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Linguistic gender is a complex and amazing category that has puzzled and still puzzles theoretical linguists, typologists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, didacticians, as well as scholars of anthropology, culture, and even mystical (divine) sufism. In Standard and colloquial Arabic varieties, feminine morphology (unlike "common sense") is not dedicated to mark beings of the female sex (or "natural gender"). When you name the female of a "lion" (¿asad) or a "donkey" (¿imaar), you use different words (labu¿at or ¿ataan), as if the male and female of the same species are linguistically conceived as completely unrelated entities. When you "feminize" words like "bee" (näl) or "pigeon" (¿amaam), the outcome is not a noun for the animal with a different sex, but a singular of the collective "bees," "one bee" (näl-at), or an individual pigeon (¿amaam-at). In the opposite direction, when a singular noun "carpenter" (najjar) is feminized, the (unexpected) result is a special plural, or rather a group, "carpenters as a professional group" (najjar-at). Since some of these words (contrastively) possess "normal" masculine plurals, or masculine singulars, I propose to distinguish atomicities (which are broadly "masculine") from unities (which are "feminine"). The diversity of feminine senses is also manifested when you feminize an inherently masculine noun like "father" (¿ab), "uncle" (¿amm), etc. The outcome (in the appropriate performative context) is that you are endearing your father or uncle, rather than "womanizing" him. More "unorthodox" senses are evaluative, pejorative, diminutive, augmentative, etc. It is striking that gender not only plays a central role in shaping individuation, or perspectizing plurality, but it is also used to distinguish what we count, or what we quantifier over. In Arabic, when you count numbers in sequence (three, four, five, six, etc.), you use the feminine, but when you count objects, you have to "negotiate" for gender, due to the "gender polarity" constraint. Your quantifier senses, which are also subtly built in the grammar, equally negotiate for gender. Wide cross-linguistic comparison extends the inventories of features, mechanisms, and typological notions used, to languages like Hebrew, Berber, Celtic, Germanic, Romance, Amazonian, etc. On the whole, gender is far from being parasitic in the grammar of Arabic or any language (including "classifier" languages). It is central as it has never been.
List of contents
Introduction: Building Feminine to Mean Gender, Number, Numeral, and Quantifier Extensions in Arabic
Chapter 1: Semantic Diversity of Gender and its Architecture
Chapter 2: New and Multiple Roles: Classification, Individuation, Evaluation, and Typology
Chapter 3: Numeral Roots, Categories, and Gender Variation
Chapter 4: Quantifiers Phrases, their Features, Types, and Partitions
Chapter 5: Number, Individuation, Atoms, and Unities
Conclusion
About the author
By Abdelkader Fassi Fehri
Summary
Two core concepts are developed in this monograph. First is feminine, or the marked Gender, a property of concepts that are distinguished along dimensions of individuation and unitization, not necessarily sex. The second is unity, a property of singularities, pluralities, and quantities.
