r General names for a social system (aristocra-cy) or social relation ship (friend-ship).
7. Extent An event may be punctual; that is, it happens more or less instantaneously (for example, a bomb explodes or a goal is scored) Or
it may be durative—alternatively called ‘continuous’ or ‘progressive’— unfolding over a period of time (for example, writing a poem or playing a game).
8. Composition. In Slavic languages (and in some others) each event must be accorded one of two aspectual values. It may be perfective, where the
event is regarded as a whole, without regard for its temporal constituency (even though it may be extended in time). If, in contrast, it is marked as
imperfective, this indicates focus on the temporal make-up of the event.
For example, ‘John baked the cake (perfective) while Mary was sleeping (imperfective)’; this indicates that Mary started sleeping before John baked the cake, continued during this activity, and then slept some more afterwards. (Care must be taken to distinguish perfective/imperfective from perfect/imperfect—(5) above—which, despite their similar names, refer to quite different contrasts.)
The term aspect is employed in varying ways by different linguists. In the narrowest sense it is used just for perfective/imperfective. But the scope is often extended to refer to extent, or boundedness, or completion (and more besides).
9. Tense. In contrast with the categories listed above, tense is a shifter (see §3.7)—what is ‘present’ at the time of speaking will soon become ‘past’.
All languages allow some assertions which are not time-related, such as ‘Dogs bark’. But most statements refer to an action, state, or property situated within a time frame with respect to the moment of speaking, and this may be shown by a system of tense choices.
As mentioned before, since ‘future’ is basically an irrealis area, the most common tense systems just distinguish ‘past’ from ‘non-past’. Some languages do include ‘future’ in their tense system, generally referring to something that can confidently be predicted to happen. (For example, on a Wednesday one could say, without fear of misleading, ‘Tomorrow will be Thursday’.) As illustrated in §1.7, there may be several divisions within past tense, and also sometimes several within future (but never more in future than in past).
Tense may also indicate one time with respect to another. In English one can say When John arrived (past1), Mary had departed (past2before past1), utilizing the ‘previous’ aspect have . . . -en (Dixon2005a: 209–29); other languages can indicate such time inclusion by means of their tense system.
Each language includes some of the parameters which describe non- spatial setting. Those which lack a tense system are likely to include in their grammars a selection from systems (5–8).
Tense is typically realized through an inflectional system on the verb. The other systems may be shown by morphological processes that are either derivational or inflectional. There is, however, considerable vari- ation. Any of the parameters may be realized through an optional aux- iliary verb or by particles, which may be separate words or clitics. These forms most often occur in juxtaposition with the verb, but are in some
3.16 noun classes and genders, and classifiers 155 languages placed elsewhere; for instance, after the first constituent of the clause.
There is one final point, which has worried many linguists. Is tense a category of the predicate (generally filled by a verb) or of the clause as a whole? That is, in John kicked Fred is it the event ‘John kick Fred’ which relates to past time, or is it just the action ‘kick’? And simi- larly for evidentiality, reality, degree of certainty, phase, completion, boundedness, extent, and composition. I can perceive no basis for this question. The predicate refers to an action, state, or property which is located within the domain of time; the predicate selects appropriate arguments which, together with it, make up a clause that has its time location determined by the predicate. Tense, aspect, and so on are prop- erties of the predicate and of the clause—of both, not of one or the other.
In some languages a secondary use of tense is to apply to an individual NP. One might say something like ‘[My wife]future is eating [the pie]yesterday.past’, which would be rendered in English by My wife- to-be is eating yesterday’s pie. This use of tense simply applies to one argument. But the canonical employment of a tense system or of any other system showing non-spatial setting—whether realized through a morphological system applying to the verb, or in some other way within the clause—applies equally to predicate and to clause.
3.16 Noun classes and genders, and classifiers
Gender was one of the first grammatical categories to be described. In the fifth centurybce, Protagoras had recognized three genders in Greek, by correlat- ing the orthographic endings of words with the ‘masculine’, ‘feminine’, and ‘inanimate’ natures of the things they stood for. Well-known Indo-European languages such as Greek, Latin, German, and French have a gender system which consists of three terms—‘masculine’, ‘feminine’, and ‘neuter’—or just two—‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. There is always some semantic basis to the allocation of nouns to gender classes (hence the names of the classes), and always also some exceptions. That is, most designations for people of the female sex will be nouns with feminine gender. (Recently, the grammatical label ‘gender’ has had its meaning extended to describe the reproductive type of a person, replacing ‘sex’; this makes statements such as those of the previous sentence difficult to formulate.)
When African languages came to be investigated by linguists it was found that their nouns fall into a number of classes similar to the gender classes
of Indo-European languages, except that there were usually a fair number of them and they often did not include a distinction between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. For example, one class might cover people (of both sexes), another long or extended objects, a third fruits and non-extended objects, a fourth artefacts, and so on. ‘Gender’—carrying with it the expectation of a ‘mas- culine’/‘feminine’ distinction—seemed inappropriate and a new term ‘noun classes’ was introduced. This is now the label in most general employment. ‘Gender’ is used for a small system of noun classes, which includes a sex-based contrast.
