In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of . A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others consider these different concepts. Noun classes should not be confused with .
Notion
There are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into noun classes:
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according to similarities in their meaning (semantic criterion);
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by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphology);
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through an arbitrary convention.
Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent.
Noun classes form a system of grammatical agreement. A noun in a given class may require:
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agreement on adjectives, pronouns, numerals, etc. in the same noun phrase,
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agreement affixes on the verb,
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a special form of pronoun to replace the noun,
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an affix on the noun,
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a class-specific word in the noun phrase.
Modern English expresses noun classes through the third person singular personal pronouns he (male person), she (female person), and it (object, abstraction, or animal), and their other inflected forms. countable noun and uncountable nouns are distinguished by the choice of many/ much. The choice between the relative pronoun who (persons) and which (non-persons) may also be considered a form of agreement with a semantic noun class. A few nouns also exhibit vestigial noun classes, such as stewardess, where the suffix -ess added to steward denotes a female person. This type of noun affixation is not very frequent in English language, but quite common in languages which have the true grammatical gender, including most of the Indo-European family, to which English belongs.
In languages without inflectional noun classes, nouns may still be extensively categorized by independent particles called .
Common criteria for noun classes
Common criteria that define noun classes include:
Language families
Algonquian languages
The
Ojibwe language and other members of the Algonquian languages distinguish between animate and inanimate classes. Some sources argue that the distinction is between things which are powerful and things which are not. Living things, as well as sacred things and things connected to the Earth, are considered powerful and belong to the animate class. Still, the assignment is somewhat arbitrary, as "
raspberry" is animate, but "
strawberry" is inanimate.
Athabaskan languages
In
Navajo language (Southern Athabaskan) nouns are classified according to their animacy, shape, and consistency. Morphologically, however, the distinctions are not expressed on the nouns themselves, but on the verbs of which the nouns are the subject or direct object. For example, in the sentence
"My shirt is lying on the bed", the verb "lies" is used because the subject "my shirt" is a flat, flexible object. In the sentence "My belt is lying on the bed", the verb
"lies" is used because the subject "my belt" is a slender, flexible object.
Koyukon language (Northern Athabaskan) has a more intricate system of classification. Like Navajo, it has classificatory verb stems that classify nouns according to animacy, shape, and consistency. However, in addition to these verb stems, Koyukon verbs have what are called "gender prefixes" that further classify nouns. That is, Koyukon has two different systems that classify nouns: (a) a classificatory verb system and (b) a gender system. To illustrate, the verb stem -tonh is used for enclosed objects. When -tonh is combined with different gender prefixes, it can result in daaltonh which refers to objects enclosed in boxes or etltonh which refers to objects enclosed in bags.
Australian Aboriginal languages
The
Dyirbal language is well known for its system of four noun classes, which tend to be divided along the following semantic lines:
The class usually labeled "feminine", for instance, includes the word for fire and nouns relating to fire, as well as all dangerous creatures and phenomena. (This inspired the title of the George Lakoff book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.)
The Ngangikurrunggurr language has noun classes reserved for canines and hunting weapons. The Anindilyakwa language has a noun class for things that reflect light. The Diyari language distinguishes only between female and other objects. Perhaps the most noun classes in any Australian language are found in Yanyuwa language, which has 16 noun classes, including nouns associated with food, trees and abstractions, in addition to separate classes for men and masculine things, women and feminine things. In the men's dialect, the classes for men and for masculine things have simplified to a single class, marked the same way as the women's dialect marker reserved exclusively for men.[Jean F Kirton. 'Yanyuwa, a dying language'. In Michael J Ray (ed.), Aboriginal language use in the Northern Territory: 5 reports. Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Darwin: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1988, p. 1–18.]
Basque
Basque language has two classes, animate and inanimate; however, the only difference is in the declension of locative cases (inessive, ablative, allative, terminal allative, and directional allative). For inanimate nouns, the locative case endings are attached directly if the noun is singular, and plural and indefinite number are marked by the suffixes
-eta- and
-(e)ta-, respectively, before the case ending (this is in contrast to the non-locative cases, which follow a different system of number marking where the indefinite form of the ending is the most basic). For example, the noun
etxe "house" has the singular ablative form
etxetik "from the house", the plural ablative form
etxeetatik "from the houses", and the indefinite ablative form
etxetatik (the indefinite form is mainly used with determiners that precede the noun:
zenbat etxetatik "from how many houses"). For animate nouns, on the other hand, the locative case endings are attached (with some phonetic adjustments) to the suffix
-gan-, which is itself attached to the singular, plural, or indefinite genitive case ending. Alternatively,
-gan- may attach to the absolutive case form of the word if it ends in a vowel. For example, the noun
ume "child" has the singular ablative form
umearengandik or
umeagandik "from the child", the plural ablative form
umeengandik "from the children", and the indefinite ablative form
umerengandik or
umegandik (cf. the genitive forms
umearen,
umeen, and
umeren and the absolutive forms
umea,
umeak, and
ume). In the inessive case, the case suffix is replaced entirely by
-gan for animate nouns (compare
etxean "in/at the house" and
umearengan/
umeagan "in/at the child").
