A typology of languages with both grammatical gender and genderlects

Résumé En

This chapter discusses the interesting, but little-known phenomenon of genderlects, also referred to as indexical gender, which means that parts of the grammar or lexis of a language depend on the gender of the speaker or hearer (or both). The chapter focusses on interactions between genderlects and grammatical gender, laying out a detailed typology on the various effects of one system on the other. Rose reports on 12 languages that provide evidence of such interaction and sorts these according to three criteria:i.whether or not the same grammatical gender values are distinguished across genderlectsii.whether or not the genderlect distinctions apply across all the grammatical gender valuesiii.whether or not there is syncretism for different grammatical gender values across genderlectsCrossing these properties results in eight different, theoretically possible systems, of which six are attested and discussed in the chapter. The first, pattern A, is argued to be the canonical case: such systems display full orthogonality between indexical and grammatical gender, as both genderlects distinguish the same values for grammatical gender and every combination has a unique (i.e. non-syncretic) marker. Rose argues that other situations are non-canonical because they are less clearly marked or introduce conditions.