions in meaning.

3.3 Similarities between grammatical gender and nominal classes Many authors disagree about the use of terminology where these “two” systems are concerned. Some consider grammatical gender and nominal classes as one

Similarities between grammatical gender and nominal classes | 31

thing, among them Bleek (1862: 95) “... this large number of classes (or genders) in the Bantu languages” and Hjelmslev (1959: 212), when he refers to nominal classes in Bantu as “des genres grammaticaux” and Comrie (1999: 457) “Grammatical gender, also called noun class, and hereafter referred to simply as gender…”. Sometimes, the term “gender class” is also used synonymously with these two terms, grouping them together. Sometimes, the term “(grammatical) gender” is used to encompass those classifications that involve grammatical agreement (Corbett 1991), while Evans (1997) uses the term “nominal class” to refer to the same thing. In line with the linguistic tradition, the present work will use the term “grammatical gender” to refer to small systems which make two or three distinctions that include masculine and feminine, as is normally the case in Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic and Dravidian languages.17 As noted above, these two systems are sometimes considered as one, due to the similarities among some of their grammatical properties. Typically in these systems, nearly every noun belongs to a single gender class or category out of a relatively small set18 of morphologically marked classes and categories. In these two systems, gender markers, especially in inanimate nouns, do not have a semantic value. This can also be said of prefixes that mark the various nominal classes. Another point of similarity between grammatical gender and nominal classes is that a particular class or gender category need not be semantically homogeneous; for example, feminine gender includes nouns that do not have a female sex. In the same way, nominal classes do not exhibit complete semantic homogeneity among their members, in spite of the fact that classes are sometimes said to group together nouns that form natural semantic classes. In fact, some classes that supposedly categorize specific things, for example animals, birds or plants, also include other nouns whose semantic link to the contents of the class is tenuous. Nominal classes and grammatical gender are sometimes also referred to as concord classes because they involve grammatical agreement affecting constituents other than the noun itself. This means that, although the noun would usually be marked according to its class or gender, the marking (agreement) is also reflected on some other category or categories, for example, demonstratives, possessives, adjectives and others that could be realized outside the noun

|| 17 The Dravidian language family includes around 73 languages spoken mainly in the south of India, in the north-east of Sri Lanka and in parts of Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Iran. It is estimated that there are over 220 million speakers of Dravidian languages. 18 In some languages, the number of classes can reach around twenty. However, this is still relatively small compared to the size of classifier systems.

32 | Nominal classification

phrase, for example in the predicate and even in adverbial phrases. Ibrahim (1973: 76) is of the view that the term “gender” should be reserved for systems19 that have some connection to natural gender. In his view, whether a group of nouns is called a “gender” or a “class” is unimportant from the grammatical point of view because, both in the case of grammatical gender and in the case of nominal classes, it is grammatical agreement that is diagnostic of the existence of these two systems. Another parallel between grammatical gender and nominal classes is the fact that normally, the principles that determine whether a noun belongs in a particular class or gender category are semantic, morphological, phonological, or a combination of these. In spite of this similarity between nominal classes and grammatical gender, languages that have them usually do not agree in the number of classes or gender categories they distinguish, in their reliance or lack thereof on semantic concepts for the assignment of a gender or class to nouns, and in the extent to which a noun can change its nominal class or gender category.

3.4 Nominal classes When European linguists such as Bleek (1862–1869: 148–149) and Meinhof (1899; 1906)20 began to study the African languages, such as Bantu and the languages of the Sudan, they discovered systems that resembled the systems of gender that we are familiar with, except that instead of two or three gender categories, these languages had many more, between ten and twenty types, that they referred to as classes and to each of which they assigned a specific number. This method of assigning numbers proved to be convenient for the purposes of comparative work, since similar forms in different languages could be assigned the same number. As a result, certain Bantu languages can have missing classes which are nevertheless present in other languages. It is often the case that distinctions between classes do not include the distinction between masculine and feminine nouns. For this reason, these writers decided to avoid the term “grammatical gender” when describing these languages, choosing instead to describe these systems as “nominal classes”. Other language families that have nominal classes include the languages of the Caucasus and Australian languages. The typical Australian language system con-

|| 19 Ibrahim uses the term classes. The term “system” is used here for terminological coherence with the rest of the present work. 20 In Corbett (1991: 44).

Nominal classes | 33

tains four classes, which in general might be said to distinguish between masculine, feminine, edible vegetables and the remaining nouns. The Algonquian21 languages distinguish between animate and inanimate nominal classes. From the semantic point of view, nominal classes can be said to categorize nouns along the lines determined by their speakers’ view of the world. Sometimes, even the most apparently arbitrary classifications afford a rational explanation. Indeed, in his study of nominal classes in Djirbal22, Dixon (1972) discusses the importance of basic classes (for example those associated with women, fire and dangerous things) as well as special principles that determine a noun’s being placed in a particular class. These principles are likely to be related to beliefs, myths and other important properties of an entity. Hence, in dealing with languages like Djirbal, a knowledge of the culture of the society is necessary in addition to an understanding of the structural aspects of the noun phrase. For example, in this culture, the moon and the sun are considered to be male and female. Many young speakers of Djirbal, who are not so steeped in traditional beliefs, have lost the rules that help them to classify an entity as a member of a particular class based on traditional myths (Corbett 1991: 17–18). According to Craig (1986b: 6), the classification of nouns is carried out on the basis of physical, social and functional interactions on the part of people with objects in their environment. It appears that there is a hierarchy, at whose peak are factors such as the extent to which such objects have human or animate qualities. Other factors, such as their form, use and consistency, are placed lower in the hierarchy. Apart from the semantic factors underlying nominal classes, they also have to contain some other element that has to agree grammatically with the noun. This agreement can be made with other words in the noun phrase, such as adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, articles, etc. and/or with the sentential predicate or adverbial phrase. Thus, nominal classes are described at the syntactic level and constitute an obligatory grammatical system. In fact, these nominal classes are normally defined according to the class prefix that attaches to the nominal stem (the formal marking on the noun) and according to the relationship between a set of nouns and a set of markers that correspond to them and that appear in other constituents of the sentence. However, some languages

|| 21 The Algonquian languages form part of the family of Native American languages. Speakers of these languages are spread over the Eastern coast of North America, up to the Rocky Mountains. 22 Djirbal is an Australian language spoken in the North-East of Queensland and is almost completely extinct.

34 | Nominal classification

which have a system of nominal classes sometimes do not mark all classes with a class prefix. The following example from Swahili, a Bantu language, which has 11 nominal classes, illustrates how all the words in the sentence, including the verb, agree with the subject noun phrase. Corbett (1991: 117) and Aikhenvald (2003: 35) refer to this process as alliterative concord. (11) a.

b.

ki-kapu ki-kubwa CP724-basket CC7-large ‘One large basket fell’ vi-kapu vi-kubwa CP8-baskets CC8-large ‘Three large baskets fell’

ki-moja CC7-one vi-tatu CC8-three

ki-lianguka23 CC7-fall’ vi-lianguka CC8-fell

The same stem can take different prefixes for different meanings, for example, large or small size. Nouns that refer to animate beings are usually marked via a special set of markers on sentential elements that have no relationship to the nominal prefix. The noun class is not determined by the form of the noun. In fact, some classes have the same prefix. Thus, the definition of nominal classes such as those found in Swahili is normally given both with reference to the nominal prefix (where this is available) and to the type of grammatical agreement. The classes of nouns in the singular and plural are related. In fact, there is a correlation between many nouns because they occur in the same class in the singular and collectively occur in a different class in the plural, which itself corresponds to a different singular class. However, these combinations of singular and plural classes can be restricted in some languages that have this system, and this is considered a disadvantage of the traditional system of enumerating classes. Sometimes, the sets of nouns that form part of the singular-plural system are referred to as (grammatical) “gender”.

3.5 Grammatical gender The study of gender takes place in many sub-disciplines of Linguistics because it sheds light on different aspects of language, such as second language learning, the storage of information in the brain25 and language processing.

|| 23 The example is from Welmers (1973: 171), in Andersson (1992: 28). 24 CP = class prefix, CC= class concord marker. 25 See Chapter 2 of the present work.

Grammatical gender | 35

As a grammatical term, the word equivalent to the term “gender” was used for the first time in the 5th century BCE by the Greek philosopher Protagoras, who divided Greek nouns into three categories: feminine, masculine and inanimate.26 It should be noted that the names given to these categories are of no particular importance; they are merely convenient labels that could just as easily have been different, say “category 1”, “category 2”, “category 3” etc. Indeed, this is the method that is used to distinguish classes in nominal classification systems, as shown above. From a grammatical point of view, this term applies not just to a particular group of nouns but often to the system as a whole. Thus one speaks of a particular language as having three gender categories, for example masculine, feminine and neuter, but also of that language as having a gender system. The meaning of the word “gender” has broadened considerably over time and has given rise to many different interpretations. Thus, contemporary sociolinguists, among others, often use “gender” to refer to a person’s biological sex, especially insofar as this is associated with social roles. Other writers (usually from areas other than Linguistics) consider gender as a social role which is strictly delimited by sex, independently of its biological aspect. In Maltese, the word ‘ġens’ is of Arabic origin (< ‫)ﺟﻨﺲ‬.27 In Arabic, it means genus, ‘species’, ‘type’, ‘family’, ‘race’, ‘gender’, ‘category’, ‘class’ or ‘nationality’ (Steingass 1978: 249). The word in Maltese also has several meanings. Erin Serracino-Inglott, in Il-Miklem Malti (1976 vol. III: 27) gives four principal senses for the word ġens in Maltese: 1. race, entities of the same origin or which are related in some way; 2. genre, category, class, series, group; 3. (grammatical meaning) the difference in sex among nouns, pronouns and adjectives; 4. a group of people who share a common belief (religion), hail from the same place (flag, frontiers, state, government), are of the same blood (race, descent, traditions), speak the same language; a nation, country, power, ancestry, generation, descendancy. On the other hand, Aquilina, in his English-Maltese (1999: 1147–1148) and Maltese-English (1987: 389) dictionaries uses both ġeneru and ġens when the grammatical meaning is intended. However, it is worth noting that, both in Aquilina’s and Serracino-Inglott’s definitions, we find some inconsistencies and

|| 26 Nowadays, these nouns would probably be referred to as nouns with “neuter gender”. 27 According to Aquilina’s dictionary (1987: 389).

36 | Nominal classification

inaccuracies, for example, when they refer to the grammatical gender as il-ġens mara instead of il-ġens femminil.28 The word mara ‘woman’ is associated more with a biological/sexual meaning rather than a grammatical one. From Aquilina’s and Serracino-Inglott’s definitions, it is clear that the senses of the words ġens and ġeneru often coincide and the two words are often used interchangeably. A search on the internet, for example for the term gender equality, immediately gives evidence for this. In fact, among the Maltese versions of this term, several use ġens and ġeneru, as well as sess ‘sex’.29

3.5.1 The main characteristic of grammatical gender Among the most widely cited definitions of grammatical gender in linguistic theory is that of Hockett (1958: 231): “Genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words” and that of Matthews (1997: 248): “… a system in which the class to which a noun is assigned is reflected in the forms that are taken by other elements syntactically related to it”. Some authors, such as Baron (1986), Fodor (1959), Jespersen (1924) and Key (1972), define grammatical gender as a formal category devoid of meaning or content. Aronoff (1994: 61) observes that grammatical gender does not in fact occur as an inherent feature of the word itself, but as a feature of lexemes that are marked in this way in the syntax. Thus, although some languages may have three gender categories, it is not always possible to determine gender on the basis of a consideration of a noun in isolation. Today, there is some agreement that gender is a morphosyntactic category because its principal criterion is grammatical/syntactic agreement, which has morphological reflexes. Grammatical agreement is given priority in the definition of grammatical gender and nominal classes, and is normally taken as the starting point for nominal classification. For example, Jespersen (1924: 226) defines the term “gender” as a syntactic phenomenon whereby different forms of adjectives and pronouns are required with different genders. As far as he is concerned, gender is a division into grammatical classes akin to the division in the Aryan languages between masculine, feminine and neuter, whether this division is based on the natural division into the two sexes, or on the distinction between animates and others. Anderson (1985: 175) defines gender as a category that divides

|| 28 [Translator’s note: both these expressions are intended to mean ‘feminine gender’; the difference which is of interest here is in the use of mara ‘woman’ vs. femminil ‘feminine’.] 29 See also Pace (2007: 44–63) for a discussion of this topic.

Grammatical gender | 37

the lexicon of a language into a number of different classes because of the process of agreement (concord). According to Corbett (1991: 4), in spite of the fact that nouns can be classified in various ways, only one type of classification can be considered a gender system, namely that which is reflected beyond the noun itself, in ‘associated words’ such as definite and indefinite articles, demonstratives, numerals, possessives, the inflected form of the verb, relative pronouns, personal pronouns, adverbs etc. According to Corbett, when a language is said to have, say, three gender categories, this implies that there are three groups of nouns that can be syntactically distinguished by the form of agreement they evince. This distinction is based on the fact that the choice of noun that belongs to a particular gender in turn determines the choice from among a group of words or other forms, such as articles, demonstratives, adjectives, pronouns etc. that are bound to the noun in a particular context. Van Berkum (1996: 15) emphasizes that grammatical gender is a property of individual nouns and not of their referents. This is why terms such as “lexical gender” or “gender of the word” are sometimes used. Nevertheless, he insists that this property is also reflected in the behavior of words which are syntactically related to nouns. For example, the French word maison (‘house’) can be said to be feminine because it is “associated” with une and grande in expressions such as une grande maison ‘a.SG.F large.SG.F house’ rather than *un grand maison ‘a.SG.M large.SG.M.house’. In German, Mädchen ‘girl’ belongs to the group of nouns which have neuter gender because it takes the nominative singular definite article das. This behavior of words associated with the noun is usually called agreement or concord.

3.5.2 Grammatical agreement and concord Once again, terminology varies considerably among authors in this domain. Some, such as Trask (1999: 7), Lyons (1968: 239) and S. R. Anderson (1992: 103) view these terms as synonymous. Thus, Trask defines grammatical agreement as The grammatical phenomenon in which the form of one word in a sentence is determined by the form of another word which is grammatically linked to it. Agreement, which is also called concord, is an exceedingly common phenomenon in languages …

However, later in his definition of the term ‘agreement’, he says that although as far as grammatical gender is concerned, this phenomenon has traditionally always been referred to as grammatical agreement, it is actually not agreement but government, since a particular noun, such as casa ‘house’ or libro ‘book’ in

38 | Nominal classification

Italian, have but one possible gender. Hence, in such cases, it is not the form of the noun that determines the form of other words, but its very presence. Indeed, some linguists refer to these cases as governmental concord. By contrast, Bloomfield (1933: 191–194) and linguists influenced by his work, distinguish between the two terms. He considers ‘grammatical agreement’ to be a general term that encompasses three types of agreement, namely concord, government and cross-reference.30 Corbett (1991) favors the term ‘grammatical agreement’. The system of nominal gender can also be considered as being frequently composed of two basic aspects. The first is the actual classification of nouns as belonging to a particular category; the second aspect is the grammatical agreement that is apparent in those words of different grammatical categories which are associated with the controlling noun. These two aspects can be considered as closely related, in that one influences the other, since agreement in context often defines gender while agreement is itself determined by gender, as shown in the following example: Fejn

poġġejtha

l-qmis

il-ġdida

li

xtrajt?

where

place.2SG-PRF-PRO.3SG.F

DEF-shirt

DEF-new.F.SG

that

buy.2SG.PRF

‘Where did you put the new shirt that you bought?’

The example shows how the adjective and the attached pronoun on the verb, both of which are marked for gender (and which, following Corbett 1991, can be referred to as “target elements”), indicate that the noun qmis ‘shirt’ is feminine. At the same time, the fact that the noun qmis (which Corbett 1991 refers to as the “controller” because it is the noun that motivates the agreement) is feminine determines the suffix -a on the adjective and the attached pronoun -ha on the inflected form of the verb in the second person singular perfect. However, this state of affairs is not the only possible one, because there can be agreement in different categories without classification of the noun, as happens for example in Hungarian, a language that does not have grammatical gender. Because of this, Greenberg (1978: 50) distinguishes between the term “grammatical agreement” and “concord”. In his view, “concord” has a broad meaning, while “grammatical agreement” is one type of “concord” whereby the

|| 30 An example of cross-reference in French is Jean ou est-il? ‘Jean, where is he?’