Caucasian languages
Some members of the Northwest Caucasian family, and almost all of the Northeast Caucasian languages, manifest noun class. In the Northeast Caucasian family, only
Lezgian language,
Udi language, and
Aghul language do not have noun classes. Some languages have only two classes, whereas
Bats language has eight. The most widespread system, however, has four classes: male, female, animate beings and certain objects, and finally a class for the remaining nouns. The
Andi language has a noun class reserved for insects.
Among Northwest Caucasian languages, only Abkhaz language and Abaza language have noun class, making use of a human male/human female/non-human distinction.
In all Caucasian languages that manifest class, it is not marked on the noun itself but on the dependent verbs, adjectives, pronouns and postpositions or prepositions.
Atlantic–Congo languages
Atlantic–Congo languages can have ten or more noun classes, defined according to non-sexual criteria. Certain nominal classes are reserved for humans. The
Fula language has about 26 noun classes (the exact number varies slightly by dialect).
Bantu languages
According to
Carl Meinhof, the
Bantu languages have a total of 22 noun classes called
nominal classes (this notion was introduced by
Wilhelm Bleek). While no single language is known to express all of them, most of them have at least 10 noun classes. For example, by Meinhof's numbering,
Shona language has 20 classes, Swahili has 15, Sotho has 18 and Ganda has 17.
Additionally, there are polyplural noun classes. A polyplural noun class is a plural class for more than one singular class.
Specialists in Bantu emphasize that there is a clear difference between genders (such as known from Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European) and nominal classes (such as known from Niger–Congo). Languages with nominal classes divide nouns formally on the base of Hyponymy meanings. The category of nominal class replaces not only the category of gender, but also the categories of number and Grammatical case.
Critics of Meinhof's approach notice that his numbering system of nominal classes counts singular and plural numbers of the same noun as belonging to separate classes. This seems to them to be inconsistent with the way other languages are traditionally considered, where number is orthogonal to gender (according to the critics, a Meinhof-style analysis would give Ancient Greek 9 genders). If one follows broader linguistic tradition and counts singular and plural as belonging to the same class, then Swahili has 8 or 9 noun classes, Sotho has 11 and Ganda has 10.
The Meinhof numbering tends to be used in scientific works dealing with comparisons of different Bantu languages. For instance, in Swahili language the word rafiki 'friend' belongs to the class 9 and its "plural form" is marafiki of the class 6, even if most nouns of the 9 class have the plural of the class 10. For this reason, noun classes are often referred to by combining their singular and plural forms, e.g., rafiki would be classified as "9/6", indicating that it takes class 9 in the singular, and class 6 in the plural.
However not all Bantu languages have these exceptions. In Luganda each singular class has a corresponding plural class (apart from one class which has no singular–plural distinction; also some plural classes correspond to more than one singular class) and there are no exceptions as there are in Swahili. For this reason Ganda linguists use the orthogonal numbering system when discussing Ganda grammar (other than in the context of Bantu language comparative linguistics), giving the 10 traditional noun classes of that language.
The distinction between genders and nominal classes is blurred still further by Indo-European languages that have nouns that behave like Swahili's rafiki. Italian language, for example, has a group of nouns deriving from Latin language neuter nouns that acts as masculine in the singular but feminine in the plural: il braccio/le braccia; l'uovo/le uova. (These nouns are still placed in a neuter gender of their own by some grammarians.)
Nominal classes in Swahili
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| singular: persons |
| plural: persons (a plural counterpart of class 1) |
| singular: plants |
| plural: plants (a plural counterpart of class 3) |
| singular: fruits |
| plural: fruits (a plural counterpart of class 5, 9, 11, seldom 1) |
| singular: things |
| plural: things (a plural counterpart of class 7) |
| singular: animals, things |
| plural: animals, things (a plural counterpart of class 9 and 11) |
| singular: no clear semantics |
| verbal nouns |
| locative meanings: close to something |
| indefinite locative or directive meaning |
| locative meanings: inside something |
"Ø-" means Null morpheme. Some classes are (esp. 9 and 10). The Proto-Bantu class 12 disappeared in Swahili, class 13 merged with 7, and 14 with 11.
