Grammatical Gender Representation in Natural Language

该奖项是国家科学基金会社会、行为和经济科学（SBE）博士后研究奖学金（SPRF）项目和SBE语言学项目的一部分。SPRF计划的目标是为学术界、工业界或私营部门和政府的科学事业准备有前途的早期职业博士级科学家。SPRF奖励包括在知名科学家的赞助下进行为期两年的培训，并鼓励博士后进行独立研究。美国国家科学基金会寻求促进科学界各阶层的科学家，包括那些未被充分代表的群体的科学家，参与其研究项目和活动；博士后阶段被认为是实现这一目标的一个重要的专业发展阶段。每个博士后必须解决各自学科领域的重要科学问题。在哈佛大学Jonathan Bobaljik博士的赞助下，这个博士后奖学金奖支持一位早期职业科学家研究语法性别的语言成分。该研究通过三个相关项目探索了性别（名词与形容词和限定词等其他元素一致反映的属性）是如何在语法上表示的：1)以理论为导向的融合类型研究（跨类别的形式共享），ii)形态句法性别“默认”的比较研究，以及iii)假设性别补充的研究（其中对形式，如阿姨/叔叔，在语义上有规则关系，但在最大程度上由不规则的形态关系表达）。这些项目围绕着性别特征如何分解和结构，以及性别特征如何在形态学和句法中反映的问题展开。这项研究的目的是促进我们对性别类别如何在语言上定义以及它们如何与语法的其他组成部分相互作用的理解。该研究综合了形态学和句法证据，为语法性别的特征表征理论提供了信息，并对特征包含等假设进行了评估。本文还探讨了语法性别在词根补充中的作用。第一个项目通过收集关于性别融合的广泛类型证据来解决特征分解和标记问题，这可以用来揭示是否存在关于已证实和未证实的融合模式的概括。因此，该研究补充了最近对融合和补充的研究，这些研究观察并提出了对强大的跨语言概括的解释，如*ABA：缺乏一种模式，在这种模式中，沿着某些层次的标记成员与标记较少的成员共享一种形式或属性，排除中间成员。虽然还没有在语法性别方面进行测试，但ABA已经在许多领域被观察到，包括形容词等级、封闭性、数和格。这一类型学证据可以用来评估性别分解和标记的普遍理论的可行性，如特征包容理论。研究的第二个组成部分通过形态句法性别默认的比较研究来调查性别标记。特别是，该研究检查了标记性如何反映在标准性别默认诊断的分裂结果中，当诊断的一个子集表明一种性别类别作为默认状态时，而另一个子集的诊断则指向不同性别的默认状态。性别标记也从另一个角度来考虑，即从句法许可的作用来看。最后，该研究考察了性别条件补充的问题，评估了形式不同的配对在共享相同的“根”时是否具有不同的性别表征。新类型的证据被考虑，包括可能被证明或可能不被证明的可想象的补充替代。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and SBE's Linguistics program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Jonathan Bobaljik at Harvard University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the linguistic ingredients of grammatical gender. The research explores how gender - a property of nouns reflected in agreement with other elements such as adjectives and determiners - is grammatically represented, through three related projects: i) a theoretically-oriented typological study of syncretism (the sharing of forms across categories), ii) a comparative study of morphosyntactic gender 'defaults', and iii) a study of putative gender suppletion (in which pairs of forms such as aunt/uncle have a semantically regular relationship but are expressed by a maximally irregular morphological relationship). These projects are centered around questions of how gender features are decomposed and structured, and how gender features are reflected in morphology and syntax. The objective of this research is to advance our understanding of how gender categories are linguistically defined and how they interact with other components of grammar.The research synthesizes morphological and syntactic evidence to inform the theory of the featural representation of grammatical gender, and evaluates hypotheses such as featural containment. It also examines the role of grammatical gender in root suppletion. The first project addresses featural decomposition and markedness through the gathering of extensive typological evidence on gender syncretism, which can be used to reveal whether there are generalizations about attested and unattested patterns of syncretism. The research thus complements recent studies of syncretism and suppletion which observe, and propose explanations for, robust cross-linguistic generalizations such as *ABA: the absence of a pattern in which a marked member along some hierarchy shares a form or property with a less marked member to the exclusion of intermediate members. *ABA has been observed in various domains including adjectival grade, clusivity, number, and case, though it has not yet been tested for grammatical gender. This typological evidence can be used to evaluate the viability of a universal theory of gender decomposition and markedness, such as the theory of featural containment. A second component of the research investigates gender markedness through a comparative study of morphosyntactic gender defaults. In particular, the study examines how markedness is reflected in split results for standard gender default diagnostics, when one subset of diagnostics indicates that one gender category behaves as a default, while another subset of diagnostics instead point to the default status of a different gender. Gender markedness is also considered from a different perspective, namely in terms of the role of syntactic licensing. Lastly, the research examines the issue of gender-conditioned suppletion, assessing whether pairs unlike in form have different gender representations while sharing the same 'root'. Novel types of evidence are considered, including conceivable suppletive alternations which may or may not be attested.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.