This handbook offers a detailed account of grammatical gender and classifiers, two closely related linguistic phenomena that are used to subcategorize the nominal system in many languages of the world. The contributors draw on data from a variety of typologically diverse languages and approach the topic from a range of different perspectives. In the first part, chapters summarize current theoretical research in the field, as well as suggesting new ways to analyse the relevant lexico-syntactic features. Part II turns instead to the substantial body of research on the acquisition of gender and classifier systems in different language families, while chapters in Part III explore the representation and processing of these systems, including coverage of code-switching and language processing in aphasia. Both these parts feature examples and data not only from Indo-European languages but also from under-represented and endangered languages. The final part of the volume presents a broad typological overview of gender and classifier systems across the world, with examples from Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Classifiers will be a valuable resource for researchers and scholars in morphosyntax, typology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience of language.
This handbook offers a detailed account of grammatical gender and classifiers, two closely related linguistic phenomena that are used to subcategorize the nominal system in many languages of the world. The chapters approach the topic from a range of perspectives and draw on data from a variety of typologically diverse languages.
Part I. Grammatical gender and classifiers in linguistic theory 1:
Sebastian Fedden and Greville G Corbett: Typology of grammatical gender and
classifiers 2: Walter Bisang: Nominal classification from a typological
perspective 3: Sandrine Zufferey, Ute Gabriel, and Pascal Gygax: Grammatical
gender versus natural gender 4: Ruth Kramer: Gender assignment and classifier
association 5: Jenny Audring: Grammatical gender agreement systems 6: Artemis
Alexiadou and Terje Lohndal: Grammatical gender in syntactic theory Part II.
Acquisition of grammatical gender and classifiers 7: Tanja Kupisch, Monika
Lindauer, and Tobias Ruberg: The acquisition of grammatical gender in German
8: Brechje Van Osch: The acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch 9: Yulia
Rodina and Marit Westergaard: The acquisition of grammatical gender in North
Germanic languages 10: Tanja Kupisch, Cristina Flores, Silvina Montrul, and
Sílvia Perpiñán: The acquisition of gender in Romance languages 11: Tanya
Ivanova-Sullivan, Oksana Laleko, Natalia Meir, Natalia Mitrofanova, and Yulia
Rodina: The acquisition of grammatical gender in Slavic languages 12: Maki
Kubota, Junko Kanero, and Jiuzhou Hao: The acquisition of classifiers 13:
Katherine Demuth: The acquisition of noun class prefixes in Bantu languages
Part III. Representation and processing of grammatical gender and classifiers
14: Niels O. Schiller and Ana Rita Sá Leite: The psycholinguistics of
grammatical gender 15: Zhiying Qian: The psycholinguistics of classifiers 16:
Niels O. Schiller and José Alemán Bañón: The neurolinguistics of grammatical
gender 17: Man Wang and Niels O. Schiller: The neurolinguistics of
classifiers 18: M. Carmen Parafita Couto, Kate Bellamy, Jorge R. Valdés
Kroff, and Pedro Mateo Pedro: Nominal classification in code-switching 19:
Giorgio Piazza and Marco Calabria: Grammatical gender processing in aphasia
20: Mulugeta T. Tsegaye: Field-based psycholinguistics of gender processing
in endangered minority languages Part IV. Typology of grammatical gender and
classifiers 21: Tor Anders Åfarli and Terje Lohndal: Grammatical gender in
Germanic languages 22: Michele Loporcaro: Grammatical gender in Romance
languages 23: Bernhard Brehmer: Grammatical gender in the Slavic languages
24: Saskia Dunn and Françoise Rose: Classifiers in Arawak languages 25:
Marianne Mithun: Grammatical gender in North American languages 26: Roland
Kießling: Grammatical gender and classifiers in African languages 27: Giorgio
Francesco Arcodia and Bianca Basciano: Classifiers in East and Mainland
Southeast Asian languages 28: Maria Polinsky and Victoria Chen: Grammatical
gender and classifiers in Austronesian languages 29: Ulrika Klomp, Maria
Kopf, and Cornelia Loos: Grammatical and semantic gender in sign languages
Niels O. Schiller is Chair Professor of Psycho- and Neurolinguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Translation at City University of Hong Kong. His area of expertise is language production, more specifically the representation and processing of lexico-syntactic features such as grammatical gender and classifiers during noun phrase production. He is also interested in morphological and phonological encoding during speech production, and his experimental work mostly makes use of behavioural and electrophysiological methods. He is the co-editor, with Greig I. de Zubicaray, of The Oxford Handbook of Neurolinguistics (OUP 2019), and has published extensively in a wide range of journals in the field.
Tanja Kupisch is Professor of Linguistics at Lund University. Her research explores various dimensions of multilingualism, including multilingual L1, L2, and L3 acquisition and bilectalism. She is particularly interested in minority languages and links to diachronic change, and she is a member of the Cluster of Excellence 'The Politics of Inequality', where she contributes research on linguistic inequality. She is the co-editor of the journal Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, and her publications include Language Policy and Language Acquisition Planning (co-edited with Maarja Siiner and Francis Hult; Springer 2019) and Formal Linguistics and Language Education (co-edited with Andreas Trotzke; Springer 2020).
