What is it about?
Nouns in some languages have genders (like masculine/feminine/neuter). In some languages they have classifiers (like round/flat/long). It's rare to have both systems concurrently. We present a way to categorize the amount of concurrency of these two systems and a formal measure of concurrency, and we apply it to Mian, a language from Papua, which has four genders and six classifiers.
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Why is it important?
This analysis matters because it shows that in linguistic argumentation it is important to be explicit about definitions and base them on carefully analyzed cases. It also matters for psycholinguistics and the question of how speakers acquire and use features concurrently.
Perspectives
I especially like the paper's analysis of orthogonality of systems, which leads to numeric measures that one can compare across languages.
Raphael Finkel
University of Kentucky
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Single versus concurrent systems: Nominal classification in Mian, Linguistic Typology, January 2017, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/lingty-2017-0006.
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