A synchronic and diachronic basic typology of semantic gender assignment: a comprehensive study of African languages
At a glance
African, American and Oceania Studies
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
DFG Individual Research Grant
Project description
The project will investigate the typology of semantic gender assignment against the background. For this we zoom in on Africa - a restriction in the first project phase justified by several facts: the continent is a) a global hotbed for languages with gender (Nichols 1992: 131), b) home to close to a third of the world’s languages, and c) diverse in genealogical terms (cf. Güldemann 2018b). The frequency and diversity of gender in Africa can thus provide a first representative picture regarding our research agenda. Our investigation is synchronic and diachronic. The synchronic part has two components, one cross-linguistic typological and the other areal-typological. The diachronic approach involves diachronic typology and historical-comparative linguistics .