The dynamics of gender complexity

In this chapter we view grammatical gender as a category type that emerges, evolves
and disappears in languages as a result of diachronic processes and whose complex-
ity grows and diminishes through time (§1–§2). Traditional approaches to gram-
matical gender focus on two properties that already presuppose a high degree of
maturity of gender systems: noun classes and agreement. Here we conceive of gen-
der rather as a category type with a semantic core of animacy and/or sex reflecting
classes of referents, which have a propensity to turn into classes of noun lexemes.
When growing and retracting, gender characteristically follows the animacy or in-
dividuation hierarchy. However, this hierarchical patterning breaks down when
animacy leaks into the inanimate domain led astray by many different associative
pathways, which is why lexical organization according to noun classes has to be
invoked to maintain some sort of order (§3). Gender manifests itself in the form of
marking on noun-associated words, often within the local domain of noun phrases.
Here we put gender marking into the wider context of nominal morphology (non-
lexical markers within the noun phrase), which often originate in independent use
in headless noun phrases and are extended to headed noun phrases only in a sub-
sequent development (§4). As more mature manifestations of gender get organized
in the form of noun classes, they typically follow certain pathways of develop-
ment that can be subsumed under the formula “From X to Y” (§5–§6). Agreement
is fuzzy as its prototypical non-noun targets gradually develop by way of decate-
gorialization from nouns, and controllers and targets are not always simple words,
but can be complex (consist of syntactic formal groups) and controllers can be en-
tirely contextual (§7). Gender should not be considered in isolation as it is – more
often than not – parasitic on other grammatical category types, notably number,
case, and person, with which it cumulates and which contribute to its high degree
of complexity (§8). Number is particularly tightly intertwined with gender in plu-
ralia tantum and other phenomena related to lexical plurality (§9). As gender is
organized in form of systems, its diachronic evolution cannot be captured in terms
of individual diachronic processes. When gender systems evolve, there is virtually
always co-evolution of connected events. Hence the study of system evolution is
indispensable for understanding the complexity of gender (§10). However, the evo-
lution of gender also displays characteristic areal and genealogical patterns and is
sensitive to external factors of language ecology (§11).