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?

People

Learn more about members of the project, including:

Researchers

Stakeholders

Consultants

Languages

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.

Experiments

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.

Outreach

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.

Publications

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

Talks

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

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All Talks

Optimal categorisation: Tracking Change in Endangered Languages

Languages categorise nouns in very different ways. One example is possessive classifier systems, which we are investigating in six endangered Oceanic languages. Our psycholinguistic experiments have revealed several new classifiers not previously documented, as well as considerable inter-speaker variation.

All Talks