• Noun classes/genders: usually a fairly small set (<7 in most cases outside Africa), are marked on multiple words at once, commonly distinguishes male/female or animate/inanimate
• Noun classifiers: commonly small (<20) but may be a larger set, most commonly occur as free words next to the noun
• Numeral classifiers: can be a very large set, occur next to numerals to specify what you’re counting
• Possessive classifiers: occur in a possessive construction to show the exact relationship between two nouns
• Verbal classifiers: incorporated into the verb to show what kind of object it’s acting on
• Deictic classifiers: incorporated into deictic words (like ‘this’ or ‘that’) to precisely specify the kind and orientation of the object you’re referring to
And then of course these overlap somewhat. Tuyuca — the language with ‘50–150 noun classes’ — has a set of classifiers which act simultaneously as numeral classifiers, possessive classifiers and deictic classifiers, as well as modifying adjectives. GP’s example of Bora seems to use numeral classifiers.
(All this is taken from Aikhenvald’s Classifiers, which is probably the best resource if you want to know more about this.)
Greville Corbett, for example, who has written a textbook about "Gender" (in the linguistic sense), defines gender as a type of noun classification which triggers agreement. In that sense, he doesn't require that it be centered around male/female or animate/inanimate. Other linguists will use different terminology.
Aargh… I don’t want to think about it. Just don’t get me started on the literature on SVCs, alright?
(My favourite linguistics quote, from Anderson’s A-Morphous Morphology: ‘Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.’ Oddly enough, he spends the rest of the book stepping on the toes of everyone else.)
> Greville Corbett, for example, who has written a textbook about "Gender" (in the linguistic sense), defines gender as a type of noun classification which triggers agreement.
Aikhenvald concurs, though she prefers the term ‘noun class’ over ‘gender’.
Yeah, that seems like a huge minefield. Another one is anything related to aspect, Aktionsart and any combination thereof. Or, one of my favourites, active-stative/split intransitivity/split-S/semantic alignment.
> ‘Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.’
That's a nice quote. One reason why I became annoyed with linguistics is exactly this feeling that there wasn't enough progress because people couldn't even agree on basic definitions.
Oh yes, that confused me for a very long time. Thankfully I mostly understand it now (with the help of the good people at https://www.verduria.org/index.php), but no-one seems to be able to agree on terminology.
> Or, one of my favourites, active-stative/split intransitivity/split-S/semantic alignment.
Ooh, I wrote a whole series of essays on that! [0] Morphosyntactic alignment is a favourite topic of mine. (I perhaps didn’t spend as much time on split intransitivity as I should have… I really should write an addendum or something which properly covers split intransitivity. Know any good resources, by any chance?)
I'll have to check your essays too!
edit: just had a quick look (not in detail yet). I love that you're using basically the same example sentences from Dixon that I also used in my thesis.
(And, yes, there’s only so many example sentences to go around :) )
It's quite impressive how much you know without formal training. I spent years learning about these subjects. However, since graduating in 2013, I haven't really done anything with linguistics.
Oh, I completely agree. I personally quite like Deal’s ‘ergative’ and ‘absolutive properties’ [0] as a first attempt; but I haven’t yet seen Lazard and Haspelmath, so I should look into that more.
[0] http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~ardeal/papers/Deal-ergativi...
> It's quite impressive how much you know without formal training. I spent years learning about these subjects.
Why, thank you! But I don’t think I’m so different in this respect: I spent a good portion of my spare time last year reading everything I could find about ergativity, and had read lots about linguistics even before that. (What can I say; it’s an interesting subject!)
Interesting. Wikipedia says that Bora has more than 350 "classifiers", but that doesn't seem to be the same concept as genders. There is a specific section at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)#Noun_... contrasting classifiers and "noun classes", of which grammatical genders are a special case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_g... lists one language with "50–140 noun classes", several Bantu languages with 16-20 of them, and apparently all other languages of the world have significantly fewer. (I am not a linguist.)