The emergence of grammatical gender: an experimental study on the loss of informative classification

Abstract

Systems of grammatical gender are widespread, yet evidence on how these systems emerge is surprisingly scarce. We report on novel research using storyboard experiments in six Oceanic languages of Vanuatu and New Caledonia, to probe the initial stages in the emergence of grammatical gender from possessive classifiers. This would appear to be an unlikely source, yet we can demonstrate the development and investigate it through current experiments. Our storyboard experiments were designed to reveal the use of classifiers as reference tracking devices across units of discourse and in different interactional contexts. The particular interest is in the degree to which the use of these classifiers becomes fixed and hence redundant for given nouns. The general interest is the investigation of the way in which apparently useful distinctions are lost, as transparent classification becomes opaque.