Grammatical gender | 39

choice of other elements depends on the class to which the stem of the controller belongs, whether or not this is marked by an affix. We can therefore conclude that grammatical gender is a syntactic phenomenon, but also a morphological one, since grammatical agreement is marked through inflectional mechanisms – primarily suffixes, prefixes or a mixture of both, with infixes being possible, though less common. In other words, grammatical gender is a syntactic phenomenon whereby the class or category of the controller is reflected on its target elements. The entire set of morpho-syntactic forms used to mark a specific gender in a language is sometimes called a “gender paradigm”, but sometimes this term is also used to refer to the entire system of forms that mark gender.

3.5.3 The existence of grammatical gender According to Van Berkum (1996: 19) the existence of grammatical gender can be explained via two main theories. The first theory is the nativist one, which focuses on the biological endowment of the human species. According to this biological explanation, the linguistic mechanisms related to case and tense are part of a language instinct that humans possess at birth, so much so that these are present in many languages which are otherwise unrelated. According to Van Berkum, this theory has never been applied to grammatical gender, at least not explicitly. An explanation of the existence of gender within this theory would require a demonstration that the gender system is the product of biological evolution in the Darwinian sense. This would require an argument to the effect that a grammatical gender mechanism is of some evolutionary utility to the human species. Although this argument might appear somewhat far-fetched, authors such as Pinker & Bloom (1990) and Pinker (1994) have in fact appealed to it in order to explain other syntactic mechanisms.31 In order to apply this argument to grammatical gender, one would have to focus on the importance of the communicative function that it may have served over time, thereby showing that the utility of this mechanism is such that it helped our ancestors in their struggle for survival and reproductive success. The second theory mentioned by Van Berkum that could explain the existence of gender is that of linguistic functionalism. This theory does not appeal to language-specific biological instincts, but focuses instead on the fact that the number of “solutions” to the problem of human communication is finite. In this || 31 In Van Berkum (1996: 19).

40 | Nominal classification

way, exponents of this theory such as Bates & MacWhinney (1989) argue that gender is a good example of a grammatical mechanism that developed culturally in order to support the communicative process, rather than to express particular contents. For example, gender markers might be useful to make it easier for the listener to resolve references in a complex discourse. Bates et al. (1994) also suggest that gender markers can even facilitate word recognition and this might explain why so many languages have this mechanism. In summary, both the nativist and the functionalist theory associate the existence of gender with its putative communicative functions. Fodor (1959) mentions two opposing theories of how grammatical gender could have come about. The first holds that the grammatical gender distinction between masculine and feminine came about as a linguistic consequence of the human desire to distinguish between the sexes. This division started between words that referred to men and those that referred to women, but later spread to include nouns with non-human referents. As a result, the neuter gender category developed over time to cover concepts that had no basis in natural gender. The second theory rejects any tie between grammatical and natural gender.32 Under this theory, nouns marked as masculine or feminine do not necessarily reflect the sex of an entity as male or female. This will in fact be shown to be the case below. It is for this reason that grammatical gender markers are often considered as linguistic forms without meaning or content. Thus, Meinhof (1910) 33 argues that African languages, such as the Bantu family, are the best example of grammatical gender in the true sense of the term, since the markers in these languages contribute no meaning to the noun and do not distinguish nouns on a biological male/female basis; their primary function is to establish agreement between elements in speech and writing.

3.5.4 The variety of grammatical gender systems Gender systems which make a three-way distinction can be considered typical and are found in many Indo-European languages, including German, SerboCroat and Icelandic, as well as in the languages of the northwest Caucasus. In

|| 32 Sometimes, instead of “natural gender”, the synonymous terms “biological gender”, “referent gender” or “sex” are also used. 33 In Moshi Lioba “The manifestation of gender in African languages”; electronic version, downloaded from http://www.uga.edu/~womanist/1996/moshi.html on 16/04/99.

Grammatical gender | 41

other Indo-European languages, such as Dutch34, French and Italian, this system was reduced, in various ways, to a system which distinguishes two categories. Another widespread grammatical gender system is found in the AfroAsiatic languages,35 including Maltese, which also distinguishes two categories, masculine and feminine. On the other hand, there are language families that do not have this system, among them the Uralic languages and many Asiatic and American languages.36 It cannot be assumed that, as a rule, where there are three gender categories, they always correspond to masculine, feminine and neuter. Indeed, different possibilities are attested. For example, in some Scandinavian dialects, such as modern Danish, there are gender systems that do not distinguish masculine and feminine. There, one finds a distinction between the common gender, which includes masculine and feminine, and neuter. Caution needs to be exercised in the use of the term “common gender”, since it is not always used with the same meaning. Thus, for example, in English, the term “common gender” is used for the gender of those nouns which applies to both sexes, as in the case of teacher, spouse, parent and mouse. Gender systems are not static. Given that languages undergo continuous development caused by a variety of factors, the gender system they incorporate will also undergo change, for example by expanding to incorporate a new gender category. On the other hand, a language can also lose a gender category, for example, because of a change in its phonetic structure. For example, Maltese, compared to Arabic, lacks the masculine/feminine distinction in the second person in the conjugation of the verb in the perfect, because a distinctive vowel at the end of the verbal form was dropped. Thus, while Arabic distinguishes between katabta ‘write.2SG.M.PRF’ and katabti ‘write.2SG.F.PRF’, Maltese only has the one form ktibt ‘write.2SG.PRF’. Nevertheless, this does not amount to the wholesale loss of a gender category in our language. Romance languages such as Italian and French lost one of the three categories they distinguished. Modern Persian has completely lost the Indo-European gender system it originally had, while English only carries traces of the original system, and grammatical gender is reflected only in pronouns. The distribution of nouns across gender categories can also change, so that a noun which is assigned a particular gender can lose it and acquire a different one. As a result, a particular category can

|| 34 See Van Berkum (1996: 22). 35 Sometimes, the synonymous term Hamito-Semitic is used. 36 This language family is composed of 38 languages spoken in the region of the Ural Mountains. The best known Uralic languages are Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian.

42 | Nominal classification

expand or contract because new nouns are included in it, or because nouns drop out, either because they do not remain in use or because they change their gender.

3.5.5 Some misconceptions about grammatical gender Although several studies on grammatical gender have been published in recent years, treating the subject from different angles, it is nonetheless common to encounter mistakes and preconceptions. Thus, for example, in some cases gender is confused with declensional classes, when the two are in fact distinct. A declensional class is a set of nouns that take the same inflective form, independently of grammatical agreement in the sense being used here (for grammatical gender). In fact, a particular language can have a different number of declensional classes and gender categories. Since grammatical gender systems, as noted above, tend to be linked somehow to natural gender, it is not uncommon for individuals, including, unfortunately, linguists, to mix these together. It should be emphasized that, although in some languages there is a correlation between grammatical and natural gender, the correlation is not direct, because sex is a biologically-based categorization, while gender is a grammatical one. In fact, grammatical gender categories include inanimate nouns that have no particular sex. Thus, for example, in Maltese, the noun bieb (‘door’) has masculine gender although it is not male, while tieqa (‘window’) is feminine without being female. Here are some other examples which show that the correlation between grammatical and natural gender is at best indirect: the noun kangarù ‘kangaroo’ in Maltese is masculine, but can refer both to a male and a female kangaroo; the noun persuna ‘person’ is grammatically feminine but can refer to a male as well as a female. Examples of this kind abound in other languages. For example, in French la sentinelle ‘the.SG.F sentinel’ is normally male, but the noun that expresses this concept is grammatically feminine. The noun vedette ‘famous person’ takes feminine gender but can refer to either a male or a female. It can therefore be said that while in some languages that have gender it is often possible to identify the category to which a particular noun belongs from its form or meaning, in others this is not possible because the gender assignment system appears less systematic or, as some have argued, is arbitrary because the basis on which nouns are assigned gender is not always clear. In some languages, natural (biological) gender is not considered an important criterion in gender assignment. All of this can give the impression that this system is

Grammatical gender | 43

completely arbitrary. The relationship between the natural, semantic basis and morphological and syntactic factors varies considerably between languages and in some appears arbitrary, while in others it appears to be very strong. As a result of this, it has often been claimed that the grammatical gender system, in languages such as German, is completely arbitrary.37 However, Zubin & Köpcke (1986: 156) found that the process of gender assignment in German is far less arbitrary than previously thought. According to Zubin & Köpcke, the arbitrariness that was frequently observed was the result of a rather restrictive view of the phenomenon, where an attempt was made to establish a direct relationship between grammatical gender and the sex of a referent. In many languages, one is likely to find a combination of semantic rules that operate in the process of gender assignment. Every language has a sort of structure from which various extensions become possible as a result of the relationships between this central model and peripheral ones. As a result, gender can be considered a category that has a central structure as a basis (which varies from language to language), with variations based on convention that are built on this basis but are not always predictable from general rules. Nowadays, there is a general tendency to avoid looking at gender as a chaotic and enigmatic38 category and more as an orderly but complex system which arises from the interaction of social, semiotic and cognitive factors. Nevertheless, there are still cases of nouns that appear to violate the gender assignment rules that are established in a particular language; for example, nouns which exhibit different gender agreement in their singular and plural forms.39 Some other nouns – though these are probably less numerous than we tend to think – synchronically appear to be exceptions, their gender being unpredictable on the basis of normal gender assignment criteria in a particular language. For example, the Maltese noun triq ‘street/road’ is feminine, despite its consonantal ending (which in Maltese is associated with the masculine), while ilma ‘water’ is masculine in spite of its feminine ending. Other examples can be found in Hebrew. Gender in this language is assigned on semantic and morphological grounds. Nouns that can be distinguished on the basis of sex are assigned gender according to semantic criteria, while nouns with the suffixes -t and -a are || 37 See, for example, Bloomfield (1933: 280). 38 See for example Ibrahim (1973: 11) and Corbett (1991: 1). 39 For example, in Gunzib (a language of the northeast Caucasus), the noun that refers to a child agrees with gender category V when singular, and with category I/II when plural (Bokarev 1967b: 476 in Corbett 1991: 170). In Rumanian, the noun palton (‘coat’) is modified by a masculine adjective in the singular and by a feminine adjective in the plural (i.e. paltoane; Bateman & Polinsky 2006).

44 | Nominal classification

feminine, as are nouns that refer to cities and various parts of the body. Nevertheless, some nouns take feminine gender for no apparent reason and are thus considered exceptions. These include even ‘stone’, kos ‘glass with a leg/bowl’ and eš ‘fire’.40 The next section will discuss these kinds of nouns in Maltese in greater detail.

3.5.6 Overt and covert gender There are in principle two extreme forms which gender systems can take, one based exclusively on semantic aspects with no rules associated with the morpho-phonological form of the noun, the other marking gender based directly on phonological and morphological factors with no semantic basis. Languages with a system where grammatical gender is evident from the form of the noun are referred to as languages with an overt gender system. A language with a purely overt gender system has a single marker for each gender category; for example, masculine nouns all end in -u and feminine nouns in -a, with this also applying in those cases where gender could equally well be predicted on semantic grounds. In languages that have an overt gender system, the gender of a noun is not only evident in the target elements that agree with it, but also in the form of the noun itself. Swahili is one language which has a preponderance of overt gender, with the form of the noun itself determining its gender (Corbett 1991: 62). In this language, morphological criteria play a crucial role in gender assignment. Another language is Qafar, an Afro-Asiatic language41, where phonological criteria are most important. The Swahili example given in Section 3.4, after Welmers (1973: 171) can serve to illustrate the point more clearly: (11) a.

ki-kapu ki-kubwa CP7-basket CC7-large ‘One large basket fell’

ki-moja CC7-one

ki-lianguka CC7-fall

In this sentence, the marker ki-, pertaining to nominal class 7, occurs with the noun itself as well as with the target elements in the sentence.42 Other languages where gender is not based on the form of the noun, that is, where the noun does not indicate its nominal class or gender category, are said to have a covert gender system. In these languages, gender is marked on target

|| 40 Examples drawn from Aikhenvald (2003: 28). 41 This language has around 1,400,000 speakers in Ethiopia and Djibouti. 42 See Welmers (1973) in Andersson (1992: 28).

Classification criteria – different gender assignment systems | 45

elements but does not appear on the noun itself. It is likely that a language’s gender system will tend towards the covert end of the spectrum the more its gender assignment rests on semantic criteria. French is an example of a language whose gender system is not so overt. In French, there are rules that determine the assignment of one gender or another based on the form of the noun, but these rules are considered quite complex. A language like English is considered to be closer to the covert end of the spectrum. Here, gender assignment is based on semantic criteria, with little if any formal properties of the noun that indicate which gender will be assigned. Needless to say, it is very rare for languages to exhibit an entirely overt or covert gender system. These can be considered the two extremes of a continuum, with various gradations in between, for example, when a language has only particular groups of nouns that are marked for gender, as occurs in Italian and Maltese. The degree to which a system is overt sometimes depends on the categories of case and number. Thus, in Russian, gender nearly always appears in the nominative case. With oblique cases, there is a degree of syncretism between the nominal inflections for different genders and it is therefore harder to predict the gender category of a particular noun (Corbett 1991: 34–42).

3.6 Classification criteria – different gender assignment systems The process of gender assignment is something of a headache for foreign language learners. Often, we consider grammatical agreement in the sentence in an attempt to identify the gender of a noun. However, as discussed in Chapter 2, this task is simple for native speakers, who generally have no difficulty at all in associating thousands of nouns with a particular gender and in establishing grammatical agreement in context. Gender assignment depends on two sources of information – the semantic aspect and the formal aspect. The latter can be divided into two – the morphological and the phonological aspect. Frequently, gender assignment is influenced by a combination of these factors, rather than by a single factor on its own. It is unlikely that all nouns in a language will easily be placed in a particular category automatically. Rather, it should be emphasized that exceptions exist and frequently the reasons why a noun is placed in a particular category aren’t clear. Nevertheless, it is necessary to keep in mind that even where there are exceptions, the rules which classify a large number of cases in a particular category have a theoretical value as well as a practical one.

46 | Nominal classification

3.6.1 Semantic systems The semantic basis for nominal classification is very important. According to Corbett (1991: 8) all gender systems are semantic, in the sense that they all include a semantic element in the way gender is assigned. In some languages, this factor alone suffices to assign a particular gender to a noun. Needless to say, there are systems where this factor predominates, while it is less evident in others. In systems where this factor is strong, the meaning of the noun determines its gender; conversely, the gender of the noun can give indications as to its meaning. Such systems are sometimes also referred to as “natural gender systems”. This type of system, which isn’t very common, can be found in the Dravidian languages, such as Tamil (Corbett 1991: 8). In Tamil, nouns are assigned gender based on their meaning. Although morphological criteria can sometimes play a role, this is nevertheless an additional source of information, because the meaning of the noun is enough to determine gender. Nouns are divided quite consistently depending on whether they are “rational” or not (Asher 1985: 136).43 Rational nouns are divided into masculine and feminine. The masculine group contains nouns that refer to male gods and persons of male sex. The feminine includes female gods and persons of female sex (Corbett 1991: 9). Thus, a noun that refers to a man is assigned masculine gender; conversely, a noun that is masculine will somehow be used to refer to a man. Some exceptions to this system include words that refer to the sun and the moon. These are assigned masculine gender because they are also names of gods. The principles of cognitive grammar are useful tools to investigate nominal classification; since they are based on the notion that linguistic categorization reflects a human endeavor to make sense of the world. Furthermore, these principles provide a cognitively motivated way of describing the associations between members of a category. At the same time, this analysis does not predict the content of a particular category or the direction that changes of meaning will take. For example, while it is possible to explain why certain nouns referring to small animals are placed in a particular class, this does not imply that all nouns that refer to small animals will belong to that class. The entities in the world can be classified in a variety of ways and their size is just one possibility among many. Thus, it is not possible to predict in advance which characteristics a speaker will consider as the most important. However, this type of analysis shows that grouping is semantically motivated and is non-arbitrary.

|| 43 In Aikhenvald (2003: 22).

