From the start of his intensive investigation Corbett has been concerned with the native speaker’s ability to allot nouns to gender (Corbett 1982;
1991, Corbett and Fraser 2000inter alia). In his monumental work, Corbett (1991) formulates two sets of assignment rules necessary to establish a noun’s gender: semantic, as in (24), and morphological, as in (25), which may form
part of the native speaker’s competence.
(24) Semantic assignment rules in Russian:
a. Sex-differentiable nouns denoting males (humans and higher an-imals) are masculine.
b. Sex-differentiable nouns denoting females are feminine.
(25) Morphological assignment rules in Russian:
a. nouns of declensional class I are masculine;
b. nouns of declensional class II and III are feminine;
c. nouns of declensional class IV are neuter.
Furthermore, in order to account for the gender of nouns like papa ‘daddy’
Corbett postulates a hierarchy of gender assignment rules where the semantic rules take precedence over morphological rules.
(26) Gender Hierarchy according to Corbett (1991):
Semantic rules>> Morphological rules (>> = “outrank”)
Clearly, nouns likepapa demonstrate that the semantic assignment rules are dominant: masculine gender is assigned to these nouns by virtue of their semantics, more specifically, by the semantic rule in (24-a), which outranks the morphological rule in (25-b). While it is correct that in the case of papa-type nouns and male names in -a the conflict is resolved in favor of the semantically based principles, the argument may be weakened by other facts, which are considered below.
In a more recent work, Corbett and Fraser (2000:321) claim that seman-tics is the core of any gender system:
“As is universally the case, the formal assignment rules [. . . ] are dominated by the semantic gender assignment rules.”
Corbett and Fraser’s claim about the universally dominant role of the semantic principles is based on typological evidence from over 200 languages, namely, there are languages where semantic information alone is sufficient for gender assignment (e.g. Godoberi, Tamil, among others), but there are no languages where formal information (phonological and/or morphological) is sufficient on its own. According to Corbett and Fraser, Russian is an example of a morphological assignment system “where semantic information is supplemented by morphological [. . . ] information” (Corbett and Fraser 2000:294).
This idea seems rather paradoxical given that formal information allows correct gender assignment for the majority of Russian nouns. Thus it has
much larger scope than the semantic criterion. Moreover, the decisive role of the semantic rules is unambiguously evident only for the nouns like papa
‘daddy’ and male names in -a, which are rather few compared to the rest of the nouns.
The universal dominance of the semantic rules stated in (26) has been questioned by various researchers, who suggest that it might be too strong to refer to the general notion of the semantic rules as proposed by Corbett and Fraser (Dahl 2000, Nesset 2006). According to them the problem arises when one considers languages, like e.g. German, where formal rules cover a small proportion of the vocabulary. In these languages the researchers have postulated numerous semantic rules, some of which do not refer to biological sex and may be overridden by a morphological or phonological rule. For example, German superordinate nouns like die Waffe ‘weapon’ or die Frucht ‘fruit’ are feminine by virtue of the morphological rule (27-b) and the phonological (27-c) respectively (from Nesset 2006:1386, after Steinmetz 1986:190). This is problematic from Corbett and Fraser’s position, since the semantic rule in (27-a) loses in both cases.
(27) a. Superordinate nouns are neuter (e.g. das M¨obel ‘furniture’).
b. Nouns in -e are feminine (e.g. die Hose trousers’).
c. Nouns in /uxt/ are feminine (e.g. die Bucht ‘bay’).
Based on such evidence, Nesset (2006) has advanced the “Core Semantic Override Principle”, according to which only semantic rules invoking biolog-ical sex take precedence (from Nesset 2006:1386):14
(28) The Core Semantic Override Principle:
Rules referring to biological sex take precedence in gender assign-ment.
Yet, Russian data discussed in Sections 2.4.2, 2.4.3, and 2.4.4 seem to be problematic for the theories that postulate dominance of semantic or sex-based principles. In all three structures in (29) agreement has a mor-phological justification, which means that semantic/sex-based rules fail to assign gender to these nouns. It also means that morphological rules take precedence over the semantic/sex-based rules.
(29) a. vraˇc physician
priˇsel comeP ST.M
(female) (female)
‘the physician came’
14Previously Dahl (2000:102) pointed out that sex is the “major” gender criterion in languages with more than one gender for animates.
b. Pomniˇs,
The evidence in (29) suggests that it may be premature to draw conclusions on the question whether semantic/sex-based rules always take precedence in gender assignment.15 Some researchers (e.g. Steinmetz 1985; 1986, Rice 2006) argue that gender assignment constraints are equally ranked, so that semantics and morphology (or phonology) contribute to the process to the same extent. Nevertheless, as I show below, this view is also unlikely to account for all the facts.
