Feature GB171: Can an adnominal demonstrative agree with the noun in gender/noun class?

Patrons: Jeremy Collins and Jay Latarche

Description ⇫

Summary

For this feature, we are interested in noun classes (classes which nouns belong to based on properties such as gender, animacy, or shape and can be identified through agreement with a modifier). We are not looking at noun classifiers (classifiers classify the noun and occur independently from other elements). Demonstratives are adnominal modifiers that mark position. This feature asks whether demonstratives can agree in gender/noun class with their head noun, whether or not the head noun is overtly marked for gender/noun class.

Procedure

  1. Code 1 if there is a morpheme that is used with at least some demonstratives to indicate noun class agreement with their head noun,
  2. And there is a fixed number of these morphemes (i.e. a fixed number of genders, as opposed to them being classifiers).
  3. Code 0 if the author states that there is no gender/noun class system, or if there is no evidence of this in the data.

Examples

Bena (Tanzania) (ISO 639-3: bez, Glottolog: bena1262)

Coded 1. "Morphologically, demonstratives are marked to agree with their head noun in class; all demonstratives are composed of an agreement class marker and some sort of demonstrative stem" (Morrison 2011: 126–127).

i-N-yuumba       yi-la
AUG-CL9-house    CL9-DIST.DEM
‘that house’ (Morrison 2011: 139)

Koy Sanjaq Jewish Neo-Aramaic (ISO 639-3: kqd, Glottolog: koys1242)

Demonstratives only distinguish number (Mutzafi 2004: 64). Koy Sanjaq Jewish Neo-Aramaic is coded 0.

Further reading

Corbett, Greville G. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Corbett, Greville G. 2013. Number of genders. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds), The world atlas of language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

References

Morrison, Michelle Elizabeth. 2011. A reference grammar of Bena. (Doctoral dissertation, Austin: University of Texas at Austin)

Mutzafi, Hezy. 2004. The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Koy Sanjaq (Iraqi Kurdistan). (Semitica Viva, 32.) Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.


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0 absent 1622
1 present 513
? Not known 108
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Values ⇫

Name Glottocode Family Macroarea Contributor Value Source Comment