Classification criteria – different gender assignment systems | 47

In these types of gender systems, metaphor plays a rather important role. For example, the Tamil word for ‘elephant’ can be assigned masculine or feminine gender, depending on whether it is used to refer to a man or a woman whose qualities resemble those of an elephant. Other Dravidian languages which, like Tamil, have a system where semantic factors are dominant, include Kannada44 and Telugu.45 For example, in Telugu, the gender of “divine creatures” depends on their mythological role. Other societies may give importance to other categories, such as strength. This is the case in Ojibwa, an Algonquian language spoken in the United States in Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota and Montana, as well as in Ontario, Canada. There are other Dravidian languages which have two gender categories rather than three, among them Kolami, Ollari and Parji (Corbett 1991: 168). In these languages, feminine and neuter gender have been fused, so that nouns are divided into two categories, those referring to male humans, which take masculine gender, and all other nouns that take non-masculine gender. Another language with a dual gender distinction based on strictly semantic factors is Dijari, a language spoken by Aborigines in Australia. In this language, the main gender category incorporates nouns referring to the female sex, for example, women, girls, prostitutes, female kangaroos, etc. The other category incorporates all the remaining nouns, including those that refer to animate males, animate creatures which are not female, animates which have no sex and nouns that refer to inanimates. Another system, which is the mirror image of this one, though still based on semantic criteria, is found in Kala Lagaw Ja, spoken in the Torres Straits in the vicinity of Australia. In this system, the main gender is masculine and groups all nouns that refer to males, while all other nouns, with a few exceptions, are grouped under the feminine gender category (Corbett 1991: 11–13). According to Corbett (1991: 12), the gender system in English can be considered as a semantically based one and this is reflected in its personal, possessive and reflexive pronouns. Nevertheless, it is not entirely dependent on criteria related to humanity and biological sex, since it can be affected by pragmatic factors. In English, male humans have masculine gender (he), females have feminine gender (she) and other nouns have neuter gender (it). Where nouns

|| 44 This is one of the main Dravidian languages in the south of India, Singapore and Sri Lanka whose dialects are spoken by around 68 million people. 45 Telugu is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and is the second largest language, with around 70 million native speakers.

48 | Nominal classification

referring to animals are concerned, there are particular criteria that apply. Domestic animals, especially those which have a name, are often considered as having masculine or feminine gender according to their sex. Stories for children feature animals which have a particular, conventionally assigned, gender. There are also some well-known exceptions, such as ship, which is considered feminine. Sometimes, in spoken English, certain interesting developments are attested as a result of emotional and affective factors. In these cases, names that refer to objects, which are usually assigned neuter gender, are assigned masculine or feminine. Less frequently, the opposite can occur, and the referent of a noun that refers to a human being is referred to using the neuter pronoun it (Mathiot & Roberts 1979). An interesting case where a semantic system with many exceptions evolved into a strictly semantic system is presented by Djirbal. In this language, nouns are divided into four nominal classes. Gender I includes nouns that refer to men and non-human animals. Gender II includes nouns referring to women and nouns associated with water, fire and battle. Gender III includes nouns that refer to foods, except for meat, while Gender IV contains everything else. Most nouns find their place in one of these four classes on the basis of these criteria, but there are several exceptions that could probably be explained on the basis of the following three principles: mythological association, conceptual association and nouns that have a salient semantic property whereby they project connotations of damage, for example, species of dangerous fish or trees with thorns.46 Interestingly, dramatic changes have been occurring in this language recently. A central reason for this is that the way of life of Djirbal speakers has changed substantially; consequently, several customs, beliefs and traditional myths have been lost. Another reason is that the native tongue has been almost completely displaced by English, so that those nouns that used to be considered exceptions due to their classification in one of the gender categories mentioned above, have now become regularized in one or another category in the following way: nouns that refer to women are included in gender II, nouns that refer to animate creatures are associated with gender I, and the “semantic residue”, that is those nouns whose gender does not satisfy a particular semantic criterion, are included in gender category IV. There are other systems based on semantic principles that aren’t as strict as those discussed so far. In these systems, although meaning is a crucial factor in determining the gender of a many nouns, there are also exceptions. Though not very numerous, they cannot be considered insignificant. For example, in Tamil,

|| 46 See Dixon (1972) for a detailed description of Djirbal.

Classification criteria – different gender assignment systems | 49

nouns that refer to rational, male and female creatures are assigned a particular gender while others, which do not fall into this category (i.e. the semantic residue) are neuter. In other languages, like Zande,47 this semantic residue does not arise in relation to a single gender category. In this language, there are two primary distinctions – animate/inanimate and human/non-human – and nouns are classified on the basis of these criteria, except for some exceptions, nearly all inanimate, which are assigned the gender that includes the names of animals, rather than neutral gender (which is the gender associated with the semantic residue in this language). Thus, in this language, those nouns which fall outside of the core of the system (the semantic residue) are included in one of the gender categories. Among the exceptions are nouns that refer to the moon and the rainbow, metallic objects, and edible plants. The semantic principles applied in several languages to distinguish one gender from another are not exclusively based on the distinction between sexes. Often, they depend on the outlook that cultures have on the roles associated with the sexes. This factor has also been found to operate in that part of the lexicon referring to inanimate objects which can be associated with characteristics that are bound to the male or female sex (Zubin & Köpcke 1986: 143). Thus, the criteria on which semantic systems for gender are built include not only that which is rational, human, male, female, animate and inanimate but also criteria that might never occur to us, for example the concept of size (large or small), whether an object is edible or not, and others. A criterion to which a particular language might attach great importance in determining a particular gender might be quite peripheral in another language. In many cases, it is not a single semantic factor that determines gender, but a number of them which are hierarchically ordered. Thus, there may be cases where two different criteria contribute to the determination of the same gender. Because these semantic systems are bound to the culture of the speakers of a particular language, what might appear to us a fantastic classification, might well be quite a regular and natural way to classify for people in that culture. The first studies conducted on gender in Djirbal ignored this point because they attempted to study these systems through an analysis based on the distinction between the sexes, using models and cognitive categories which are common in Western culture. This was a mistake, because gender assignment according to semantic principles can be better understood in the light of the way speakers of that language interpret the world. This recalls the words of Dixon (1997: 135): “A language is the emblem of its speakers. Each language determines a unique way

|| 47 A language belonging to the Niger-Congo family, spoken primarily in the Congo and the Sudan.

50 | Nominal classification

of viewing the world. It encapsulates the laws and traditions and beliefs of its ethnic group.” This point is further illustrated by the case of Ket, a typologically isolated language spoken in Siberia. In this language there are three gender categories, masculine, feminine and neuter. All nouns that refer to animate creatures are masculine or feminine, but the difference between these gender categories isn’t easy to determine in the case of animate nouns which are not distinguished on the basis of sex. Wood, because of its importance in the culture of the speakers of this language, is a criterion whereby some nouns are grouped into the masculine category. This fluidity in the way the world is interpreted can give rise to different gender assignments in different languages. Thus, for example, particular nouns that are interpreted in a certain way by speakers of one language and hence assigned a particular gender can be interpreted in a different way by speakers of another language and thus classified as part of a different gender category. Since in purely semantic systems the referent alone suffices to assign gender to the noun, individuals who are unfamiliar with the culture of the speakers of these languages might find it difficult to understand why certain nouns are assigned one gender rather than another.

3.6.1.1 Common models, criteria and semantic properties The foregoing discussion on semantic systems for gender assignment suggests that certain models are commonly used to classify nouns into categories. Among the most common are those listed in Table 3.1. Table 3.1: The most common models of semantic criteria found in the languages with strictly semantic gender classification.

Animate/Inanimate Rational/Irrational Human/Non-human Male (human)/Other Female (human)/Other Large/Small Abstract/Concrete Whole/Part Strong/Weak Male or female sex/No sex

Classification criteria – different gender assignment systems | 51

In addition to these models, other criteria that determine the separation of nouns into specific gender classes and categories could be mentioned. Often these criteria, which are listed in Table 3.2, are attested in languages which come from different families and are unrelated. Table 3.2: Other semantic criteria that determine the separation of nouns into specific gender classes and categories in languages with semantic gender systems.

Things which reflect light Things related to religion Large, wild animals Animals and birds (the young) Domestic animals and birds Hunting weapons Phenomena associated with water Astronomical and meteorological phenomena Honey Tools Sounds Fish Food other than meat Insects Dogs Abstract concepts Liquids Textiles Metals Bees Large wooden objects Parts of the body Mythological characters Plants Trees Musical instruments

Normally the semantic component of a nominal classification is organized along three parameters: animacy, physical properties and functional properties

52 | Nominal classification

of the noun. Animate nouns can be further subdivided according to these qualities: human/non-human, person/non-person, qualities related to natural gender (sex). Humans can be further subdivided according to their social status or role, age, or their relationship with other family relations. Languages can also accord special status to supernatural entities. Often, benevolent gods or angels are personified and viewed as human or at least as animate, while malevolent spirits and ghosts are often treated as inanimate or even as part of the semantic residue. Even inanimate nouns and, in rare cases, animates are likely to be classified according to their physical properties and social functions. According to Aikhenvald, the main semantic properties of the inanimate nouns are those shown in Table 3.3. Table 3.3: The main semantic properties of inanimate nouns, according to Aikhenvald (2003: 272–274).

Property

Description

Values

Extendedness

shape/dimension and direction of the object

one-dimensional (long), twodimensional (flat), three-dimensional (spherical), vertically or horizontally extended

Interioricity

the way in which the internal parts of an entity are distinguished from its exterior

distinction between a ring/circle and a hole

Size

the size of the object

large/small

Consistency

the plasticity of the object

flexible/rigid

Constitution or state the physical state of the entity

solid/liquid

Material

what the object is made of

wooden, metal, categories for types of plants, houses etc. ... sometimes, some of the properties are bound to a specific culture

Function

what the object is used for

can be eaten, drunk, sown, can be domesticated, etc.

Arrangement

the object’s configuration

whether the object is made of pieces bound together, out of rope, etc.

Quanta

the number and quantity of the whether the object is found in a group, object cluster, flock, etc.

Often, gender assignment has an affective dimension. For example, in Berber languages, feminine gender is also used for diminutive nouns and often carries

Classification criteria – different gender assignment systems | 53

connotations of sympathy or preciousness. In Amharic, close male friends and relatives can address each other using the feminine gender and the feminine can be used to express a certain admiration towards a man. In Palikur,48 gender assignment to non-human animate nouns depends on their value and the speakers’ attitude. For example, the feminine has positive connotations, while the masculine has negative ones, to the extent that a mouse, which is a small animal and would hence be expected to be assigned feminine gender on the basis of its small size, is assigned masculine gender because it is regarded as bad and dirty. At the same time, a newborn mouse is assigned feminine gender because it is considered “cute”, precisely because it is small (Aikhenvald 2003: 279). In semantic systems, there are rules governing the way a noun can be transferred from one class to another. For example, in Djirbal, an object can be assigned gender because of its mythological associations rather than its semantic connotations. In fact, in this language birds are assigned feminine gender because of their mythological association, since it is believed that when women die, their souls enter the bodies of birds (Aikhenvald 2003: 23). Many authors, including Corbett (1991: 34) believe that in a sense, all the mechanisms underlying nominal categorization have a semantic basis. Nouns are placed in different classes based on their semantics or due to a combination of semantic, morphological and phonological properties. In spite of this, it is sometimes said that gender assignment in the main Indo-European languages does not really have a semantic basis. Nevertheless, Zubin & Köpcke (1986) found that in German, there are semantic motivations for gender assignment to certain groups of nouns. For example, masculine and feminine were found to mark nouns referring to the male and female sex, respectively, of all domestic and hunting animals, based on natural gender, while neuter gender was assigned to generic terms that are not bound to a specific sex, or to the young of a species. Zubin & Köpcke also found that the masculine is used among other things for terms that refer to minerals, while certain areas of study and academic disciplines are likely to be assigned feminine gender. Often, when a noun cannot be incorporated into a semantic system for gender assignment, there is a tendency to continue to search for more and more semantic criteria that would somehow justify its inclusion into the system. Nevertheless, it is sometimes clear that this process won’t work, because the criteria that influence gender assignment are not semantic, but formal, as discussed in the next section.

|| 48 A language in the Arawakani family, spoken by a few hundred speakers, primarily in Brazil.

54 | Nominal classification

3.6.2 Formal systems Formal systems are normally divided into two types, namely, morphological systems that are sensitive to word structure, including inflection and derivation, and phonological systems which are sensitive to sound (Corbett 1991: 33). These systems can be combined to different degrees in different languages. Although as we have seen, there are languages (like Tamil)49 which base their gender system exclusively on semantic principles, there is no natural language that builds its gender assignment system on purely formal grounds, that is, without any correlation between the meaning of the noun and the gender it is assigned. However, as stated above, in some languages semantic principles might not have great importance, because gender assignment is determined to a greater extent by formal criteria. The difference between morphological and phonological criteria is not always as clear as the difference between semantic and formal criteria. As a general rule, phonological criteria refer exclusively to a single form of the noun, for example, nouns which end in a vowel in the singular are feminine. Typically, these cases involve the base form of the noun. On the other hand, morphological criteria require more information and are likely to refer to more than one form of the noun, as well as to other elements that the noun is derived from.50 For example, nouns with a particular declension might be assigned feminine gender and the fact that this process is sensitive to the noun’s declension means that it requires information about, say, the singular nominative or genitive.

3.6.2.1 Morphological systems According to Corbett (1991), a morphologically-based gender assignment system typically relies on the inflectional morphology of the noun. However, other types of morphological factors exist. For example, many nouns in German are assigned gender based on their affixes, for example -er, -en, -ung etc. These affixes may be semantically motivated. Indeed, it is worth clarifying that morphological systems are not purely morphological, in the sense that they are not completely distinct from semantic criteria; rather, they are related insofar as, quite often, they include a semantic component. Another reason is that where semantic criteria “fail” to classify nouns in a particular gender category, it is

|| 49 This does not imply that this language uses no morphological criteria, but only that in most cases semantic criteria alone would be enough to assign gender to a noun. 50 According to Corbett (1991: 3), this is not a hard and fast rule.

Classification criteria – different gender assignment systems | 55

morphological criteria that do the work. Frequently, morphological criteria also mingle with semantic criteria. This is often the case with derivational morphology. Thus, nouns in Maltese which end in -iż are masculine (Borg & AzzopardiAlexander 1997: 191), for example Franċiż ‘French(man)’, Ingliż ‘English(man)’ and Ċiniż ‘Chinese’. Nevertheless, in certain contexts these nouns are masculine because they refer to a “man”, as in, for example, Il-Franċiż u l-Ingliż marru jieklu maċ-Ċiniż ‘The Frenchman and the Englishman went out to dinner with the Chinese man’. It is therefore justifiable to claim that even formal rules for gender assignment can have some degree of semantic motivation. Russian can serve as an example of the way morphological rules operate. In this language there are four nominal paradigms, that is, four types of declension. Morphological rules for gender assignment are built on these declensions. For example, nouns that belong to declension I are masculine, nouns that take declension II and III are feminine, while other nouns are neuter. In this case, the neuter gender functions as a morphological residue. This might give the impression that semantic criteria play no role in Russian. However, this is not the case; the relationship between semantic, morphological and phonological criteria can get complex. In fact, some Russian nouns take a particular declension associated with a particular gender, but are assigned a different gender on the basis of semantic criteria. For example, while the noun djadja ‘uncle’ belongs to declension class II which, as observed earlier, is associated with the feminine, it is nevertheless assigned masculine gender.51 This shows how semantic criteria in some cases override morphological ones in case of conflict. As in Russian, nouns in Bulgarian that end in -a are feminine, with the exception of those nouns that refer to male persons, for example sluga ‘male servant’. 52 The correlation between the various declensions and gender can lead to confusion in terminology, for instance in statements such as ‘masculine nouns end in -a in the genitive singular’, which strictly speaking should be ‘nouns in the first declension, which includes many masculine nouns, take -a in the genitive singular’. In some other works dealing with child language acquisition, one reads that children up to the age of around three have acquired a particular gender. This is not in fact entirely correct, since research shows that children in fact acquire the case ending that belongs to a declensional class that includes

|| 51 Compare to the noun agricola (farmer) in Latin, which is masculine in spite of its having a feminine form. In this connection, one could mention Maltese nouns such as Papa (‘pope’), mastrudaxxa (‘carpenter’) or names such as Kola (Nicholas) which, despite their “feminine” form (their ending in -a) have masculine gender. 52 Comrie (1999: 457–466).

