{"id":10672,"date":"2017-11-27T06:00:29","date_gmt":"2017-11-27T10:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=10672"},"modified":"2017-11-27T06:39:45","modified_gmt":"2017-11-27T10:39:45","slug":"mit-colloquium-121-nina-sumbatova-rsuh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2017\/11\/27\/mit-colloquium-121-nina-sumbatova-rsuh\/","title":{"rendered":"MIT Colloquium 12\/1 - Nina Sumbatova (RSUH)"},"content":{"rendered":"
Speaker: <\/b>Nina Sumbatova<\/a>\u00a0(Russian State University for the Humanities)<\/div>\n
Title:\u00a0<\/b>Referential, Radical Alliterative, and other uncommon instances of gender agreement<\/div>\n
Time:\u00a0<\/b>Friday, December 1st, 3:30-5pm<\/div>\n
Place:\u00a0<\/b>32-155<\/div>\n
Abstract:<\/b><\/div>\n
\n

According to the widely cited definition by Charles Hockett, \u0093genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words\u0094 (Hockett 1958: 231). In other words,\u00a0genders are defined via agreement. At the same time, in most languages with gender\u00a0systems, the speakers cannot determine the gender of an arbitrary noun neither by its\u00a0meaning nor by any formal properties \u0096\u00a0it is a lexical feature of the noun and should be\u00a0kept in the lexicon.<\/p>\n

However, there is a whole number of languages whose gender systems are described as totally semantic as well as some languages where (almost) all nouns are assigned to particular genders by applying some simple and highly regular formal rules. In\u00a0this talk, I shall discuss some languages of these two types.<\/p>\n

First, I shall present the data of Dargwa (East Caucasian), a language with a\u00a0\u0093semantic\u0094 gender system. I hope to show that gender assignment in Dargwa is rather based on the properties of the NP referents than on the lexical features of the nouns.<\/p>\n

Second, I shall discuss the possibility of systems where gender is assigned solely by a set of\u00a0rules and probably does need to be stored in the lexicon. The language of Landuma (Mel < Niger-Congo) is a unique example of a language where the choice of agreement markers seems to be conditioned by a purely phonological rule. The \u0093gender\u0094 system in Landuma\u00a0needs a serious discussion, since it looks as a violation of the well-known principle of phonology-free syntax (Zwicky 1969; Zwicky, Pullum 1986, etc.).<\/p>\n

The data of Dargwa and Landuma were obtained in course of fieldwork in Daghestan (Russian Federation) and in the Republic of Guinea, respectively.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaker: Nina Sumbatova\u00a0(Russian State University for the Humanities) Title:\u00a0Referential, Radical Alliterative, and other uncommon instances of gender agreement Time:\u00a0Friday, December 1st, 3:30-5pm Place:\u00a032-155 Abstract: According to the widely cited definition by Charles Hockett, \u0093genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words\u0094 (Hockett 1958: 231). In other words,\u00a0genders are defined via agreement. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10672"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10678,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10672\/revisions\/10678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}