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

Oceanic languages are well known for their possessive classifier systems. Typically, a noun can occur with different classifiers, depending on how the possessed item is used by the possessor (Lichtenberk 1983). For example, wi ‘water’ in Lewo (Vanuatu) occurs with either the general or drinkable classifier depending on how the water is used (Early 1994:216) :

In marked contrast, North Ambrym’s (Vanuatu) cognate for water – we – only occurs with the drinkable classifier (2a), but not the general classifier (2b) (Franjieh 2016:95):

We argue that North Ambrym’s system resembles a gender system: a noun must occur with a particular classifier regardless of contextual interactions. We seek to establish empirically whether gender systems can indeed emerge from classifiers in this way. We must also uncover how and why languages relinquish a useful, meaningful classificatory system, and adopt a rigid, apparently unmotivated gender system. We have designed and piloted novel experiments to compare possessive classifier systems in Oceanic. We will run the experiments on six languages from Vanuatu and New Caledonia. The experiments are designed to investigate both the origin and nature of the new systems:

1. Free listing, to establish the central members of a classifier’s semantic domains.
2. Card sorting will reveal how speakers categorise relevant nouns and whether conceptual groupings map onto classifiers.
3. Video and audio vignettes, depicting typical and atypical interactions with different items, will be used to ascertain whether there is a rigid assignment of nouns to classifiers; or whether speakers are free to use different classifiers.
4. A possessive labelling experiment will be based on a list of the central and non-central nouns from each language generated by free-listing to uncover the extent of the classifiers’ semantic domains.
5. Eye tracking will be employed to reveal how speakers map congruent and incongruent visual cues onto auditory cues, providing information on the cognitive processing of classifiers.
6. Storyboards designed to elicit grammatical constructions of anaphora will establish whether there is consistency in the use of classifier.
7. Category training with UK participants will investigate the relative cognitive cost of each classifier system. Separate groups of English monolinguals will be trained to categorise a set of exemplar nouns according to the gender systems of each of the sample languages to explore whether cognitive complexity is a reason for grammatical change.

We will present pilot data from three of these experiments, suggesting that the classifier systems tested represent different stages of grammaticalisation from classifier to gender markers, and reveal intriguing inter-speaker variation in classifier choice.

References
Franjieh, Michael. 2016. Indirect Possessive Hosts in North Ambrym: Evidence for Gender. Oceanic Linguistics 55:87-115.

Early, Robert. 1994. A Grammar of Lewo, Vanuatu. Ph.D. thesis, Australian National University, Canberra.

Lichtenberk, Frantisek. 1983. Relational Classifiers. Lingua 60(2-3):147–176.