56 | Nominal classification

nouns which belong to that gender, but not that children actually distinguish one gender from another (Corbett 1991: 39–40). Nominal classes and categories are never marked with free morphemes. The most common markers in nominal classifications are suffixes and prefixes, a process known as external affixation. Some languages, such as the Berber languages, use both prefixes and suffixes together, as in the feminine markers t- ... -t (Aikhenvald 2003: 59).

3.6.2.2 Phonological systems Phonological criteria can exhibit several characteristics, among them the phonemes of a particular language, the segments (of different lengths) in a word, the articulation of the final vowel, the main accent and syllabification. This also means that all phonological information in a word can potentially determine its gender. For example, Zubin & Köpcke (1981: 440) found that in German, the more consonants a monosyllabic noun has at its onset or coda, the more likely it is to be assigned masculine gender. In Qafar, apart from semantic criteria which determine gender assignment, there are also phonological rules. For example, nouns that end in an accented vowel take feminine gender, for example karmà ‘autumn’, while nouns which end in consonants, such as gilàl ‘winter’ and nouns that end in a non-accented vowel, such as baànta ‘trumpet’ are masculine. According to Corbett (1991), there are only a few exceptions to these phonological rules, so that around 95% of nouns would be assigned the correct gender based on this criterion. In Hausa,53 nouns ending in -a(a) are feminine while all other nouns are masculine unless they refer to humans and animals of male or female sex (Jaggar 2001: 48). In fact, phonological principles are often used for gender assignment in the case of inanimate referents.

3.6.3 Mixed systems and conflicts There is near universal agreement among researchers that every gender assignment system is semantically motivated to some degree (Aikhenvald 2003: 25). In those cases where a language does not apply semantic principles it has to rely on formal ones; when this is the case, the language is referred to as having a

|| 53 A language in the Afro-Asiatic family, spoken by around 20 million people in Nigeria and the Republic of Niger.

Classification criteria – different gender assignment systems | 57

mixed gender assignment system. Such languages frequently exhibit different strategies for gender assignment which are in competition, or even cooperate. These different rules create hierarchical relationships both within a system (for example, the semantic system) as well as between systems.54 German is an example of a language with a mixed system. In this language there are several systems acting in tandem, in a complex interaction that determines gender assignment, for example semantic rules (e.g. that nouns with female referents are assigned feminine gender), morphological rules (e.g. that nouns in the diminutive -chen are assigned neuter gender) and phonological rules (e.g. many nouns ending in -ie are assigned feminine gender). Another example is Russian. Here, semantic criteria are used for nouns which can be classified according to their sex. Morphological criteria apply to nouns that belong to the declension system. In this case, as described above, nouns of type I take masculine gender, nouns of types II and III take the feminine, while nouns of type IV are assigned neuter gender. Those nouns which cannot be declined are divided into three categories: (i) acronyms, which take gender according to the rules that apply to their declinable head nouns (i.e. according to morphological criteria); (ii) nouns whose referent is animate, which take masculine gender; and (iii) all remaining nouns which are neuter. Thus, in the case of Russian, as in many other languages, semantic criteria take precedence over morphological ones. For example, although the nouns mužčina (‘man’) or detina (‘big man’) morphologically belong to declension class II and should thus take feminine gender, are assigned masculine gender on the basis of semantic criteria. In Russian too, with many nouns, such as professor, that refer to professions and which are morphologically masculine because they fall under the first declension, grammatical agreement is feminine when the noun refers to a person of the female sex. Where the names of professions are concerned, this phenomenon is attested in many other languages. Thus, in Portuguese, some nouns that refer to professions and end with -a or -e (associated with the feminine) can also be assigned another gender depending on the sex of their referent, for example, dentista ‘male/female dentist’, estudante ‘male/female student’. In Djirbal, binnu can mean both ‘father of the eldest girl’, in which case it takes feminine gender and ‘father of the eldest boy’, in which case it takes the masculine (Aikhenvald 2003: 41). Although some authors refer to these nouns as hybrid, in the sense that they can receive either gender, Corbett (1991: 183) uses this term with a somewhat dif|| 54 For Maltese see Farrugia (2015).

58 | Nominal classification

ferent meaning. For Corbett, hybrid nouns seem not to belong to a gender system because they do not belong to a particular gender. Among other examples, he cites the case of vrač in Russian, a noun that can refer both to a male and a female doctor. When it refers to a male doctor, the noun agrees with the biological gender of the referent, taking masculine gender, but when the noun refers to a female doctor, the criteria for gender assignment are in conflict because while this noun should be feminine by semantic criteria, it is masculine by morphological criteria. In this case, agreement with the noun is a mixture of masculine and feminine. For example (i) attributive modifiers tend to be masculine but can also be feminine; (ii) in predicate position both masculine and feminine are possible; (iii) the relative pronoun is likely to be feminine and is rarely masculine; and (iv) personal pronouns are normally feminine (Corbett 1991: 183). Thus, the noun vrač, when it refers to a woman, is a hybrid noun since it does not consistently take either feminine or masculine agreement; neither does it consistently take the two gender categories, thereby distinguishing it from nouns of common gender (or, as some authors such as Corbett 1991 refer to them, dual gender). As we have seen, agreement in this case depends on the different types of target elements involved. The distinction is exemplified in Table 3.4. Sometimes, masculine grammatical forms can also take on a generic meaning and are used in contexts where the sex of the referent is unspecified. For example, in Portuguese, juiz can be used to mean a male judge, or with a generic meaning, while juiza can only be used for a female judge; ministro can mean (male) minister or have a generic meaning, while ministra can only be used for a female judge.55 Some nouns that do not have a human referent can also have more than one gender. For example, nouns such as lašon ‘tongue’ and ruah ‘spirit, wind’ in Hebrew can take both feminine as well as masculine without any change in their meaning. Another language which has a mixed gender assignment system is French, a language frequently considered opaque when it comes to gender assignment. However, researchers such as Bidot (1925), Mel’čuk (1958) and Tucker et al. (1977) have argued that the gender assignment system in French is not arbitrary. In fact, French uses both semantic and formal criteria. In general, nouns whose referent is male take masculine gender, while those whose referent is female take feminine gender. Morphological criteria apply to compound nouns formed

|| 55 See Chapter 6 of the present work, where nouns of this kind are discussed with particular reference to Maltese.

Classification criteria – different gender assignment systems | 59

out of a verb and some other element.56 These usually take masculine gender, as in the case of porte-monnaie ‘purse’ where, despite the feminine noun monnaie ‘money’, the compound takes masculine gender. Another example is garde-boue ‘mudguard’, which is masculine in spite of the noun boue ‘mud’ being feminine. Table 3.4: Distinctions between epicene nouns, nouns with common gender and hybrid nouns.

Noun

Referent (biological gender)

Grammatical gender

male

masculine

i. Epicene nouns Examples from French écrivain (writer) personne (person)

female

masculine

male

feminine

female

feminine

male

masculine

female

feminine

ii. Nouns of common gender Examples from French collègue (colleague) enfant (child)

male

masculine

female

feminine

iii. Nouns with hybrid gender (according to Corbett 1991) Examples from Russian male

masculine feminine (semantically) or masculine (morphologically)

vrač (doctor)

female

(Agreement depends on the different types of target elements involved, for example, attribute modifiers, predicates, relative pronouns and personal pronouns)

|| 56 For a detailed work concerning the gender assigned to compound nouns borrowed from English into Maltese consult Micallef (2017).

60 | Nominal classification

According to Tucker et al. (1977), although phonological and morphological criteria in French frequently overlap, phonological criteria are stronger in determining gender assignment to the noun. In fact, they argue that the gender of 84.5% of the 31,619 nouns in the Petit Larousse can be determined based on phonological principles. Thus, they consider semantic and morphological criteria as the exception. Among the examples of the distribution of nominal gender based on the last phone, there are those of nouns ending in /Ʒ/, which tend to be masculine (94.2%), for example, ménage ‘housework/maintenance work’, while those than end in /z/, such as église ‘church’ have a strong tendency to take feminine gender (90%). Sometimes, the indicator of gender is not the last phone of the noun, but the penultimate, or even the one preceding that. Thus, Tucker et al. (1977: 62) conclude that phonological rules in French play an important role in predicting gender. They argue that this process of analysis of sound, starting from the edge of the word, suggests that gender classification is an active process, based on an ability that develops as a result of speakers’ exposure to the language. It is clear from Tucker et al.’s work that grammatical gender in French is not an irrational process. They argue that semantic criteria are still the strongest and take precedence over other criteria. For example, nouns that end in /i/ are mostly feminine but mari ‘husband’ is masculine. Semantic criteria also take precedence over morphological criteria; for example, although the noun gardemalade ‘nurse’ would be masculine by morphological criteria (since it is a compound noun composed of a verb and another element), it is in fact feminine or masculine depending on the sex of the referent, by semantic criteria. In fact, according to Corbett (1991: 52), when semantic and formal criteria conflict, it is generally the semantic ones that dominate the formal. For example, in Maltese, the noun duka ‘duke’ is masculine although its form would predict feminine gender. This semantic criterion is considered very strong, to the extent that it is sometimes referred to as the core semantic override principle.57 Another factor that may play a role in gender assignment is what is called ‘conceptual association’. This means that if a noun is conceptually associated with another which has a different gender, it can also be assigned the gender of that noun. This explains how in Djirbal, both the nouns for fishing line and rod, which should belong to class IV, which contains the semantic residue, take the gender of class I nouns which includes (human) males and other non-human animates. This occurs because of the association of these nouns with fish, which belong to class I due to their animacy. Corbett (1991: 77) is of the view that con|| 57 See, among others, Nesset (2006), in Anna M. Thornton (2009).

Classification criteria – different gender assignment systems | 61

ceptual association is identical to another factor called ‘semantic analogy’. This process plays a role primarily with borrowed words which are assigned a particular gender in the target language by analogy with other words in the language which are associated with the borrowed word. Nevertheless, Corbett’s views have been criticized in recent work on the subject. Some authors argue that there is no universal, hierarchical arrangement underlying the process of gender assignment. Rice (2006) argues that when rules for gender assignment (formal or semantic) are in conflict, this is resolved according to a markedness hierarchy which is language-specific. In this way, a noun such as deduška ‘grandfather’ and the hypocoristic noun Saša in Russian can be assigned different genders by different criteria, masculine according to a semantic rule (because they refer to a male) and feminine by formal criteria (because they end in -a). In fact, the nouns take masculine gender because of semantic criteria, but Rice argues that this is not because semantic rules dominate formal ones, but because in Russian, masculine gender is much less marked when compared to the feminine and neuter. Corbett’s hypothesis about a conceptual association has also been criticized by Comrie (1999: 461), who argues that there is a strong possibility that conceptual processes are ex post facto rationalizations. On the other hand, Poplack et al. (1982) and Thornton (2003) suggest that the two factors – that is, conceptual association and semantic analogy – are not identical as argued by Corbett, but need to be examined separately to evaluate the contribution they make to gender assignment.

4 Grammatical gender in Maltese according to descriptive grammars and dictionaries 4.1 The relationship between form and meaning The relationship between form and meaning is central to many linguistic studies, including those on grammatical gender. As we saw in the previous chapter, a study on grammatical gender relies on evidence of the relationship and agreement (concord) between the classes that the noun belongs to and the specific form taken by other elements that are syntactically related to it. Nevertheless, we have also seen the importance of the semantic component for the gender assignment system, to the extent that scholars, such as Corbett (1991: 307), are of the view that there is no gender system that functions on purely formal grounds, that is, gender always has a semantic basis. It is in this context that the gender system of Maltese will be analyzed. Thus, the present chapter begins by studying the three most recent descriptive and/or pedagogical grammars of Maltese, to identify the ways in which they treat the nominal gender assignment system in our language.58 These grammars are Grammatika Maltija (‘Maltese Grammar’) by Brother Henry (2004, revised edition)59, Grammatika Ġdida talMalti (‘A New Grammar of Maltese’) by Mgr. L. Cachia (1994)60 and Maltese – Descriptive Grammar by Albert Borg & Marie Azzopardi-Alexander (1997).61

4.2 Animate nouns An important distinction made by these grammars in their description of grammatical gender is that between animate and inanimate nouns. In the case of animate nouns, those that refer to creatures of the male sex, or to typically male roles, take masculine gender, while those that refer to creatures of the female sex or roles which are typically associated with it, take feminine gender. As a result, in the case of these nouns, gender assignment is in large measure bound up with semantic rather than formal criteria. For example, the nouns omm

|| 58 See Farrugia (2003: 53–76) for details of earlier grammars. 59 See pp. 140–144. 60 See pp. 70–74. 61 See pp. 188–193. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110612400-004

Animate nouns | 63

‘mother’ and soru ‘nun’, despite their ending with a consonant and the vowel -u (an ending associated with the masculine), are feminine, while the nouns Papa ‘pope’ and patrijarka ‘patriarch’ take masculine gender in spite of ending in -a (an ending associated with the feminine). The distinction between masculine and feminine is made: (a) by adding a feminine ending that is bound to the masculine form (for example għalliem/a ‘teacher.SG.M/SG.F’, tabib/a ‘doctor.SG.M/ SG.F’, prinċep/ prinċipessa ‘prince/princess’, kelb/a ‘dog.SG.M/ SG.F’, qattus/a ‘cat.SG.M/SG.F, ħmar/ a ‘donkey-SG.M/SG.F’);62 (b) by having two completely different forms (suppletion, for example raġel – mara ‘man – woman’, missier – omm ‘father – mother’, patri – soru ‘priest – nun’, għoġol – erħa ‘calf.SG.M – calf.SG.F’, bodbod – mogħża ‘he-goat – shegoat’, serduk – tiġieġa ‘rooster – hen’); (c) through the use of the classifiers raġel (lit. ‘man/male’) and mara (lit. ‘woman/female’) after the noun (for example tigra raġel – tigra mara ‘male tiger – female tiger’, kanarin raġel – kanarin mara ‘male canary – female canary’, qanfud raġel – qanfud mara ‘male hedgehog – female hedgehog’, iljunfant raġel – iljunfant mara ‘male elephant – female elephant’63). Bro Henry claims that Maltese has no neuter gender, although some nouns are assigned common gender (for example, tarbija ‘baby’, which may be a boy or a girl). At this point, it should be noted that the author’s assessment is not entirely correct in giving this example, since it confuses grammatical with natural gender. Grammatically, the noun tarbija does not have common gender, but is an epicene noun that semantically refers to persons of the male or female sex, while grammatically it takes a single gender, namely, the feminine. It is also worth adding that this is hardly an isolated instance of terms such as ‘nouns of common gender’ and ‘epicene nouns’ being considered synonymous in linguistic work. In fact, however, nouns with common gender take two types of agreement. Thus, Corbett (1991: 181) suggests the term double gender instead of common gender. On the other hand, epicene nouns have a single form, although they refer to creatures of both sexes.

|| 62 Sometimes, the masculine form may undergo a minor change, as in tifel – tifla ‘boy – girl’, rather than *tifela. 63 It is somewhat strange that these grammars give no examples of nouns in this category that refer to persons. Some examples of this type include pulizija raġel – pulizija mara ‘male police officer – female police officer’, ners raġel – ners mara ‘male nurse – female nurse’.

