Noun class


In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others consider these different concepts. Noun classes should not be confused with noun classifiers.

Notion

There are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into noun classes:
Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent.
Noun classes form a system of grammatical agreement. A noun in a given class may require:
In Modern English, countable and uncountable nouns are distinguished by the choice of many/much. The choice between the relative pronoun who and which may also be considered a form of agreement with a semantic noun class. A few nouns also exhibit vestigial noun classes, such as stewardess, where the suffix -ess added to steward denotes a female person. This type of noun affixation is not very frequent in English, but quite common in languages which have the true grammatical gender, including most of the Indo-European family, to which English belongs.
When noun class is expressed on other parts of speech in addition to nouns and pronouns, the language is said to have grammatical gender.
In languages without inflectional noun classes, nouns may still be extensively categorized by independent particles called noun classifiers.

Common criteria for noun classes

Common criteria that define noun classes include:
See Swahili for the semantic motivations for an elaborate noun-class system.

Language families

Algonquian languages

The Ojibwe language and other members of the Algonquian languages distinguish between animate and inanimate classes. Some sources argue that the distinction is between things which are powerful and things which are not. All living things, as well as sacred things and things connected to the Earth are considered powerful and belong to the animate class. Still, the assignment is somewhat arbitrary, as "raspberry" is animate, but "strawberry" is inanimate.

Athabaskan languages

In Navajo nouns are classified according to their animacy, shape, and consistency. Morphologically, however, the distinctions are not expressed on the nouns themselves, but on the verbs of which the nouns are the subject or direct object. For example, in the sentence ' "My shirt is lying on the bed", the verb "lies" is used because the subject ' "my shirt" is a flat, flexible object. In the sentence "My belt is lying on the bed", the verb ' "lies" is used because the subject ' "my belt" is a slender, flexible object.
Koyukon has a more intricate system of classification. Like Navajo, it has classificatory verb stems that classify nouns according to animacy, shape, and consistency. However, in addition to these verb stems, Koyukon verbs have what are called "gender prefixes" that further classify nouns. That is, Koyukon has two different systems that classify nouns: ' a classificatory verb system and ' a gender system. To illustrate, the verb stem -tonh is used for enclosed objects. When -tonh is combined with different gender prefixes, it can result in daaltonh which refers to objects enclosed in boxes or etltonh which refers to objects enclosed in bags.

Australian Aboriginal languages

The Dyirbal language is well known for its system of four noun classes, which tend to be divided along the following semantic lines:
The class usually labeled "feminine", for instance, includes the word for fire and nouns relating to fire, as well as all dangerous creatures and phenomena.
The Ngangikurrunggurr language has noun classes reserved for canines and hunting weapons. The Anindilyakwa language has a noun class for things that reflect light. The Diyari language distinguishes only between female and other objects. Perhaps the most noun classes in any Australian language are found in Yanyuwa, which has 16 noun classes, including nouns associated with food, trees and abstractions, in addition to separate classes for men and masculine things, women and feminine things. In the men's dialect, the classes for men and for masculine things have simplified to a single class, marked the same way as the women's dialect marker reserved exclusively for men.

Basque

In Basque there are two classes, animate and inanimate; however, the only difference is in the declension of locative cases. There are a few words with both masculine and feminine forms, generally words for relatives /lehengusina ) or words borrowed from Latin. In names for familiar relatives, where both genders are taken into account, either the words for each gender are put together and daughter): seme-alaba or there is a noun that includes both: "father": aita; "mother": ama; "parent": guraso''.

Caucasian languages

Some members of the Northwest Caucasian family, and almost all of the Northeast Caucasian languages, manifest noun class. In the Northeast Caucasian family, only Lezgian, Udi, and Aghul do not have noun classes. Some languages have only two classes, whereas Bats has eight. The most widespread system, however, has four classes: male, female, animate beings and certain objects, and finally a class for the remaining nouns. The Andi language has a noun class reserved for insects.
Among Northwest Caucasian languages, only Abkhaz and Abaza have noun class, making use of a human male/human female/non-human distinction.
In all Caucasian languages that manifest class, it is not marked on the noun itself but on the dependent verbs, adjectives, pronouns and prepositions.

Atlantic–Congo languages

can have ten or more noun classes, defined according to non-sexual criteria. Certain nominal classes are reserved for humans. The Fula language has about 26 noun classes. According to Steven Pinker, the Kivunjo language has 16 noun classes including classes for precise locations and for general locales, classes for clusters or pairs of objects and classes for the objects that come in pairs or clusters, and classes for abstract qualities.

