Re: person specification (polite/familiar)

From: John Atkinson (johnacko_at_bigpond.com)
Date: 02/16/05 

Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 05:26:06 GMT

"Neeraj Mathur" <neemathur@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:cuu760$nnq$1@news.ox.ac.uk...
>
> "Herb Martin" <news@LearnQuick.com> wrote...

> > There could just as easily have been additional
> > "Persons" for gender, especially for natural gender.
> >
> [snip]
>
> 1) There could not have been additional 'person' categories based on
gender
> in languages of the Indo-European type, because of the statistics. It is
> true that gender is a feature of these languages, but its operation - as
an
> observer - is different: the one causes agreement in the finite verb, and
> the other causes agreement in nouns/adjectives/pronouns. There are
> definitely statistical reasons for considering these to be real categories
> (such as the statistics that correlate the use of the form 'is' with a
> different pronoun from that associated with the form 'am', despite
> occasional non-standard forms like "I's gonna tell you how it is").
> Therefore it is not true that 'there could just as easily have been
> additional "persons" for gender' since gender does not seem to have any
> statistical relationship with forms of the finite verb: it is this
> relationship that linguists would describe with the word 'gender'.

But in Bantu languages, for example, gender (noun class) of subject and
object *does* have a relationship with forms of the finite verb. The
prefixes involved go into the same slots and behave in just the same way as
those which are used when the subject or object is 1st or 2nd person.

Even if you insist on sticking to languages "of the Indo-European type",
there are cases where gender does "have a relationship with forms of the
finite verb". Admitedly, it's mostly restricted to particular tenses (past
in Russian and, IIRC, Hindi), and the gender suffixes don't work in exactly
the same way as the person suffixes.

In any case, if you're trying to establish as a linguistic universal that
'person' categories *can't* be based on gender, surely it's cheating to
restrict yourself to just one family.

John.

Relevant Pages

  • How many proto-languages?
    ... I've never been convinced by the arguments for a single proto-language. ... What I have noticed from the small number of modern languages I have ... Ones without gender, e.g. Finnish ... Holes of ignorance (I know nothing of class and/or gender in Khoi/San, ...
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  • Re: person specification (polite/familiar)
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  • Re: Indo-European Languages and Gramatical Gender Loss
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  • Re: How many proto-languages?
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