Class prefixes appear also on adjectives and verbs, e.g.:
The class markers which appear on the adjectives and verbs may differ from the noun prefixes:
In this example, the verbal prefix a- and the pronominal prefix wa- are in concordance with the noun prefix m-: they all express class 1 despite their different forms.
Zande
The
Zande language distinguishes four noun classes:
There are about 80 inanimate nouns which are in the animate class, including nouns denoting heavenly objects (moon, rainbow), metal objects (hammer, ring), edible plants (sweet potato, pea), and non-metallic objects (whistle, ball). Many of the exceptions have a round shape, and some can be explained by the role they play in Zande mythology.
Noun classes versus grammatical gender
The term "gender", as used by some linguists, refers to a noun-class system composed with two, three, or four classes, particularly if the classification is semantically based on a distinction between masculine and feminine. Genders are then considered a sub-class of noun classes. Not all linguists recognize a distinction between noun-classes and genders, however, and instead use either the term "gender" or "noun class" for both.
Sometimes the distinction can drift over time. For instance, in Danish, the main dialects merged the three original genders down to a total of two genders. Some other dialects merged all three genders down to almost a one gender similar to English, but kept the neuter adjective form for uncountable nouns (which are all neuter in Danish). This effectively created a noun class system of countable and uncountable nouns reflected in adjectives.
Noun classes versus noun classifiers
Some languages, such as Japanese,
Chinese language and the
Tai languages, have elaborate systems of particles that go with nouns based on shape and function, but are
rather than affixes. Because the classes defined by these classifying words are not generally distinguished in other contexts, there are many linguists who take the view that they do not create noun classes.
List of languages by type of noun classification
Languages with noun classes
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Atlantic languages (Niger–Congo language family)
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all (Niger–Congo language family) such as
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Ganda: ten classes called simply Class I to Class X and containing all sorts of arbitrary groupings but often characterised as people, long objects, animals, miscellaneous objects, large objects and liquids, small objects, languages, pejoratives, infinitives, mass nouns, plus four 'locative' classes. Alternatively, the Meinhof system of counting singular and plural as separate classes gives a total of 21 classes including the four locatives.
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Swahili language
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Zulu language
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Northeast Caucasian languages such as Bats language
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Dyirbal language: Masculine, feminine, vegetable and other. (Some linguists do not regard the noun-class system of this language as grammatical gender.)
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Arapesh languages such as Mufian language
Languages with grammatical genders
See also
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Animacy
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Classifier (linguistics)
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Declension
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Grammatical agreement
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Grammatical category
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Grammatical conjugation
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Grammatical gender
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Grammatical number
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Inflection
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Redundancy (linguistics)
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Synthetic language
Inline
General
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Craig, Colette G. (1986). Noun classes and categorization: Proceedings of a symposium on categorization and noun classification, Eugene, Oregon, October 1983. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins.
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– A comprehensive study; looks at 200 languages.
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Corbett, Geville (1994) "Gender and gender systems". En R. Asher (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp. 1347–1353.
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Greenberg, J. H. (1978) "How does a language acquire gender markers?". En J. H. Greenberg et al. (eds.) Universals of Human Language, Vol. 4, pp. 47–82.
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Hockett, Charles F. (1958) A Course in Modern Linguistics, Macmillan.
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Ibrahim, M. (1973) Grammatical gender. Its origin and development. La Haya: Mouton.
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Iturrioz, J. L. (1986) "Structure, meaning and function: a functional analysis of gender and other classificatory techniques". Función 1. 1-3.
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Meissner, Antje & Anne Storch (eds.) (2000) Nominal classification in African languages, Institut für Afrikanische Sprachwissenschaften, Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. .
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Ohly, R., Kraska-Szlenk, i., Podobińska, Z. (1998) Język suahili. Wydawnictwo Akademickie "Dialog". Warszawa.
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Steven Pinker (1994) The Language Instinct, William Morrow and Company.
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Мячина, Е.Н. (1987) Краткий грамматический очерк языка суахили. In: Суахили-русский словарь. Kamusi ya Kiswahili-Kirusi. Москва. "Русский Язык".
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SIL: Glossary of Linguistic Terms: What is a noun class?
External links
- *Global map and discussion of languages by type of noun class at WALS: Number of Genders
- * Contini-Morava, Ellen. Noun Classification in Swahili . 1994.
- * On nominal classes in Swahili