Bantu languages

According to Carl Meinhof, the Bantu languages have a total of 22 noun classes called nominal classes. While no single language is known to express all of them, most of them have at least 10 noun classes. For example, by Meinhof's numbering, Shona has 20 classes, Swahili has 15, Sotho has 18 and Ganda has 17.
Additionally, there are polyplural noun classes. A polyplural noun class is a plural class for more than one singular class. For example, Proto-Bantu class 10 contains plurals of class 9 nouns and class 11 nouns, while class 6 contains plurals of class 5 nouns and class 15 nouns. Classes 6 and 10 are inherited as polyplural classes by most surviving Bantu languages, but many languages have developed new polyplural classes that are not widely shared by other languages.
Specialists in Bantu emphasize that there is a clear difference between genders and nominal classes. Languages with nominal classes divide nouns formally on the base of hyperonymic meanings. The category of nominal class replaces not only the category of gender, but also the categories of number and case.
Critics of the Meinhof's approach notice that his numbering system of nominal classes counts singular and plural numbers of the same noun as belonging to separate classes. This seems to them to be inconsistent with the way other languages are traditionally considered, where number is orthogonal to gender. If one follows broader linguistic tradition and counts singular and plural as belonging to the same class, then Swahili has 8 or 9 noun classes, Sotho has 11 and Ganda has 10.
The Meinhof numbering tends to be used in scientific works dealing with comparisons of different Bantu languages. For instance, in Swahili the word rafiki ‘friend’ belongs to the class 9 and its "plural form" is marafiki of the class 6, even if most nouns of the 9 class have the plural of the class 10. For this reason, noun classes are often referred to by combining their singular and plural forms, e.g., rafiki would be classified as "9/6", indicating that it takes class 9 in the singular, and class 6 in the plural.
However not all Bantu languages have these exceptions. In Ganda each singular class has a corresponding plural class and there are no exceptions as there are in Swahili. For this reason Ganda linguists use the orthogonal numbering system when discussing Ganda grammar, giving the 10 traditional noun classes of that language.
The distinction between genders and nominal classes is blurred still further by Indo-European languages that have nouns that behave like Swahili's rafiki. Italian, for example, has a group of nouns deriving from Latin neuter nouns that acts as masculine in the singular but feminine in the plural: il braccio/le braccia; l'uovo/le uova.
Here is a complete list of nominal classes in Swahili:
Class numberPrefixTypical meaning
1m-, mw-, mu-singular: persons
2wa-, w-plural: persons
3m-, mw-, mu-singular: plants
4mi-, my-plural: plants
5ji-, j-, Ø-singular: fruits
6ma-, m-plural: fruits
7ki-, ch-singular: things
8vi-, vy-plural: things
9n-, ny-, m-, Ø-singular: animals, things
10n-, ny-, m-, Ø-plural: animals, things
11u-, w-, uw-singular: no clear semantics
15ku-, kw-verbal nouns
16pa-locative meanings: close to something
17ku-indefinite locative or directive meaning
18mu-, m-locative meanings: inside something

"Ø-" means no prefix. Some classes are homonymous. The Proto-Bantu class 12 disappeared in Swahili, class 13 merged with 7, and 14 with 11.
Class prefixes appear also on adjectives and verbs, e.g.:
The class markers which appear on the adjectives and verbs may differ from the noun prefixes:
In this example, the verbal prefix a- and the pronominal prefix wa- are in concordance with the noun prefix m-: they all express class 1 despite of their different forms.

Zande

The Zande language distinguishes four noun classes:
CriterionExampleTranslation
human kumbaman
human diawife
animatenyabeast
otherbambuhouse

There are about 80 inanimate nouns which are in the animate class, including nouns denoting heavenly objects, metal objects, edible plants, and non-metallic objects. Many of the exceptions have a round shape, and some can be explained by the role they play in Zande mythology.

Noun classes versus grammatical gender

The term gender, as used by some linguists, refers to a noun-class system composed with 2, 3, or 4 classes, particularly if the classification is semantically based on a distinction between masculine and feminine. Genders are then considered a sub-class of noun classes. Not all linguists recognize a distinction between noun-classes and genders, however, and instead use either the term "gender" or "noun class" for both.

Noun classes versus noun classifiers

Some languages, such as Japanese, Chinese and the Tai languages, have elaborate systems of particles that go with nouns based on shape and function, but are free morphemes rather than affixes. Because the classes defined by these classifying words are not generally distinguished in other contexts, there are many linguists who take the view that they do not create noun classes.

List of languages by type of noun classification

Languages with noun classes

Inline

General

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