Ebook: The Expression of Gender

De Gruyter Mouton, 2014. — v, 225 pages. — (The Expression of Cognitive Categories). — ISBN: 978-3-11-030733-7.Gender is an endlessly fascinating category. It has obvious links to the real world, first in the connection between many grammatical gender systems and biological sex, and second in other types of categorization such as size, which underpin particular gender systems and also have external correlates. While in some languages the way in which gender is assigned to nouns is semantically transparent, for example, in Dravidian languages such as Tamil, others are rather opaque: though their systems still have a semantic core, there is much more to be said about gender in familiar languages like French or German. Of course, there are other grammatical categories with links to the real world, but compared with these gender is surprising in that it appears to be an “optional extra”. That is, many of the world’s languages have gender, but many (probably somewhat over half) do not. The differences continue: in some languages gender is a relatively superficial matter, while in others it is central, being found through the noun phrase and on the verb by agreement, and interacting in morphology with other features, typically number, case and person. Thus the description of some languages requires constant detailed reference to gender, and for others it is absent.Introduction
Gender and its relation to sex: The myth of ‘natural’ gender
Gender determined dialect variation
Ladies and gentlemen: Word order and gender in English
Gender typology
Gender and culture
Psycholinguistic approaches to the investigation of grammatical gender
Plural as a value of Cushitic gender: Evidence from gender congruency effect experiments in Konso (Cushitic)