64 | Grammatical gender according to descriptive grammars and dictionaries

According to Corbett (1991: 68), animate, non-human nouns are likely to be epicene. When he refers to epicene nouns he says that “they are below the threshold of sex-differentiability. This threshold varies from language to language”. He adds that in many languages, nouns that refer to persons take gender according to the sex of the referents although, in other languages, especially the Indo-European ones, even nouns that refer to animals are distinguished on the basis of sex. This happens through the use of two completely different nouns (as in the Maltese example żiemel – debba ‘horse – mare’), or through nouns that are morphologically related (for example ċerv – ċerva ‘deer – doe’). Corbett argues that the existence of two forms, whether or not they are related, could result either from the importance that these animals have for humans, or from an evident physical difference. In the absence of this, a single, epicene noun can be used. Whether two forms exist, or only one, the normal rules for gender assignment based on formal or semantic criteria apply, depending on the language. In Maltese (as shown by example (c) above), an epicene noun that refers to an animal is often followed by the classifier raġel or mara, so that the noun is no longer considered epicene. Thus, for example, although the noun kukkudrill ‘crocodile’ is listed as masculine in the dictionary and refers to both sexes of the species, it is still possible to distinguish between kukkudrill raġel ‘male crocodile’ and kukkudrill mara ‘female crocodile’. In another comment on animate nouns Bro Henry says that, barring some exceptions (e.g. żiemel – żwiemel ‘horse – horses’, debba – dwieb ‘mare – mares’), the plural form takes common gender, that is, it is applicable both to the masculine and to the feminine case (for example, żgħażagħ ‘youngsters’, which refers both to young men and young women). Once again, we note an inconsistency in the use of the term ‘common gender’, which at times is used in grammars in its grammatical sense (masculine/feminine), while at other times it is used in its semantic sense (male/female). The term ‘common’ is used more consistently in Cachia’s grammar. The author states that a noun which has both the masculine and feminine singular forms has a single common form for masculine and feminine in the plural (for example, tifel – tifla – tfal ‘boy – girl – children’). He adds that adjectives and participles used as adjectives or nouns are likely to use the feminine singular form as a plural for both the masculine and feminine cases. According to Cachia, sometimes the ‘feminine’ used as a plural has completely replaced the real plural, citing as an example ħaddiema ‘workers’, which has completely replaced ħaddemin. It is worth noting that the author is being imprecise because ‘the form of the feminine singular’ that he refers to is in fact no more than another form of the plural. Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander also discuss this point in their grammar, but interpret it

Animate nouns | 65

differently from Cachia. According to these authors, the suffix -a with plural nouns is best analyzed as a plural suffix which is homophonous with the feminine singular suffix. Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander’s interpretation is bolstered by a study by Mifsud (1995: 74), who considers the -a ending in such cases as a plural suffix for nouns referring to professions or roles, for example, baħħara ‘sailors’, ħaddiema ‘workers’, naġġara ‘chiselers’, qattiela ‘killers/murderers’. Mifsud adds that, coincidentally, this ending of Semitic origin found an appui in a similar plural morpheme used in some Southern dialects of Italian, as in the loanwords biċċiera ‘butchers’, barbiera ‘barbers’. According to Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander, there is no gender distinction in the case of the plural. They also mention cases that can give rise to ambiguity in the singular, but can be resolved with reference to other elements in the sentence, such as the form of the predicative adjective or the inflected form of the verb. As an example, they give the following: (12)

Il-patoloġista malajr identifika l-kawża ta-l-marda. DEF-pathologist quickly identify.SG.M.PRF DEF-cause of-DEF-illness ‘The pathologist quickly identified the cause of the illness.’

In this case, the noun patoloġista, which may refer to both the male and the female, is known to be masculine through the inflected form of the verb. The most recent grammars of Maltese suggest that the basic form is the masculine, while the feminine is the marked case derived from it. Thus, for example, Cachia cites the many Semitic nouns and adjectives that derive the feminine form from the masculine: (a) by adding -a as a suffix in words that end in a consonant (for example kelb – kelba ‘dog.SG.M – dog.SG.F’, qattus – qattusa ‘cat.SG.M – cat.SG.F’, tifel – tifla ‘boy – girl’); (b) in case they end in the vowel -u in the masculine (and have a missing third radical), this changes to w (for example felu – felwa ‘foal.SG.M – foal.SG.F’, ġeru – ġerwa ‘puppy.SG.M – puppy.SG.F’); (c) if they are not Semitic and end in -u in the masculine, this is simply dropped (for example, vavu – vava ‘baby.SG.M/idiot.SG.M – baby.SG.F/ idiot.SG.F’, pupu – pupa ‘doll.SG.M – doll.SG.F’). Cachia also mentions the case of nouns derived from Italian that take the ending -essa to form the feminine (for example, prinċipessa ‘princess’, saċerdotessa ‘priestess’, studentessa ‘student.SG.F’). One question that arises is why the author, having chosen to draw attention to an Italian suffix associated with the feminine, mentions only a single one, when others exist, including -triċi (for example, awtriċi ‘author.SG.F’, direttriċi ‘director.SG.F’) and -ina (for example, ballerina ‘dancer.SG.F’ and sinjorina ‘miss’). Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander discuss

66 | Grammatical gender according to descriptive grammars and dictionaries

this issue in greater detail. They mention ten64 masculine suffixes that have a corresponding feminine suffix, as shown in Table 4.1. Table 4.1: Masculine suffixes and corresponding feminine suffixes according to Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander’s grammar.

Masculine suffix Feminine suffix

Examples

-an

-ana

Taljan – Taljana ‘Italian.SG.M– Italian.SG.F’

-ant/-ent

-anta/-enta

kantant – kantanta ‘singer.SG.M – singer.SG.F’; esponent – esponenta ‘exponent.SG.M – exponent.SG.F’

-azz

-azza

sakranazz – sakranazza ‘drunkard.SG.M – drunkard.SG.F’

-ier

-iera

teżorier – teżoriera ‘treasurer.SG.M – treasurer.SG.F’

65

-ist

-ista

attivist – attivista ‘activist.SG.M – activist.SG.F’

-iż

-iża

Franċiż – Franċiża ‘Frenchman.SG.M – Frenchwoman.SG.F’

-ur

-ura

difensur – difensura ‘defendant.SG.M – defendant.SG.F’

-at/-ut

-ata/-uta

traskurat – traskurata ‘careless.SG.M – careless.SG.F’; batut – batuta ‘sufferer. SG.M – sufferer.SG.F’

-tur

-triċi

ambaxxatur – ambaxxatriċi ‘ambassador.SG.M – ambassador.SG.F’

–

-essa

prinċep – prinċipessa ‘prince.SG.M – princess.SG.F’

Apart from this list, Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander (1997: 191) give some other masculine and feminine suffixes; however, these are restricted to particular lexemes: -ell/-ella (for example, indovinell ‘riddle.SG.M’, sardinella ‘geranium.SG.F’); -ett/-etta (for example, bukkett ‘bouquet.SG.M’, barbetta ‘sideburn.SG.F’); -in/-ina (for example, biskuttin ‘biscuit.SG.M’, ċikkulatina ‘chocolate. SG.F’). It is worth noting that even among these suffixes, those that end in consonants are mostly masculine while those that end in the vowel -a are feminine. The only two suffixes that are not compatible with this scheme are the suffix -triċi and the suffix -ista; the latter is in some cases also used for the masculine. The grammar of Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander is probably the first grammar of Maltese that focuses in some detail on gender assignment among borrowed nouns. It is also the first grammar to discuss the formal and semantic criteria involved in the process of assigning gender to nouns of English origin. In the

|| 64 The grammar mentions 11 suffixes but in fact only 10 are listed. See p. 191. 65 The authors remark that this suffix can also be masculine, as in arkivista (‘archivist.M/F’).

Inanimate nouns | 67

case of nouns borrowed from English that refer to human roles (for example, names of occupations and professions), and which are not necessarily associated with a particular sex, Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander state that the tendency is to assign gender along lines that reflect cultural realities. For example, the nouns player, driver and pilot are likely to be assigned masculine gender, in spite of the fact that women frequently perform these roles nowadays. By contrast, the noun nurse is likely to be viewed as feminine in spite of the existence of male nurses. Other roles, including caretaker and teacher, are considered more ‘neutral’ and tend to be assigned gender corresponding to the sex of the speaker.66

4.3 Inanimate nouns Inanimate nouns can be masculine or feminine. Where gender assignment to these nouns is concerned, the most important criterion is not the semantic but the formal one – their declension (the edge of the word) – although some grammars mention other criteria, as we shall see. According to the grammars I am referring to in the present work, the following are masculine nouns: (i) those that end in a consonant (for example, sellum ‘ladder’, lapes ‘pencil’); (ii) those that end in the vowel -i (for example, bini ‘building’, felli ‘slice’, fidi ‘redemption’, from the verb feda, ġiżi ‘reward’, from the verb ġeża). Nouns of non-Semitic origin that end in this vowel tend to be feminine (for example vuċi ‘voice’, raġuni ‘reason’, funzjoni ‘function’, kriżi ‘crisis’ and fidi ‘faith’). Note, in this case, the intrusion of an etymological criterion to distinguish between genders; (iii) those that end in the vowel -u (for example, karru ‘cart’, tubu ‘tube’); (iv) nouns that denote substances or collections in the broad sense (for example, żonqor ‘coralline limestone’, zokkor ‘sugar’, ġild ‘leather’, ward ‘roses’). Grammatically, collective nouns are considered singular and masculine. Some collective nouns, such as baqar ‘cows’ and weraq ‘leaves’ are now being interpreted as plural; (v) geographical names of countries, islands, rivers and mountains that end in a consonant, or with the vowels -u or -o (for example, il-Marokk ‘Morocco’, Ċipru ‘Cyprus’, Monaco); (vi) non-Semitic masculine nouns (for example, papru ‘duck’, salott ‘living room’, pil ‘fur’).

|| 66 See Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander (1997: 193).

68 | Grammatical gender according to descriptive grammars and dictionaries

Criterion (vi) above raises the question as to how practical it is to search for the gender of a foreign word in order to determine its grammatical gender in Maltese, especially given the existence of nouns that had a particular gender in the original language and were assigned a different gender in Maltese. For example, the nouns dada ‘dice’, delta, diska ‘disk/song’, poema ‘poem’, problema ‘problem’, sistema ‘system’ and tema ‘theme’, are masculine in Italian but feminine in Maltese. Cachia also mentions the following class of masculine nouns: (vii) deverbal nouns that do not denote a single entity, even if they end in the vowel -a (for example, għana ‘folk song’, għemil ‘deed/action’, qtugħ ‘cutting’, ħala ‘waste’, wisa’ ‘space’67). In their grammar, Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander (1997: 190) describe the gender markers of “native” nouns and those of borrowed nouns, a distinction that is not given such a detailed treatment in the other grammars. They claim that in Maltese, there is a rich variety of borrowed endings, some of which are inherently masculine or feminine, while others are masculine but can be changed into feminine endings by the addition of another suffix. The following are the masculine suffixes they mention: Table 4.2: Non-native masculine nominal suffixes according to Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander.

Suffix

Examples given

-aġġ/-eġġ

ekwipaġġ ‘equipage’, arpeġġ ‘arpeggio’

-ment

notament ‘note’

-ar/-jar

sparar ‘shooting’, editjar ‘editing’

-arju/-orju

xenarju ‘scenery’, interrogatorju ‘interrogation’

-at

stuffat ‘stew’

-ew

ġublew ‘jubilee’

-ar

arluġġar68 ‘watchmaker’

-grafu

telegrafu ‘telegraph’

-iku

kantiku ‘canticle’

-iżmu

sadiżmu ‘sadism’

|| 67 Wisa’ in the masculine (a generic deverbal noun), means space, while wisgħa in the feminine (nomen unitatis) means a square or some other bounded space. 68 Some of these endings are associated with animate nouns.

Inanimate nouns | 69

(Table 4.2 continued) Suffix

Examples given

-zju

prefazju ‘preface’

-ju

sodju ‘sodium’

-logu

teologu ‘theologian’

-metru

dijametru ‘diameter’

-ott

ġuvnott ‘young man’

-skopju

teleskopju ‘telescope’

-un

berrittun ‘cap’

Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander discuss the relative productivity of the above suffixes. According to them, the suffixes -ar/-jar and -iżmu are among the most common gender markers of borrowed words. Upon closer examination, the masculine suffixes in the list turn out to either end in a consonant (8 of them) or in the vowel -u (9 of them). For practical purposes, it is still possible to consider them as falling under the general rule found in descriptive grammars that nouns that end in a consonant or the vowel -u are masculine. There are some inanimate nouns which appear at first glance to belong to one of the categories associated with the masculine; however, grammars tend to view them as exceptions. Thus, for example, there are nouns that end in a consonant but are feminine, such as aħbar ‘news’, art ‘land’, belt ‘city/town’, għajn ‘eye’, id ‘hand’, mewt ‘death’, qalb ‘heart’, ruħ ‘soul’, qmis ‘shirt’, ras ‘head’, sieq ‘leg’, triq ‘street/road’, xemx ‘sun’ and żaqq ‘stomach’. Setting aside those animate nouns whose referents are female and which, as stated above, take feminine gender, the other nouns that take feminine gender are: (i) those that end in the vowel -a (for example karta ‘paper’, riga ‘ruler’, mejda ‘table’, xitla ‘plant’, siġra ‘tree’). According to Cachia (1994: 71), feminine nouns used to end in -at and the -t is still evident in the construct state, as well as in some nouns outside the construct state (for example iben – bint ‘son – daughter’, (a)ħu – oħt ‘brother – sister’, xbin – xbint ‘male friend – female friend/partner’, ħaten – ħtint ‘brother-in-law – sister-in-law’, sid – sidt ‘master/owner – mistress/owner’). (ii) unitatis deverbal nouns (for example, daħla ‘entrance/introduction’, taħbita ‘knock’);

70 | Grammatical gender according to descriptive grammars and dictionaries

(iii) nouns that denote materials or collectivities that are individuated (for example, ħadida ‘piece of iron’, werqa ‘leaf’);69 (iv) names of cities (for example Pariġi ‘Paris’, Madrid, Budapest); (v) the letters of the alphabet (for example, be kbira ‘capital B’, emme żgħira ‘small M’, għajn ma tinstemax ‘silent għ’). According to Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander, the suffix -a is very productive, not only because it marks the feminine form of both native and borrowed masculine nouns, but also because it is the suffix of a large number of other nouns, among them the deverbal nouns, which are grammatically feminine. According to these authors, one can determine that a noun is masculine by using formal criteria, with the exception of those that end in -a, apart from some cases such as Alla ‘God’, ħama ‘mud’, għana ‘folk song’, sema ‘sky’, għera ‘nakedness’, agħma ‘blindness’. To these, Bro Henry and Cachia add difa ‘tepidity’, hena ‘joy’, safa ‘purity’, għagħa ‘hubbub’, wita ‘level ground’, sewwa ‘goodness/ truth’. Originally, some of these nouns did not have the ending -at in Arabic but had a similar sounding ending (i.e. -ā’/-ā:). It is also worth noting that some of these nouns are occasionally marked as feminine in Maltese dictionaries. Thus, for example, difa, għagħa and wita are considered feminine in the MalteseEnglish dictionary of Aquilina (1987) as well as in Il-Miklem Malti (‘The Maltese dictionary’) by Serracino-Inglott. The noun hena is considered masculine by Aquilina (1987) but in the concise version of the same dictionary (2006)70 is listed as a feminine noun. In Il-Miklem it is also marked as feminine. The noun sewwa is given as a noun of common gender by Aquilina, but the concise version of the dictionary only gives masculine gender. The noun għera is also classified as feminine by the concise version of the Aquilina dictionary. Mifsud (1996) discusses collective nouns of Semitic origin and says that nouns of the morphologically masculine form which historically ended in the Arabic phoneme /ʕ/ or /y/, silence the final sound and end in [-a] for example, għana ‘folk song’, ħara ‘shit’, xema’ ‘candle’ and wisa’ ‘space’. As a result, nouns of this kind are likely to be interpreted and treated as feminine. Thus, Mifsud calls them pseudo-feminine collective Semitic nouns. Other exceptions mentioned by Bro Henry are those nouns that he calls ‘infinitive deverbal nouns’. In spite of ending in -a, these nouns “are sometimes considered masculine”. Examples include ħefa ‘bare-footedness’, kera ‘rent’ and ħela ‘waste’.

|| 69 Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander refer to nouns of the second and third category as singulative nominals. 70 Concise Maltese-English, English-Maltese dictionary, 2006.

Inanimate nouns | 71

In their grammar, Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander (1997: 190–191) list a number of borrowed nominal suffixes associated with the feminine form. In their view, the most common is the suffix -zzjoni, followed by -ità and -ura/-tura. The complete list is given in Table 4.3. Table 4.3: Non-native feminine nominal suffixes according to Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander.

