Optimal categorisation: the origin and nature of gender from a psycholinguistic perspective

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Context:The very existence of gender is a source of bafflement: why in Russian is 'elbow' masculine, while 'knee' is neuter and 'bone' is feminine? Why do some Dutch speakers distinguish three genders, and others only two? It challenges language learners and excites linguists and psychologists no less. The origin of grammatical gender is a major question in linguistics, and the related issue of how entities are categorised by speakers of different languages is a key question in psychology. We seek to establish empirically whether gender emerged from special classificatory words (classifiers, similar to English 'sheet of paper' vs. 'pack of paper'), while these classifiers in turn developed from nouns. To make our explanation fully convincing, we must also establish how and why languages relinquish a useful, meaningful classificatory system, and adopt a rigid, apparently unmotivated gender system. How do these varying systems impact cognition? Is a gender system more optimal than a classifier system? Do the additional cognitive costs of less optimal systems lead to language change? We shall address these research questions by combining typological enquiry and psycholinguistic experimentation.Aims:To demonstrate the origin of gender unambiguously, we must track the rise of a completely new gender system, from inception to a fully functioning system. We need to do this in a group of closely related languages, so that we can use differences between the languages as a proxy for development through time. And we need sufficient speakers of each language to enable us to investigate their systems of classification psycholinguistically. Remarkably, we have identified an environment that meets all these requirements - a group of six languages in Vanuatu and New Caledonia that exhibit intriguing signs of this grammatical development in their possessive classifiers.Our research on how gender emerges will provide insight into the way in which humans categorise entities in the world, and how this categorisation is incorporated into the workings of language. These two aspects of our research provide a rare opportunity to investigate how the mind codifies human experience. We have developed an innovative method for investigating how grammatical categories like gender come to exist. By bringing psycholinguistic experiments to a natural laboratory, we can test hypotheses that would otherwise be out of reach. This approach is timely, given that the key languages are all highly endangered and the chance to conduct this research requires exactly the type of setting identified by our research team.In order to investigate our hypotheses on the emergence of gender from noun classifier systems and how these differing systems affect cognition, we have tested a suite of experiments. These involve a range of techniques (free-listing, card-sorting, vignettes and storyboards, eye-tracking and category training) to access speakers' judgements and reaction times in order to assess the cognitive load of each system. Conducting the experiments on six key languages will allow us to map the semantic domain (the range of meaning) of the individual classifiers. We shall also establish for each language whether the purported classifiers still function to classify the relation between a possessor and an entity, or whether they have become gender markers.Applications:This original methodology will outlive the project's lifespan, providing a wealth of opportunities for future research. The experiment toolkit will provide a template for conducting experiments in other areas (where gender systems are at later stages). The findings will provide the foundations for new hypotheses about the development of categorisation more generally. The different language communities will benefit from literacy materials detailing the use of the different classifier and gender systems found, which will aid vernacular education efforts for this tricky area of language.