Video vignettes | Nominal Categorisation

Optimal Categorisation

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Optimal Categorisation

Current Project

Optimal Categorisation: the origin and nature of gender from a psycholinguistic perspective.

Grammatical gender is perplexing concept that has raised an abundance of questions around its origin, impact and the classification of entities in various languages. With the primary question being: Why are there so many different categorisation systems?

Learn more about members of the project, including:

With the objective to investigate the formation and development of gender in language and its interplay with cognition, six interconnected languages have been selected with distinctive possessive classifier systems. The sample of Oceanic languages encompass those spoken in Vanuatu and New Caledonia.

To further comprehend the nature and origin of grammatical gender six psycholinguistic experiments have been developed. These experiments investigate classifier systems within the six oceanic languages, collecting data to investigate our hypotheses.

Using our data, with the support of local stakeholders, we are creating vital vernacular literacy materials to help support these endangered languages. We are also interacting with the public to share, explain, and teach about these remarkable varieties of nominal categorisation.

Our team has published several papers as a result of our research, with other papers being written and reviewed.

Our researchers have given a number of talks as part of our outreach efforts to share the project findings.

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Video Vignette

Video vignettes were used to investigate three key criteria (i) the amount of overlap between noun and classifier, (ii) the semantic (mis)match between verb and classifier, and (iii) the typicality of contextual interaction.

Method

Participants of the 6 different languages watched the same 24 video vignettes; these were designed to investigate the use of classifiers when the items depicted in the vignettes are used in different interactional contexts. Participants were asked to describe in one simple sentence what the actor was doing with their possessions, thus evoking a possessive classifier. Since the classifier inventories vary across the sample languages, we tested their three main classifier categories – GENERAL, DRINK, and FOOD.

Results

Initial results for the Video Vignette task can be found in our Exling proceedings paper: Uncovering variation in classifier assignment in Oceanic.

Data

Data can be accessed…

A Nêlêmwa speaker watching the video vignettes with project consultant Anne-Laure Dotte behind

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