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?

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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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North Ambrym possessive classifiers from the perspective of canonical gender

This study investigates the possessive classifier system in North Ambrym, arguing it is an instance of non-canonical gender.

Abstract

Linguists draw both typological (Dixon 1986) and morphosyntactic (Grinevald 2000) distinctions between classifiers and gender systems. However, these two systems show many functional similarities (Kilarski 2013). Canonical Gender (Corbett and Fedden 2016) is an attempt to unify the two systems. This chapter investigates the possessive classifier system in North Ambrym (Oceanic) and argues, using psycholinguistic experiments, that it is an instance of non-canonical gender as more than 50% of the nouns tested adhere to the Canonical Gender Principle (Corbett and Fedden 2016: 503). Nouns which are prototypical possessions and are closer to the core of the classifier’s semantic categories are restricted to occur with just one classifier. Nouns which are less prototypical possessions and further away from the semantic core of the classifier categories are able to be assigned different classifiers. These two underlying factors are what drives internal variation in adherence to the Canonical Gender Principle.

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