There are two main criteria for recognizing a system of noun classes. 1. It codes a grouping of all the nouns of the language into a smallish
number of classes. The number of noun classes generally varies from two to about ten (only rarely are there more). Generally, each noun belongs to just one class. However, there may be a small number of exceptions, nouns which can be in one of two (or more) classes depending on their reference. For example vrach ‘doctor’ in Russian may be either masculine or feminine depending on its referent, and similarly for jaja ‘baby’ in Dyirbal.
2. There must be some overt indication of the class of a noun (when in certain functional positions) within the clause in which it occurs, and this must not be entirely within the noun-word itself.
The class of a noun can be shown on modifiers to it within the NP. For example, in French one says un homme intelligent ‘a clever man’ and une femme intelligente ‘a clever woman’. One cannot tell the gender of homme and femme from the forms of the words, but one can by noting that homme takes masculine forms of the indefinite article and the adjective ‘clever’, un and intelligent, while femme takes the feminine forms, une and intelligente.
Alternatively, gender can be marked on the predicate, as in Jarawara: (1) batis
father
noho-ka
be.hurt-declarative.masculine (His) father is hurt
(2) matis mother
noho-ke
be.hurt-declarative.feminine (His) mother is hurt
Here the gender of the noun filling the intransitive subject (S) slot is shown by the gender-marked form of the declarative suffix which is attached to the verb in predicate slot. It is -ka for masculine and -ke for feminine.
3.16 noun classes and genders, and classifiers 157 In Swahili, noun class is shown in three ways: by a prefix to the noun itself, by a prefix to modifying words within the NP, and by a cross-referencing prefix within the predicate. In the following sentence, -kombe ‘cup’ belongs to the general inanimate noun class, marked by prefix ki- in the singular (as here) and vi- in the plural.
(3) [ki-kombe class-cup ki-dogo class-small ki-wili]s class-two ki-mevunjika class.of.s-be.broken The two small cups are broken
In summary, noun class may or may not be marked on the noun itself (it is in Swahili, but not in French or Jarawara) but, for it to be recognized as a grammatical category, there must be some marking of the class of a noun outside that noun.
There are just a few examples of languages with two different systems of noun classes, at different places in the grammar—typically, a small gender system for pronouns (sometimes extended to verbal agreement) and a larger noun class system for adjectival and numeral modifiers.
Noun classes are generally realized through affixation or other morpholog- ical processes. In languages which lack a system of noun classes (and in some that have one), there is often a set of classifiers. These are generally free forms, there is typically a large number of them (sometimes into the hundreds), and they occur only accompanying a noun within its NP. For example, in the Australian language Yidiñ many (but not all) nouns may be accompanied by a classifier: miña edible.animal.classifier gangu:l grey.wallaby grey wallaby mayi edible.vegetable.classifier gubu:m black.pine black pine nut
There are always some nouns which do not take any classifier (in Yidiñ these include ‘dog’, ‘sun’, and ‘boomerang’). And a fair number of nouns may occur with more than one; for example, besides mayi gubu:m ‘black pine nut’ (with the ‘edible vegetable’ classifier mayi), one finds jugi gubu:m ‘black pine tree’ (with the ‘tree’ classifier jugi).
There are a number of different varieties of classifier. These include numeral classifiers (for example, ‘threehuman.classifier woman’ for ‘three women’), possessed classifiers (for example ‘chicken my-pet.classifier’ for ‘my chicken’), verbal classifiers (for example, ‘Iround.object-picked coconut’),
and locational classifiers (for example, ‘on-branch.like.classifier tree’ for ‘on a tree’). Some languages feature classifier sets of several types.
Aikhenvald (2000) provides an informed and comprehensive treatment of noun categorization devices—noun classes (including genders) and classifiers.
3.17 Number systems
It was pointed out under (a) in §3.7 that virtually every language has a number distinction in its pronoun system. However, linguists do argue about the status of ‘number’ here. For example ‘2nd person plural’ may be used for addressing a group of people (and referring to all of them), but also when addressing one person, then meaning ‘you (singular) and others’. Is the latter instance really to be called a plural (since it does not involve several you’s)?
Number systems of the following sizes were illustrated in Table1.1 of §1.4:
r
A two-term system, {singular, plural}, is the most common.r
A three-term system, {singular, dual, plural}, is well attested.r
A four-term system is not too uncommon. Most often the extra term is ‘paucal’, referring to ‘a few’—{singular, dual, paucal, plural}. Sometimes it does refer to three—{singular, dual, trial, plural}.As noted in §1.4, ‘plural’ has a different meaning in each type of system, complementary to the other terms—‘more than one’, ‘more than two’, ‘more than a few’, and ‘more than three’ respectively.
Some number systems include additional terms, such as ‘collective’, refer- ring to a group of similar objects, and ‘associative’, indicating a set linked together by some characteristic; for example ‘Smith-associative.plural’ (‘the Smiths’) could refer to the whole Smith family (including in-laws, whose name is not Smith, and perhaps also close friends, who may have a differ- ent name).
Many—but not all—languages have a number system applying to word classes other than pronouns.