Suffix

Examples given

-aġni

guffaġni ‘roughness’

-anti

governanti71 ‘governess’

-ata

brikkunata ‘an act of slyness’

-zzjoni

ġurisdizzjoni ‘jurisdiction’

-ea

Ġudea ‘Judaea’

-anza/-enza

arroganza ‘arrogance’, permanenza ‘permanence’

-erija

spiżerija ‘pharmacy’

-età/-ità/-tà

varjetà ‘variety’, sanità ‘hygiene’, lealtà ‘loyalty’

-ezza

ċertezza ‘certainty’

-ġenesi

ontoġenesi ‘ontogenesis’

-grafija

biblijografija ‘bibliography’

-iera

passiġġiera ‘passenger’

-ija

poeżija ‘poem’

-ite

tonsillite ‘tonsillitis’

-itù

skjavitù ‘slavery’

-attiva

inizjattiva ‘initiative’

-ja

arkadja ‘arcadia’

-joni

tensjoni ‘tension’

-loġija

teoloġija ‘theology’

-metrija

radjumetrija ‘radiometry’

-ojde

asterojde ‘asteroid’

-skopija

stereoskopija ‘stereoscopy’

-tomija

flebotomija ‘phlebotomy’

-udni

solitudni ‘solitude’

-ura

bravura ‘skill’

|| 71 Some of these suffixes are also bound to animate nouns.

72 | Grammatical gender according to descriptive grammars and dictionaries

Note that out of these 25 feminine suffixes, 16 end in -a/-à, an ending that has always been associated with the feminine gender in earlier grammars. Of the nine remaining suffixes, six end in -i, an ending that some grammars had already associated with the feminine in nouns borrowed from Romance. This leaves three suffixes that do not fit the criteria normally given in grammars for endings associated with one gender or the other. Two of these end in -e (i.e. -ite and -ojde) while another ends in -ù (i.e. -itù). It is also worth mentioning that in Aquilina’s (1987) dictionary, there are nouns that end in the -ite and -ojde suffixes that are masculine, for example dinamite ‘dynamite’, melinite ‘melinite’, oċċipite ‘occiput’, pulmunite ‘pneumonia’, asterojde ‘asteroid’, ċiklojde ‘cycloid’, globojde ‘globoid’, ipoċiklojde ‘hypocycloid’, kretinojde ‘cretinoid’, paratifojde ‘paratyphoid’ and sfenojde ‘spheroid’. Even in the case of the suffix -itù, one of the very few nouns with this ending in the Aquilina dictionary is classified as masculine, namely segwitù ‘retinue’. Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander also mention certain criteria that are used in gender assignment for borrowed nouns in Maltese. According to them, in the case of nouns of Romance origin whose use in Maltese is well established, gender is normally stable, whereas in the case of nouns borrowed recently from English, there is more variation in their gender. In the case of these nouns borrowed from English, it has been found that there are semantic and phonological factors that influence gender assignment, for example, the word ending.72 Analogy has also been found to play a major role. Thus, for example, the borrowed nouns jeans, slacks, shorts and pants have a tendency to be regarded as masculine nouns, possibly by analogy with their native hyperonym qalziet ‘trousers’ which is masculine; by contrast, nouns such as kiwi, pineapple and grapefruit tend to be regarded as feminine, possibly because of the gender of the feminine hyperonym frotta ‘frotta’ (Farrugia 2003: 250–252). In this discussion of recent grammars of Maltese, a number of semantic, formal and even etymological criteria have been discussed in relation to the process of gender assignment to nouns in Maltese, both when these nouns are native, that is, of Semitic origin, as well as when they are borrowed, either from Romance, especially from Italian, or from English. The next section takes a brief look at the systems of gender assignment to nouns in Arabic, the language from which Maltese developed, and in Italian, a language with which Maltese was in contact for hundreds of years, in order to see how and to what extent these systems have affected the gender system in our language.

|| 72 For an exhaustive investigation of this topic, see Farrugia (2003).

Grammatical gender in Arabic | 73

4.4 Grammatical gender in Arabic According to certain scholars, among them Ibrahim (1973: 39) and Procházka (2004: 237), the study of gender in the Semitic languages is at a somewhat preliminary stage when compared to the study of this topic in the Indo-European languages. The most widely accepted theory among scholars is that the gender system in Semitic is likely to hark back to proto-Semitic, and evolved from a more complex system in proto-Afro-Asiatic, where grammatical gender may have formed part of a broader system of nominal classes that did not have the gender system.73 Within this system, there are those who believe that the division into nominal classes was based on a value system and that these classes corresponded to a number of different suffixes. In this context, those nouns that were considered “inferior” in Semitic culture may have been marked by a suffix (Fleisch 1961: 352–326).74 Nevertheless, there is as yet insufficient evidence to justify this hypothesis. Indeed, there is an alternative hypothesis that holds that the marker for the feminine evolved from a polysemous marker whose primary function was to distinguish marked from unmarked forms in the lexicon. Speiser (1936: 33–46)75 argues that the feminine suffix -at was initially not used as a marker of feminine gender. The main source of evidence for this is the fact that in Semitic languages this suffix has many other functions apart from its primary one of marking the feminine. For instance, synchronically the morpheme for the feminine in Semitic languages is also used to (i) derive abstract nouns from adjectives, numerals and verbs, as in the Arabic example ḥasan ‘good’ – ḥasanat ‘goodness’; (ii) derive collective nouns from participles, for example, Arabic kāfir ‘non-believer’ – kafarat ‘non-believers’; (iii) create the nomina unitatis from the collective, for example the Arabic baqar ‘cows’ – baqarat ‘cow’; (iv) derive diminutives, for example, Hebrew *yāniq ‘small tree’ – yāniqat (‘trunk’). Note that many of the functions of this morpheme are also found in Maltese, together with other functions, for example (verb – abstract noun) għamel → għamla (‘he did’ → ‘form’); (collective – nomina unitatis) weraq → werqa (‘leaves’ → ‘leaf’); (diminutives) but → buta (‘pocket’ → ‘small pocket/purse’); (plural of a noun denoting role or profession) għalliem → għalliema (‘teacher’ → ‘teachers’), bajjad → bajjada (‘whitewasher’ → ‘whitewashers’). These functions all support the view that the feminine ending originated in a

|| 73 See footnote 3 in Hämeen-Anttila (1999: 605). 74 In Ibrahim (1973: 42). 75 In Ibrahim (1973: 43–44).

74 | Grammatical gender according to descriptive grammars and dictionaries

more complex system of classes that included the category of number (the collective) (Moscati 1964: 86). According to Speiser (1936) the original functions of the “feminine marker” was to create derivational morphemic stems with some special modification of the original meaning and this occurred before the grammatical gender system came into existence in Arabic. Classical Arabic (CA) has two gender categories that are traditionally called the masculine and the feminine. The gender of inanimate nouns is purely conventional, e.g. qamar ‘moon.SG.M’, šams ‘sun.SG.F’. There are nouns that can be either masculine or feminine, e.g. sikkīn ‘knife’, sūq ‘market’. The following are some examples of Maltese nouns of Arabic origin that can be both masculine and feminine in Arabic, but in Maltese take only one gender: abt ‘armpit’, boton ‘litter of rabbits’, ġewnaħ ‘wing’, ħanut ‘shop’, sultan ‘king’, sliem ‘peace’, sellum ‘ladder’, sema ‘sky’,76 sur ‘bastion’, saba’ ‘finger’, darsa ‘molar’, triq ‘street/ road’, għasel ‘honey’, għonq ‘neck’, għanqbut ‘cobweb’, qaws ‘bow’, ilsien ‘tongue/language’, lejl ‘night’ and melħ ‘salt’. In the case of nouns that refer to animates, there are more complex systems at the lexical level, which are, however, still reducible to the binary masculine/feminine distinction at the grammatical level. The feminine of animate nouns is generally formed from the masculine through the affixation of -at, which is the most frequent feminine suffix, or via a different word that may or may not have a feminine suffix, for example, kalb ‘dog.SG.M’ – kalb+ at ‘dog.SG.F’; jamal ‘camel.SG.M’ – nāqa+ at ‘camel. SG.F’; ’ab ‘father’ – ’umm ‘mother’. Words that refer to animate creatures of the male sex and which have the morphological form of the feminine are syntactically masculine in spite of their form, e.g. xali:f+at kabi:r, (‘old.SG.M caliph’); ‘alla:m+at kabi:r (‘old. SG.M wise-man’). By contrast, in the case of inanimates, nouns marked with the feminine form are always grammatically feminine, e.g. maqbar+at kabi:r+at ‘large.SG.F cemetery’. In Arabic, there was a tendency to strengthen the gender system by making the form compatible with the meaning, especially among nouns that refer to humans. For example, the original meaning of zawj ‘husband’ referred both to the man and to the woman, but later came to refer only to the man, while the feminine form zawj+at ‘wife’ began to refer specifically to the woman. It is worth noting that Maltese does not have this feminine form, and makes use instead of the noun mara ‘woman/wife’ in its definite form or with a pronominal suffix, or else with the definite article and a form of the preposition or possessive marker

|| 76 Although, in Aquilina’s dictionary, this noun is marked as masculine, the author states that it is sometimes also considered feminine, as in is-sema ħmaret (‘DEF-sun become-red.SG.F.PRF’).

Grammatical gender in Arabic | 75

ta’ ‘of’, for example mart-i (‘wife-POSS.1SG’)/il-mara tiegħi (‘DEF-wife POSS.1SG), martek (‘wife-POSS.2SG’)/il-mara tiegħek (‘DEF-wife POSS.2SG). Another interesting case where the discrepancy between the form of the noun and its gender was ironed out is found in the noun lejl ‘night’. In protoSemitic the noun was *laylay, which later became *layla:. The feminine form of the noun did not correspond to its masculine gender. This discrepancy was resolved in various ways. For example, in Accadian, the noun acquired a feminine suffix -t and came to be considered as feminine, i.e. li:lat. In languages such as Ugaritic and, to some extent, Hebrew and Arabic, the form changed to conform to the masculine gender, thus maintaining its original gender assignment i.e. layl. In addition to this form, Arabic also has laylat ‘night.SG.F’, which is feminine and is either a direct descendent of the form *layla or is more likely derived from layl as a nomen unitatis. Whatever its origin, laylat was considered a nomen unitatis (i.e. a particular night), while layl acquired the more general sense of a particular period of the day (Hämeen-Anttila 1999: 600).

4.4.1 Unmarked feminine nouns In the Arabic gender system, meaning dominates form in the case of animate nouns. But in general, form has precedence over meaning in the case of inanimates, although there are a number of exceptions. The feminine is the marked form. In the sound or regular plural, the feminine gender marker merges with the plural marker through the lengthening of the final vowel, as shown in the example of muslim ‘Muslim.SG.M’/muslim +u:n ‘Muslim.PL.M’; muslim+at ‘Muslim.SG.F’/muslim+a:t ‘Muslim.PL.F’. Note that the gender distinction in the plural does not exist in Maltese. Many grammars of Arabic, among them that of Wright (1991: 178–179), list a number of classes of nouns that take feminine gender. Among these are: proper names of countries and cities, names of directions, including the direction of the wind; names given to different types of fire; names for body parts that come in pairs; collective nouns that refer to animate creatures and from which the nomen unitatis cannot be derived; nouns that end in -at or the elif maksura. There are other nouns in Arabic that are habitually simply considered feminine. Among these are some that have been inherited by Maltese as well: art ‘land/floor’, dar ‘house’ and xemx ‘sun’. Other nouns which are feminine in Arabic have been regularized in Maltese and have become masculine due to their consonantal ending. Examples include bir ‘well’, delu ‘funnel’, riħ ‘wind’, mus ‘penknife’, nar ‘fire’ and nifs ‘breath’.

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According to Ibrahim (1973: 47), these groups of nouns can be divided into three categories: (a) those that are inherently feminine, that is, they refer to a creature of the female sex, whether or not these nouns have a feminine ending, for example baqarat ‘cow’, ’umm ‘mother’. In CA, as well as Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Arabic dialects, all nouns that refer to animate creatures of the female sex are considered grammatically feminine, whatever their form; (b) those that are considered metaphorically feminine, that is, inanimate nouns that are considered feminine whether or not they have a feminine ending, e.g. dawlat ‘state/government’; yad ‘hand’; and (c) those that are morphologically feminine, that is, nouns that have a feminine ending even though they may refer to a male and are treated as masculine nouns, e.g. Ḥamzat ‘name of a man’, xalīfat ‘Caliph’. According to Ibrahim, the most “problematic” cases are those feminine nouns that are unmarked. There has never been unanimous agreement on the gender of these nouns. In an investigation carried out in 196677, a list was compiled of the nouns that appeared in different lists in various grammars. This list included 240 unmarked feminine nouns. There was agreement on their gender in fewer than 100 cases. Procházka’s (2004) study of the Arabic dialects confirms that in general there is a lack of agreement on gender assignment in these dialects, although surprisingly, they are quite homogeneous when they attribute gender to a number of nouns that take the feminine but have no marker.78 Procházka classifies these nouns into specific semantic categories, without delving into the question of the origin of the feminine gender that is addressed in some other speculative work.79 Normally, discussions of nominal gender in Arabic tend to state that body parts that occur in pairs are usually feminine. This is especially true of CA and MSA, although, according to Procházka, it doesn’t apply to contemporary Arabic dialects. In these dialects, such nouns are usually considered masculine, with the exception of ‘ayn ‘eye’, ’udun ‘ear’, yad ‘hand’ and rijl ‘leg’/sāq ‘foot’, which are practically always feminine. It is worth noting that riġel (‘leg’) in Mal-

|| 77 M. Al-Khāl, “al-Mu’annathāt al-Samā’iyya”, Majallat al-Majma’al-‘ilmī al-‘irāqī, Part I, vol. 13 (1966) pp. 310–399, Part II, vol. 14 (1967), pp. 121–150, in Ibrahim (1973: 47). 78 According to Procházka (2004: 254), unmarked feminine nouns are more numerous in Western dialects of Arabic, which include Maltese. 79 See, for example, Wensinck (1927: 34–52).

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tese is masculine, which is also the case in some parts of Morocco.80 However, although the nouns mentioned above are feminine, most nouns that refer to body parts and which come in pairs are masculine in modern Arabic dialects, with the exception of dirā‘ ‘arm’ which can be both masculine and feminine, and a few others like xadd ‘cheek’ which is masculine in CA and MSA but feminine in some regional dialects, and kitf ‘shoulder’ which is a feminine noun in CA but masculine in both MSA and Maltese. There are also nouns that refer to body parts which do not come in pairs and which take feminine gender in the dialects, although they are unmarked. To mention a few: ra’s ‘head’ is masculine in CA and masculine/feminine in MSA but feminine in, among others, the dialect of Egypt and Anatolia as well as Maltese. Qalb ‘heart’ is masculine in CA and MSA but feminine in both Moroccan and Maltese. In some other dialects, there are other nouns which are feminine e.g. lisān ‘tongue’ and sinn ‘tooth’. The case of the noun sinn in CA is interesting, as it is an unmarked feminine noun which became marked in some varieties of Arabic, among them that spoken in Cairo, as well as in Maltese. Other examples of nouns that underwent the same change are ‘arūs, ajūz and sikkīn, which in Maltese became għarusa ‘bride/fiancée’, għaġuża ‘old woman’ and sikkina ‘knife’. Although they are not really body parts, one can also mention the words rūḥ ‘soul’ (masculine/feminine in CA and MSA) and nafs ‘soul/mind/ psyche’ (feminine in CA and MSA, as well as in most dialects). Maltese appears to be an exception here. Another category of nouns which are not marked in the feminine but tend to take feminine gender is that of nouns that refer to the sky, the earth and the elements. Among these are: šams ‘sun’, ’arḍ ‘earth’, nār ‘fire’ and turāb ‘soil’. Note that in Maltese, the words nar ‘fire’ and trab ‘dust’ take the masculine gender. The word samā’ ‘sky’, though similar in form to feminine nouns, is masculine in many regions, especially when its meaning is that of ‘roof’. In CA and MSA, it can be either feminine or masculine. However, in sedentary dialects, among them those of Syria, Egypt and the Central Maghreb, it is feminine. This noun is considered masculine in Maltese grammars and dictionaries, but is in practice treated as feminine by many speakers. The noun mā’ ‘water’ is also considered feminine in some dialects, among them that of Cilicia, but is masculine in some dialects spoken in Lebanese villages, as it also is in Maltese.

|| 80 Procházka (2004: 239).