Within the optimal gender assignment theory, Rice (2006) proposes that gender conflicts are resolved on the basis of the default or markedness hier-archy, formulated in (30) for Russian (from Steinmetz 1986:26):
(30) Default Hierarchy for Modern Russian:
Masculine>> Feminine >> Neuter (>> = “outrank”)
The default hierarchy suggests that masculine is the default gender and neuter is the most marked gender. It can also be attributed to other lan-guages that make a three-way gender distinction such as e.g. German. Con-sider now how the gender conflict for German superordinates likedie Waffe
‘weapon’ is resolved in terms of the optimal gender assignment theory. Specif-ically, Rice (2006:1398) suggests thatdie Waffe, which falls into the domain of two constraints, one which assigns neuter to superordinates and one which assigns feminine to words in -e, is assigned to the least marked of the two conflicting categories, i.e. feminine.
With regard to the Russian data in (29), Rice’s analysis makes correct predictions about (29-a) and (29-b), where the nouns vraˇc ‘physician’ and Svetik should be assigned masculine (in accordance with their morphology) and not feminine (in accordance with their semantics). This is consistent with the markedness hierarchy, where masculine is the least marked of the two conflicting categories. On the other hand, in (29-c) feminine agreement for the nounlakomka ‘gourmand’ suggests that the word should be assigned
15It should be noted that Corbett (1991) is aware of the problem with hybrids illustrated in (29-a). In fact it was he who proposed this term to capture the phenomenon of nouns like vraˇc, which he describes as a “. . . curious composite with one half being masculine, apparently half of a double-gender noun (when a male is denoted), while the other half is a hybrid noun (when a female is denoted)” (Corbett 1991:184).
feminine, which, however, is more marked than masculine. Thus, in some cases the default hierarchy is able to provide a better explanation of the intricate assignment patterns than the the semantic hierarchy. Nevertheless, it appears that the gender system of Russian cannot be straightforwardly explained within one assignment theory, since the data discussed in this chapter do not seem to be fully compatible with the theories reviewed in this section. While these theories can deal with lexical gender of the nouns likepapa ‘daddy’, referential gender of the nouns in (29) remains problematic for them.
Being concerned with finding the universally true theoretical approach to gender assignment, these theories do not pursue the issue of learnability.16 Yet, the question I would like to address is how the discovery of gender may proceed in the mind of a language learner. Another type of question that arises here has in fact been formulated by (Corbett 1991:82). “How does the child acquire the knowledge equivalent to that which we have modelled as assignment systems?” Further questions appear in the context of both the default or markedness hierarchy and the assignment rule hierarchy.
In terms of the default hierarchy approach, one might ask whether the unmarked form should be the easier and hence the earlier to be acquired.
With the default hierarchy for Russian in mind (see (30) above), do we ex-pect masculine gender to be acquired before feminine? And should neuter be acquired last? To put it differently, should children’s performance be su-perior for masculine nouns as compared to feminine and neuter? These are interesting research questions and to the best of my knowledge they have not received much attention in the research on child language in the context of gender in particular. However, exploring them further is not the focus of this dissertation and is therefore left as a topic for future research. Given that my main concern here is the discovery of the semantic principles in the course of acquisition and their integration into the system of grammatical gender, I would still like to mention here two interesting facts from Russian child language in relation to markedness. In the next chapter, where a de-tailed diary of one Russian child is reviewed, there is an indication that he initially develops a two-way gender system of masculine and feminine, while the acquisition of neuter gender is delayed. In addition, forms marking femi-nine gender are the first to appear in the child’s speech. However, these facts seem to be rather related to the properties of the input, such as transparency, consistency, and salience, and not a universal markedness hierarchy.
16(Corbett 1991:82) mentions child language acquisition as an area for further research, which, according to him, may provide a clearer picture of how assignment systems work.
Offering a detailed comparison of Corbett’s and Rice’s approaches is well beyond the scope of this dissertation. However, the questions arising from Corbett’s assignment rule hierarchy are more relevant for my research. First, do children establish gender based on formal or semantic criteria? And what is the role of agreement in this process? More importantly, given that seman-tic (sex-based) criteria are on top of the assignment hierarchy, will they be hypothesized by children first? In fact such a scenario seems to be logically correct: children may want to initially rely on semantics, especially with re-gard to nouns likepapa ‘daddy’, since otherwise they are doomed to commit errors, which will have to be unlearned. In fact, this idea, known under the term “semantic bootstrapping”, was hypothesized by Pinker (1982) in one of his earliest works. He proposed that the discovery of gender may proceed as follows: the child may use “. . . the sex of human referents as a semantic cue for the feature name GENDER and the feature values masc and fem, with the gender of inanimate nouns learned distributionally via their similarity in inflection to words denoting humans”. Yet, as I show in the next chapter, against all expectations previous research on child language reveals the op-posite scenario, namely that children acquiring various languages base their initial hypotheses about gender on formal rules rather than semantic. Many issues related to acquisition of the semantic criterion and its role in the ac-quisition process remain unclear and will therefore be given special attention in this dissertation.