Why is gender so complex? Some typological considerations

A cross-linguistic survey shows that languages with gender can have very high levels of morphological complexity, especially where gender is coexponential with case as in many Indo-European languages. If languages with gender are complex overall, apart from their gender, then gender can be regarded as an epiphenomenon of overall language complexity that tends to arise only as an incidental complication in already complex morphological systems. I test and falsify that hypothesis; apart from the gender paradigms themselves, gender languages are no more complex than others. The same is shown for the other main classificatory categories of nouns, numeral classifiers and possessive classes. Person, the other important indexation category, proves to be less complex, and I propose that the reason for this is that person, but not gender, is referential, allowing hierarchical patterning to emerge as a decomplexifying mechanism.Peer reviewe

Morphological complexity of languages refle ts the settlement history of the Americas

Morphological complexity is widely believed to increase with sociolinguistic isolation, and to decrease with language spreads and absorption of L2 adult learner populations. However, this can be assessed only for communities with well-described histories. Morphological complexity has also been shown to be greater in higher-altitude languages, which are often sociolinguistically isolated, so we use altitude as an empirically determinable proxy for sociolinguistics. In past research, only a very few small locations have been surveyed and the measures of complexity used were family-specific and not easily generalizable. We apply several improved measures of complexity and show that the correlation holds, especially in the Andean regions of South America. We discuss the implications of the South American pattern for the settlement of the Americas and post-settlement prehistoric population formation.Peer reviewe

Appositive possession in Ainu and around the Pacific

Some languages around the Pacific have multiple possessive classes of alienable constructions using appositive nouns or classifiers. This pattern differs from the most common kind of alienable/inalienable distinction, which involves marking, usually affixal, on the possessum, and has only one class of alienables. The Japanese language isolate Ainu has possessive marking that is reminiscent of the Circum-Pacific pattern. It is distinctive, however, in that the possessor is coded not as a dependent in an NP but as an argument in a finite clause, and the appositive word is a verb. This paper gives a first comprehensive, typologically grounded description of Ainu possession and reconstructs the pattern that must have been standard when Ainu was still the daily language of a large speech community; Ainu then had multiple alienable class constructions. We report a cross-linguistic survey expanding previous coverage of the appositive type and show how Ainu fits in. We split alienable/inalienable into two different phenomena: Argument structure (with types based on possessibility: optionally possessible, obligatorily possessed, and non-possessible) and valence (alienable, inalienable classes). Valence-changing operations are derived alienability and derived inalienability. Our survey classifies the possessive systems of languages in these terms.Peer reviewe

Transitivizing-detransitivizing typology and language family history

Peer reviewe

On Direct and Oblique Cases

Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1983), pp. 170-19

The Origin of Nominal Classification

Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1989), pp. 409-42

The Historical Geography of Pharyngeals and Laterals in the Caucasus

Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Caucasian, Dravidian, and Turkic Linguistics (2000

The Meeting of East and West: Confrontation and Convergence in Contemporary Linguistics

Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1979), pp. 260-27

Ingush Transitivization and Detransitivization

Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1982