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Among other nouns that are not marked but are considered feminine in many dialects of Arabic are rīḥ ‘wind’, balad ‘city’, dār ‘house’81, bāb ‘door’, bayt ‘room’, furn ‘oven’, ṭarīq ‘street’, bi’r ‘well’, fār ‘rat’, fikrūn ‘tortoise’, ‘asal ‘honey’, laḥm ‘meat’, xubz ‘bread’, šaḥm ‘fat’, ṣūf ‘wool’. Maltese seems to exhibit a tendency to regularize and avoid exceptions. Thus, all of these nouns with the exception of belt, dar and triq are considered masculine in Maltese, the likely reason being precisely that they are not marked for the feminine and end in consonants. Another case that strengthens this observation is the noun mūsā ‘penknife’, which is feminine. In dialectal Arabic this noun is likely to occur without the ending -at but often maintains the feminine gender. This is not the case in Maltese, where, probably because it has lost its ending and now ends in a consonant, it is considered masculine. This tendency is in fact mentioned by Procházka (2004: 248), who observes that barring a few exceptions, the tendency for feminine nouns to become masculine is found in modern dialects of Arabic that simplify the system. In his view, this tendency is in fact not exclusively found in modern Arabic dialects but is as old as the history of the Semitic languages themselves. It’s likely that the majority of archaic feminine nouns which were unmarked became masculine in order to become compatible with masculine nouns that lacked the -at ending. Speakers of Arabic dialects detect no rationale as to why such nouns should be feminine. Thus, one might conjecture that many of these unmarked feminine nouns are used frequently and, as a result, resist the transformation from feminine to masculine. Based on this, one might hypothesize that in Maltese, some feminine nouns which are unmarked for gender cease to be in frequent use for some reason, they would in all likelihood start being considered masculine. All in all, it is possible to state that only a few remaining nouns are both feminine and unmarked in the majority of Arabic dialects, including Maltese. In fact, the only nouns of Semitic origin that belong to this category and that are listed in Aquilina’s dictionary (excluding those that refer to animates of the female sex and number words) are the following: aħbar ‘news’, art ‘land’, belt ‘city’, dar ‘house’, għajn ‘eye’, id ‘hand’, mewt ‘death’, qalb ‘heart’, qmis ‘shirt’, ras ‘head’, ruħ ‘soul’, sieq ‘leg’, triq ‘street/road’, xemx ‘sun’ and żaqq ‘belly’. It is worth noting, in fact, that for the most part these nouns are basic and have a high frequency and thus, although they are not marked, speakers will have no difficulty in associating them with a particular gender (the feminine). In the

|| 81 This noun is considered masculine in other varieties of Arabic, such as those spoken in Central Syria and Cilicia.

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case of the noun żaqq, Procházka believes that in Maltese, this word was assigned feminine gender because it replaced the archaic word kirš, which was feminine. It is worth pointing out that Maltese still uses the noun kirxa ‘gut’ (mostly used in a culinary context). The tendency displayed by Maltese to simplify the system can also be seen in some nouns that end in the sound /t/ in Maghribi dialects which changed their gender from masculine to feminine, most likely on the basis of a phonological analogy with the -t ending, which is one of the markers of the feminine. Among others, one finds the nouns bayt ‘house’, zayt ‘oil’, mawt ‘death’, ḥūt ‘fish’, waqt ‘time’, ḥanūt ‘shop’, and ‘ankabūt ‘spider’. Nevertheless, with the exception of the noun mewt ‘death’, all the nouns in this list are masculine in Maltese, because the -t ending is no longer considered a strong marker of the feminine and probably has the status of a consonant like any other; hence, it is associated with the masculine.

4.4.2 The relationship between sex and gender according to Drozdík Although in Arabic the category of gender does not strictly correspond to the extralinguistic category of sex, there is nevertheless a connection between the two. Drozdík (1973: 221) discusses this relationship in detail and lists four classes. (i)

Class 1 (sex – gender):

This class contains nouns that refer to animate creatures that constitute classes based on natural gender (sex), such that each one is bound specifically to one grammatical gender class. These gender classes can involve inflectional means (e.g. malik ‘king’ vs. malikat ‘queen’), lexical means (e.g. ’ab ‘father’ vs. ’umm ‘mother’) or a mixture of the two (e.g. tawr ‘bull’ vs. baqarat ‘cow’). This means that nouns that refer to male creatures are assigned masculine gender (e.g. rajul ‘man’), while those that refer to female creatures are assigned feminine gender (e.g. bint ‘girl’). This relationship is normally found in human referents and sometimes also in animals of a large size, or those which are traditionally considered useful to humans. Formally, the gender classes may (i) coincide with the classification on the basis of sex, which is the typical case, for example malik (masculine sex – masculine gender, unmarked) vs. malikat (feminine sex – feminine gender, marked), or (ii) interfere with it, for example xalifat (‘Caliph’). The noun xalifat is assigned masculine gender because its referent is notionally bound to the male sex, although it is formally similar to feminine nouns because of its ending.

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Drozdík states that this category of animate creatures can be problematic because one needs to distinguish between sex-gender classifications and classifications based on gender only. To clarify, he gives the following example. In the noun baqarat, the derivational class of the nomen unitatis (from the collective) coincides with the feminine gender class or, more accurately, the marker -at of the nomen unitatis coincides with the feminine marker -at. However, in this case there also exists the masculine form tawr, which is a suppletive form and is not created by means of inflection.82 By contrast, in the case of ḥamāmat (‘dove’), although the marker -at of the nomen unitatis also coincides with the marker -at of the feminine, nevertheless, the feminine form can be used for both sexes and is not associated with any particular sex. The same occurs in the case of the nouns samakat ‘fish’, naḥlat ‘bee’ and others. Drozdík therefore includes nouns such as baqarat in this class, while he considers nouns such as ḥamāmat, samakat and naḥlat as belonging to class 2. The same relationship between sex and gender exists in Maltese where animate referents of a particular sex correspond to a specific grammatical gender. There also exists a distinction similar to that discussed by Drozdík for examples such as baqarat vis-a-vis samakat. So much so, that in Maltese there are nouns such as ħuta ‘fish’ and naħla ‘bee’ that refer to both the male and the female of the species; thus, we do not use ħuta/*ħutu, naħla/*naħlu. The word ħamiema ‘dove/pigeon’ has two synchronic uses in Maltese. Often, ħamiema takes feminine gender to refer to either the female or the male of the species. If a speaker needs to be specific, he would distinguish between ħamiema raġel ‘male pigeon’ and ħamiema mara ‘female pigeon’. But in the case of someone who breeds pigeons, for whom the sex of the bird is an essential part of the breeding process, it is likely that they would distinguish between ħamiema (the feminine noun referring to the female) and ħamiemu (a masculine noun referring to the male). In this case, two nomen unitatis are derived from the collective, a feminine and a masculine. Mifsud (1996) discusses a small number of nouns of this kind in Maltese, that have developed a noun of unity with an “innovative” suffix (the suffix -u) that indicates masculine gender. As a rule, the noun of unity ends in the suffix -a and is feminine. Mifsud states that he has never encountered a similar suffix in dialectal Arabic. The examples he cites for Maltese include dud ‘worms’ (collective) → duda ‘worm.SG.F’, dudu ‘worm.SG.M’ (nouns of unity); bebbux ‘snails’ (collective) → bebbuxa ‘snail.SG.F’, bebbuxu ‘snail.SG.M’

|| 82 Hämeen-Anttila (1999: 607) doesn’t agree entirely with Drozdìk’s analysis of the pair tawr-baqar+at. He argues that this analysis is only justified on a synchronic basis, but not on a diachronic one.

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(nouns of unity); nemel ‘ants’ (collective) → nemla ‘ant.SG.F’, nemlu ‘ant.SG.M’ (nouns of unity). Drozdík observes that this class raises another problem when it comes to the distinction between nouns that refer to animate creatures. Nouns such as ta’lab ‘fox’, ’arnab ‘rabbit’ and ‘arūs ‘fiancé/fiancée’83 all refer to animates, but the sex-gender relation isn’t the same for all of them. Although among these nouns there is a direct relationship between sex and gender, in the case of the nouns ta’lab and ’arnab every class based on sex can be related to either the masculine or the feminine irrespective of natural gender, while for nouns such as ‘arūs the relationship between sex and gender is specific, i.e. male sex – masculine gender, female sex – feminine gender. Nouns such as ta’lab and ’arnab are considered by Drozdík (1973: 227) not to have a sex and he puts them in class 4. Cases like these are likely to be isolated in the grammar of Arabic. Drozdík places nouns such as ‘arūs in class 3. (ii) Class 2 (no sex – gender): This class contains nouns whose referent has no sex, but which are associated with a particular grammatical gender. Here can be found nouns such as kitāb ‘book’ which is masculine, and nouns such as šams ‘sun’, which is feminine. This relationship is exclusively based on formal criteria. According to Drozdík the membership of nouns in a given gender class, based on this relationship, can be determined in formal terms only where the gender classes are marked, as in the case of madrasat ‘school’ or ṣaḥrā’ ‘desert’. Since those gender classes which are not marked can often be masculine or feminine, unmarked feminine nouns are likely to be listed in Arabic grammars as nouns that belong to various semantic classes, for example, nouns that are names of countries or nouns that refer to body parts that occur in pairs. Thus, in this nominal class, the notional category of sex is largely irrelevant and this, according to Drozdík, can lead to considerable variation in gender assignment in different varieties of Arabic. For example, collective nouns that are derivationally related to nouns of unity belong to the masculine gender in colloquial varieties of Arabic, whereas in CA these nouns can take both masculine and feminine. For example, in Moroccan Arabic, the noun nmel ‘ants’, which is derivationally related to nemla, belongs to this class because it takes one particular gender and does not refer to a particular sex. At the same time, the noun naml ‘ants’ in CA, which is also derivationally related to namla, does

|| 83 In some varieties of Arabic, the form ’arīs refers specifically to the female sex.

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not fit into this class because it is a noun that lacks a reference to either sex, taking both masculine and feminine gender. (iii) Class 3 (common sex – gender): In this class, Drozdík places those nouns whose referent can be of either sex and which take both the masculine if the referent is male and the feminine if the referent is female. According to Drozdík, this relationship is restricted in all varieties of Arabic. An example is the noun ‘arūs ‘fiancé/fiancée’, which in Arabic can refer to both the male (in which case it takes masculine gender) and the female (in which case it is feminine). In Maltese, this noun can only refer to the male – għarus ‘fiancé’ – whereas a marked feminine form, għarusa, has also developed, referring specifically to the female.84 Hence, according to the criteria for the relationship discussed by Drozdík, the noun għarus, in the sense it has in Maltese, does not belong to this class but to class 1, discussed above.85 Some other examples of nouns that belong to this class are xādim, which, in CA and MSA, refers both to a male and a female servant, and the noun ‘ajūz, which in written modern Arabic refers both to an old man and an old woman. In the case of the noun ‘ajūz inherited by Maltese – għaġuż – it is worth noting that, by Drozdík’s criteria, it would fit into Class 1 because the noun refers exclusively to the male, while the marked form of the feminine għaġuża refers to the female. (iv) Class 4 (common gender): This class contains those nouns whose referent has no sex and can take two types of grammatical gender. Like the previous one, this relationship is limited in the varieties of Arabic. Some nouns that belong to this class include sikkīn ‘knife’, sūq ‘market’, ‘asal ‘honey’, lisān ‘tongue’ and samā’ ‘sky’. Note that in Maltese, these nouns take only one gender. Thus, the noun sikkina is feminine, having been regularized via the ending -a,86 while suq, għasel and lsien are masculine. In the case of sema, Maltese grammars list it as a masculine noun, but many use it as a feminine noun, as in the example Is-sema ċċarat u issa ħarġet ix-xemx.87,88 Note that, according to Aquilina’s dictionary (1990), the only inan-

|| 84 Egyptian Arabic also has the form ’arusat (‘fiancée/bride’). 85 In fact, Drozdík (1973: 228) states that many nouns that belong to this class (common sex – gender) can also alternate with those in Class 1 (sex – gender). Among them he mentions the nouns ‘arūs and hādim. In colloquial varieties of modern Arabic, the relationship (sex – gender) is more common than (common sex – gender). 86 The same has happened to the noun widna ‘ear’ in Maltese. 87 Is-sema ċċarat u issa ħarġet ix-xemx DEF-sky clear.3SG.M.PRF and now come-out.3SG.F.PRF DEF-sun ‘The sky has cleared and now the sun has come out’

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imate noun of Semitic origin that is considered to be of common gender and which therefore, by Drozdík’s criteria, belongs in this class, is the noun sewwa ‘goodness/truth’.89 In this class, Drozdík also includes certain CA collective nouns from which nouns of unity can be derived via the morpheme -at, which also functions as the feminine morpheme, for example ḥamām ‘pigeons’, baqar ‘cows’, and waraq ‘leaves’. However, in the colloquial varieties of modern Arabic, as well as in Maltese, these collective nouns are likely to be considered masculine. The noun baqar in Maltese has lost its collective sense and is today considered the plural of baqra ‘cow’.

4.4.3 Gender markers Nouns in Arabic can be marked for gender using a marker that is visible, for example, the feminine marker -at (e.g. malikat ‘queen’) or the masculine marker ’aKKaK (e.g. ’abyaḍ ‘white’); they may also not have a visible marker, as in the CA nouns qalb ‘heart’ (a masculine noun) or ‘ayn ‘eye’ (a feminine noun). Those nouns that do have a marker are referred to as “marked nouns”, while those without a visible marker for gender are referred to as “unmarked nouns”. In discussing the inflectional process involved in gender marking, Drozdík (1973: 237) distinguishes between: (a) external markers that depend exclusively on affixes (suffixes) and that always coincide with a single morpheme, as with the -at in malikat; and (b) combined markers which involve external morphemic constituents (affixes: prefixes and suffixes) as well as internal ones (i.e. particular forms or patterns). External markers are exclusively associated with the feminine gender. They include a number of principal variants of the feminine suffix -at in CA, among them -ah, -at, -at:, -t, -et, -a, -a:,90 -a:’.91 According to Ibrahim (1973: 41) although these endings appear synonymous, they may originally have had different

|| 88 Farrugia (2003: 208) found that 34% of adult informants and 52.8% of younger informants in his sample considered sema ‘sky’ as feminine. 89 In the concise version of Aquilina’s dictionary (2006), this noun is only listed as masculine. In this version of the dictionary, numbers of Arabic origin are assigned common gender. In the original version of the dictionary, some of the numbers were associated with one gender and others with the other. 90 See Drozdík (1973: 237–239). 91 This ending is given by Hämeen-Anttila (1999: 598).

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meanings. In some cases the feminine suffix may become an integral part of the root and be considered as its final radical, as in bint ‘daughter’ (√bnt), ‘uxt ‘sister’ (√’xt).92 Synchronically, as a constituent of the root morpheme, this “suffix” can sometimes function as an allomorph of the feminine morpheme, as shown by the following CA example: bint (a feminine noun unmarked for gender, √bnt) vs. ’ibna(t-un) (a feminine noun that is marked for gender, √bn), as compared to the masculine noun ’ibn (√bn). Against this background, it is interesting to note that, in the case of the Maltese noun oħt ‘sister’, the t is historically the feminine suffix that was integrated with the original root (ħu + –t) and which synchronically is no longer considered an allomorph of the feminine morpheme but as the remnant of a variant of the main marker of the feminine in Arabic. The case of the noun bint in Maltese is somewhat more complicated. The t in this word could be analyzed as it was in the case of oħt, if it is considered in the context of iben – bint, as well as an allomorph of the feminine morpheme if considered in the context of bin – bint. Combined gender markers, according to Drozdík, are associated both with the masculine and with the feminine and are found primarily in adjectives that denote a color or a defect. He cites as examples ’aswad – sawdā’ (‘black.SG.M – black.SG.F’) and says that in the case of the masculine they can be analyzed as a prefix + specific model, with a specific model + suffix in the case of the feminine. In his view, these markers function as part of a form and never function as a single morpheme. It is worth noting that cases similar to those mentioned by Drozdík are normally analyzed as two distinct forms, the masculine ’a12a3 and the feminine 1a23ā’.

4.5 Grammatical gender in Italian 4.5.1 Nouns that refer to inanimate objects In Italian, nouns can be either masculine or feminine. In the case of inanimate objects, the gender distinction is conventional, that is, there is no relationship between the masculine gender and the male sex, or the feminine gender and the female sex.

|| 92 Also in Maltese sidt (‘owner/mistress.F’).

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As a rule, inanimate nouns which end in -o are masculine, for example, il tempo93 ‘the.SG.M time’, il monumento ‘the.SG.M monument’, il quaderno ‘the.SG.M notebook’, but there are some exceptions, that is, nouns that are assigned the feminine gender despite ending in -o. Among these are: l’eco ‘the echo’, la mano ‘the.SG.F hand’, la radio ‘the.SG.F radio’, l’auto(mobile) ‘the car’, la foto(grafia) ‘the.SG.F photograph’, la moto (cicletta) ‘the.SG.F motorbike’. There also exists another group of masculine nouns that do not end in -o. These are nouns which are not of Latin origin and which end in a consonant, for example il film ‘the.SG.M film’, lo sport ‘the.SG.M sport’ and il tram ‘the.SG.M tram’. Nouns that end in -a, -i (many of them of Greek origin), -tà and -tù in Italian are generally feminine, for example la tavola ‘the.SG.F table’, la crisi ‘the.SG.F crisis’, la città ‘the.SG.F city’, la virtù ‘the.SG.F virtue’. Here too there are some exceptions, especially nouns that end in -ma and -ta, which are of Greek origin and keep their masculine gender, for example il clima ‘the.SG.M climate’, il dilemma ‘the.SG.M dilemma’, il diploma ‘the.SG.M diploma’, il fonema ‘the.SG.M phoneme’, il morfema ‘the.SG.M morpheme’, il programma ‘the.SG.M program’, il lemma ‘the.SG.M lemma’, il sistema ‘the.SG.M system’, il telegramma ‘the.SG.M telegram’, il tema ‘the.SG.M theme’, il diadema ‘the.SG.M diadem’, il problema ‘the.SG.M problem’. Among other exceptions, there are nouns which are borrowed from other languages which end in -a and are masculine, for example il kamasutra ‘the.SG.M kamasutra’, il mantra ‘the.SG.M mantra’, lo yoga ‘the.SG.M yoga’, as well as some nouns that refer to animals, such as il boa ‘the.SG.M boa’, il cobra ‘the.SG.M cobra’, il gorilla ‘the.SG.M gorilla’, il puma ‘the.SG.M puma’. Maltese nouns that were borrowed from Italian and which are counted as exceptions in the source language tend to become regularized in Maltese and take gender according to their ending. Thus, for example, eku ‘echo’ and radju ‘radio’ are masculine because they end in -u, while sistema ‘system’, telegramma ‘telegram’, klima ‘climate’, dilemma and similar nouns are feminine because they end in -a. In the case of the borrowed noun programma ‘program’, Maltese has kept the same gender as Italian, except that it has regularized the relationship between the noun ending and the assignment of a particular gender, in this case, the consonantal ending (after the vowel “a” in the original was dropped) and the masculine gender, i.e. programma → programm = masculine. Probably, the process was also influenced by the English form program.

|| 93 In the case of Italian, the examples include the article because this reflects the noun’s gender. The section on Arabic did not include articles since this language, like Maltese, does not have articles that agree with the noun in gender.

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Some other masculine nouns which in Italian end in -a and which, as a result, came to be considered feminine in Maltese include il cobra ‘the.SG.M cobra’, il delta ‘the.SG.M delta’, il guardaroba ‘the.SG.M wardrobe’, il pianeta ‘the.SG.M planet’, il pigiama ‘the.SG.M pajamas’, il proclama ‘the.SG.M proclamation’. Italian nouns that end in -e and refer to inanimates can be either masculine or feminine. Some masculine nouns that end in -e are il dente ‘the.SG.M tooth’, il fiume ‘the.SG.M river’, il codice ‘the.SG.M code’, il mare ‘the.SG.M sea’, il sole ‘the.SG.M sun’, il latte ‘the.SG.M milk’. Feminine nouns that have the same ending include la luce ‘the.SG.F light’, la fede ‘the.SG.F faith’, la legge ‘the.SG.F law’, la pace ‘the.SG.F peace’, la voce ‘the.SG.F voice’. Descriptive grammars give no criterion for gender assignment to these nouns. Speakers have to learn their gender by rote. Nouns like these that were borrowed into Maltese often changed the -e ending to -i and have the tendency to keep their original gender. Thus, fidi ‘faith’, liġi ‘law’, paċi ‘peace’ and vuċi ‘voice’ are feminine, while eżami ‘exam’, forti ‘fort’ and kalċi ‘chalice’ are masculine. Among the exceptions is the noun torri ‘tower’ (from Italian torre), which is feminine in Italian but masculine in Maltese.

4.5.2 Nouns that refer to people and animals Nouns that refer to people or animals normally take gender according to the referent’s sex, that is, those of male sex are masculine and those of the female sex are feminine. Examples include nonno ‘grandfather’, padre ‘father’, gatto ‘cat’, which are masculine, while nonna ‘grandmother’, madre ‘mother’ and gatta ‘female cat’ are feminine. This occurs even when the noun ending does not correspond to the gender it is associated with. For example, although the nouns messia ‘messiah’, pascià ‘pasha’, scriba ‘scribe’, duca ‘duke’ and papa ‘pope’ end in -a, they are still considered masculine because these roles were historically associated with men. Nevertheless, grammatical and natural gender do not always correspond. For example, there is a small group of nouns that, despite referring specifically to women, take masculine gender as a result of formal criteria (their ending), e.g. il contralto ‘the.SG.M contralto’, il mezzosoprano ‘the.SG.M mezzo-soprano’, il soprano ‘the.SG.M soprano’. Here, form takes precedence over semantics. Another group which has the opposite tendency includes nouns which, although they normally refer specifically to men, take feminine gender because their ending is associated with the feminine. Examples include la spia ‘the.SG.F spy’, la recluta ‘the.SG.F recruit’, la sentinella ‘the.SG.F sentinel’, la guardia

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‘the.SG.F guard’. In these cases, grammatical agreement continues to operate, for example Il soprano Maria Borg è bravo; La sentinella Luigi Cassar è attenta.94 Similar nouns borrowed from Italian into Maltese are likely to be treated as having common gender. Note that animate nouns can: (i) have two distinct forms, one for the feminine and one for the masculine. This is likely to occur with nouns which refer to persons and indicate a familial relationship, or with nouns that refer to animals. Examples include padre – madre ‘father/mother’; fratello – sorella ‘brother/sister’, marito – moglie ‘husband/wife’, uomo – donna ‘man/woman’, montone – pecora ‘ram/sheep’, toro – vacca ‘bull/ cow’; or (ii) have the same stem but with different endings, for example amico – amica ‘friend.M/friend.F’, avvocato – avvocatessa ‘lawyer.M/lawyer.F’, difensore – difenditrice ‘defender.M/defender.F’, l’imperatore – l’imperatrice ‘emperor/empress’; lettore – lettrice ‘reader.M/reader.F’, padrone – padrona ‘master/mistress’, poeta – poetessa ‘poet.M/poet.F’, studente – studentessa ‘student.M/student.F’; or (iii) have the same form, including the ending. In this case, nouns have common gender that is they are considered both masculine and feminine. The difference between the masculine and the feminine is made via another element in the host phrase or sentence, such as the form of the article that precedes them or that of a modifying adjective. Such nouns are likely to end in the following endings: -e, for example, nipote ‘nephew/niece’, custode ‘custodian’; -ante, for example, amante ‘lover’, cantante ‘singer’; -ista, for example, artista ‘artist’, dentista ‘dentist’; -ente, for example, cliente ‘client’, agente ‘agent’; -cida for example, omicida ‘homicide’ [used for the perpetrator]; -iatra, for example, pediatra ‘pediatrician’, psichiatra ‘psychiatrist’; -a which are of Greek origin, for example, atleta ‘athlete’, collega ‘colleague’. Among these nouns, those that have been borrowed into Maltese are treated either (i) in the same way, that is considered to have common gender (except that in Maltese, the difference between one gender and another does not emerge through the different articles used, as happens in Italian, but through grammat-

|| 94 Il soprano Maria Borg è the.SG.M soprano Maria Borg be.3SG.PRES ‘The soprano Maria Borg is good’ La sentinella Luigi Cassar è Luigi Cassar be.3SG.PRES the.SG.F sentinel ‘The sentinel Luigi Cassar is attentive’

bravo good.SG.M attenta attentive.SG.F

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ical agreement); for example psikjatra ‘psychiatrist’, pedjatra ‘pediatrician’, atleta ‘athlete’, kollega ‘colleague’; or (ii) distinguished through the creation in Maltese of two separate forms, one for the masculine and one for the feminine, for example dilettant/a ‘dilettante/beginner’, kantant/a ‘singer’, klijent/a ‘client’, pensjonant/a ‘pensioner’. Nouns such as these will be dealt with in more detail in Chapter 6.

4.5.3 Italian suffixes Several suffixes can be associated with a particular gender. For example, the suffixes -tore, -sore, -ore, -ione, -one are masculine, as in autore ‘author’, precursore ‘precursor’, colore ‘color’, campione ‘winner/ champion’, cannone ‘cannon’. On the other hand, the suffixes -trice, tora, -tudine, -zione, -sione, -gione, -essa and -ina are associated with the feminine, for example imperatrice ‘empress’, impostora ‘impostor.F’, altitudine ‘altitude’, nazione ‘nation’, visione ‘vision’, ragione ‘reason’, stagione ‘season’, prinċipessa ‘princess’, eroina ‘heroin’. All of these suffixes have infiltrated Maltese, some of them intact (as in the case of -essa and -ina), while others have undergone some minor modification at their periphery, for example -tudni (from Italian -tudine: gratitudni ‘gratitude’, solitudni ‘solitude’). Maltese nouns with these suffixes tend to either (i) drop the final vowel so that they are considered masculine, for example awtur (‘author’, prekursur ‘precursor’, kulur ‘color’, kanun ‘cannon’, staġun95 ‘season’ or (ii) change the vowel -e at the end into -i, so that the noun is likely to be considered feminine, for example, imperatriċi ‘empress’, altitudni ‘altitude’, viżjoni ‘vision’, raġuni ‘reason’, osservazzjoni ‘observation’. Some grammars of Italian, such as Patota (2007: 50), mention a particular problem faced by grammatical gender in Italian. This problem arises in relation to the feminine gender of some masculine nouns that refer to a profession or role, such as presidente ‘president’, ministro ‘minister’, architetto ‘architect’, deputato ‘deputy’, senatore ‘senator’, medico ‘doctor’. Until recently, nouns like these would have been used exclusively in the masculine because only men occupied these positions or practiced these professions. As a result of increased gender equality in the workplace and the removal of social barriers that excluded women from certain activities, many women began to occupy these professions and thus, the need arose for feminine forms for these nouns. Some of the-

|| 95 In this process, the vowel “o” at the end in Italian is changed to “u” in Maltese, for example cannone → kanun (‘canon’); direttore → direttur (‘director’).

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se forms were adopted without difficulty, for example dottoressa ‘doctor’, poetessa ‘poet’, professoressa ‘professor’, studentessa ‘student’, ambasciatrice ‘ambassador’, attrice ‘actress’, scrittrice writer’. However, there is still disagreement on the feminine form of certain professions, including: avvocato ‘lawyer’, architetto ‘architect’, chirurgo ‘surgeon’, ingegnere ‘engineer’, magistrato ‘magistrate’, medico ‘doctor’, notaio ‘notary’, ministro ‘minister’, deputato ‘deputy’, soldato ‘soldier’, giudice ‘judge’. For example, many Italian speakers are uncertain whether to use avvocata, avvocatessa, avvocato donna (‘lawyer woman’) or donna avvocato (‘woman lawyer’). Patota (2007: 50) has a three-fold reaction to this state of affairs: (i) he suggests that the masculine form should not also be used for the female sex, that is, there should be two distinct forms for the two genders; (ii) he disagrees with the idea that the word donna ‘woman’ be added to the masculine noun, as in donna magistrato ‘woman magistrate’ or sindaco donna ‘mayor woman’. In his view, these expressions focus on the person’s sex rather than their professional role; (iii) he doesn’t agree that the ending -essa be used with nouns whose feminine form is not yet established. In his view, the ending has an ironic or pejorative connotation. Nouns that refer to animals are likely to have a single form which is masculine or feminine and which refers to both sexes, making many of these epicene nouns. Examples include la farfalla ‘the.SG.M butterfly’ (for both male and female butterflies); la balena ‘the.SG.F whale’ (for both male and female whales); il delfino ‘the.SG.M dolphin’ (for both male and female dolphins), il serpente ‘the.SG.M snake’ (for both male and female snakes), la volpe ‘the.SG.F fox’ (for both male and female foxes).

4.5.4 Other categories Color terms are likely to be masculine even when their ending is not, as in il rosa ‘the.SG.M pink’, l’arancione ‘the.SG.M orange’, il viola ‘the.SG.M violet’. Names of wines also tend to be masculine even when they refer to places of origin whose names have the feminine ending -a, e.g. il Gattinara ‘the.SG.M Gattinara’, il Valpolicella ‘the.SG.M Valpolicella’, il Fontana Candida ‘the.SG.M Fontana Candida’. Names of trees, metals, months, mountains, seas, rivers and lakes also tend to be masculine. On the other hand, names of fruits, sciences, continents, states, regions, cities and islands are often feminine. However, there are excep-

90 | Grammatical gender according to descriptive grammars and dictionaries

tions in each of these categories.96 Nevertheless, it is possible to state that in Italian, gender assignment is based primarily on formal criteria (morphological and phonological), though at other times it is based on semantic criteria, such as biological sex.

4.6 A quantitative analysis The first part of this section outlined the criteria for gender assignment in Maltese according to recent descriptive and pedagogical grammars. In general, we have seen that these grammars agree that inanimate nouns that end in a consonant are masculine while those that end in -a are feminine, with a few exceptions. The vocalic ending -u is also associated with the masculine while, among nouns that end in -i, some are associated with the feminine and others with the masculine. Nouns that end in -o and -e are not discussed in any detail in these grammars. They are usually only mentioned in relation to geographical names and are considered masculine, while those ending in -e are mentioned in the grammar of Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander as part of the suffixes -ite and -ojde and are considered feminine. To date, there has been no quantitative study of the relationship between noun endings and their associated gender, especially for vowel endings other than -a. Thus, one of the aims of the present work is to investigate this. For this purpose, a large database containing as many nouns as possible was needed. These nouns were harvested from Aquilina’s Maltese-English dictionary (in two volumes, 1987 and 1990), which is hereafter referred to as the original version, as well as from the concise version of this dictionary published in 2005. The concise version was included for three reasons: (i) because of the introduction of new nouns that were not included in the original version; (ii) because some nouns in the original version, for some reason, were not assigned a grammatical gender, but this was rectified in the concise version; and (iii) because the gender of some nouns changed from the original to the concise version. In this case, the gender assigned in the concise version was considered, as it is the most recent and presumably gives a more faithful picture of the gender associated with a noun in the present.

|| 96 For a complete list of these categories, with examples, see Dardano & Trifone (1995: 173– 174).

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4.6.1 The collection of nouns The process of collecting nouns took around eighteen months. A total of 22,867 nouns were collected, namely, all nouns from the dictionary lemmas for which a grammatical gender is given, with the exception of names of people (e.g. Abram, Dwardu, Filep, Ġielka) and names of places in Malta (e.g. ta’ l-Addolorata, ta’ lAnġlu). However, nouns that refer to countries (for example, Arġentina, Brażil) were considered.97 As a rule, when the dictionary listed variants of the same lemma (which had the same ending), the first listed form was used, for example, abbondanza ‘abundance’ and not abbundanza, unless one of the other variants was considered to be in more common usage. In the latter case, the more common variant was considered, for example, emir not amir. In case some variants had different endings, for example abeċe (an archaic term for the alphabet, equivalent to ‘ABC’) and abiċi, both were considered because of the correlation between noun endings and specific genders that was carried out as part of this study. In case the variants had different origins, for example ġavelin ‘javelin’ (from English) and ġavellott (from Italian), both were considered as well, although the dictionary lists them under a single head word. Homonymous nouns (e.g. the noun far = (1) large rat; (2) lighthouse), were counted as two entries or more in the database, depending on the number of senses they had. In some cases, a noun was assigned different genders depending on its sense, for example, the noun anatema ‘anathema’, which was considered as feminine in its “excommunication” sense and as a noun of common gender when it refers to a person. In such cases, the noun was given two entries in the database. Apart from their gender, the origin of the nouns that were collected was considered, in order to address the question whether gender assignment criteria in Maltese apply in the same way to nouns of different origins. The origin was considered in those cases where it was clearly indicated in the dictionary98, using the sign “