Grammatical gender often seems arbitrary from a semantic point of view. When I was taking French many years ago, we were told that one must simply memorize the gender for each noun. Are there any languages with similar markings on the verb--obligatory morphological markers for the verb that typically seem arbitrary from a semantic point of view?
asked May 13, 2012 at 6:44
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Arbitrary in what sense, and to whom? Would you consider the obligatory irregular past forms of some English verbs but not others arbitrary (i.e. "is it he speaked, he spoke, or he spake?")?– CerberusCommented May 13, 2012 at 7:12
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1Semantically arbitrary, as the question states. Obviously, selection of 'speaked,' 'spoke,' and 'spake' would not be pragmatically arbitrary or syntactically arbitrary, but they would all have the same meaning.– James GrossmannCommented May 13, 2012 at 7:19
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1The relevance of the regular/irregular distinction hadn't occurred to me until your comment. But I suppose that the distinction between the conjugation of regular and various types of irregular verbs might be analogous to grammatical gender. Yes it seems semantically arbitrary to me, since "did" and "*do-ed" would mean the same thing.– James GrossmannCommented May 13, 2012 at 17:45
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1The fact that you don't know why a noun is inflected a certain way should not be sufficient ground to call it arbitrary. It would be arbitrary only if you could arbitrarily change it. The nominal gender allows a determiner in a relative clause to unambiguously select one of multiple possible referents from the main clause. This makes it semantic. If you don't think of this and that as based on gender, nor who, which, that, but Ger. dies-, jen- + -er/-e/-es or der, die, das and e.g. Fr. quel- + -_/-le (not even audible), or lui, leur, then it is the question that is arbitrary.– vectoryCommented Jul 13, 2019 at 12:46
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1To clarify the question (which some answers hint at without explicitly answering the question), what is being asked is, like gender of nouns, are there any languages which categorize verbs grammatically such that there is also a semantic counterpart. Romance has historically 4 conjugations (which govern the form of the inflections in each conjugation), but there is no (none obvious) semantic part to that grouping. (spelling this out, I think that verb conjugations are arbitrary enough to satisfy the criteria, there's just no exemplar/proto-verb in each conjugation).– MitchCommented Jul 15, 2019 at 14:27
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6 Answers
Romance languages have (generally speaking) three classes of verbs, inherited from Latin. In French, these correspond to the infinitive endings -re, -er, and -ir. These are like gender in that they don't correspond to any semantic property of the verb. Unlike gender (as expressed in Romance), it's difficult to point to a single morpheme as the "gender marker." However, the different verb classes have differences that pervade the paradigm of tense and agreement marking. In the Romance context, this is sometimes called the "theme vowel," hearkening back to a stage of the language when the morphology was more segmentable.
Many other languages have a notion of "verb class" that is even less morphologically transparent. Old English for example had seven classes of strong verbs; each of these had a different ablaut pattern. (There were also three different weak verb classes.)
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1Latin is considered to have 4 conjugations. Just to avoid any misunderstandings.– dainichiCommented May 15, 2012 at 4:49
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4Yes, but the gender of the noun is ruling over the adjective (enforcing forms based on the gender of noun), and nothing similar happens with the classes of the verbs in above examples. Commented Jun 4, 2012 at 11:47
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2To me that is the counterpart of the nominal declinations (5 in Latin). But words from a certain declination can be of almost any gender anyway (femina vs. agricola). I do not see what has this to do with the question. Commented Jul 13, 2019 at 20:10
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@VladimirF The first declension is almost always feminine, second declension almost always masculine, 3rd 1/2 and 1/2? 4th rare, fifth all feminine except 'dies'. So gender maybe arbitrary as in not deterministic by category, but it is somewhat predictable. But ignore gender for the moment. It i-is- arbitrary what (semantic) noun goes in which (syntactic) declension, and that is similar to how it is arbitrary what verb goes in what conjugation. For the verbs there happens to be no convenient canonical verbs with meanings like nouns do (with male things in the masculine group).– MitchCommented Jul 15, 2019 at 14:53
French and other Romance languages provide an example, actually – verbs are arbitrarily associated with theme vowels.
For example, in Spanish (I am not familiar with French), the infinitive form of to have is tener, and that of to take is tomar. The bolded vowel, traditionally called "theme", affects most of the inflected forms of the verb: tienes (you have) vs. tomas (you take), tiene vs toma (third person singular), tenéis vs. tomáis (second person plural), etc.
Crucially, these are inherent properties of the verbs, not simply a part of their phonological form: in the Spanish subjunctive, verbs with an e or i theme take a in the theme position and verbs with an a theme take e in the theme position. For example, tomas becomes tomes, and tienes becomes tengas. (Obviously, there are some other things going on here morphophonologically, but the important part is the theme vowel.)
More generally, grammatical gender, theme vowels, and the Germanic verb classes mentioned in Aaron's answer, are kinds of inflectional class (in the modern sense, not the more limited traditional sense), i.e. arbitrary groups of roots/stems identifiable by a morphological reflex.
Update 2024-12-05:
I have found an example of a language with something analogous to verb gender.
nDrapa is a Sino-Tibetan language with a system of five directional prefixes:
- ʌ- upwards
- a- downwards
- kʌ- inwards or upstream
- ŋʌ- outwards or downstream
- tʌ- neutral
Note that the exact shape of the prefixes can change, but I don't know the exact reasons why yet. For example /tsɨ1/ means eat and takes the inward prefix, yielding /kɨ-ttsɨ1/ perfective and /ko-tsɨ2/ imperfective.
Except for a small class of prefixless verbs, every verb takes a prefix. However, for a large class of verbs the prefix is entirely conventional, similar to nominal gender in Indo-European languages.
For more information see the following:
- This article by SHIRAI Satoko
- This other article by the same author.
- This presentation which covers some of the material in 1 and 2, as well as some background.
The perfect example of verbal gender/verb classes would be a language that assigns every verb to one of a small number of classes and has morphology elsewhere in the sentence that agrees with the verb, e.g. declining adverbs to agree with the verb. I don't know of any slam dunk examples.
French itself, though, has an example of something similar. The selection of avoir (to have) or être (to be) for forming compound tenses is partly lexical.
A closed class of intransitive verbs use être (e.g. aller (to go), devenir (to become), naître (to be born)) and every reflexive verb uses être.
Je suis allé(e).
1sg.NOM be.1sg.PRES go.PP.M/F
I went / I have gone.
J' ai dormi
1sg.NOM have.1sg.PRES sleep.PP
I slept / I have slept
Selection of être is highly correlated with unaccusativity, but in French the choice of auxiliary cannot be predicted perfectly from semantic criteria alone.
This paper goes into some detail about the verbs that form compound tenses with to have and to be in French and Italian.
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Yes, in Italian and German too, but it's not very arbitrary, if that's a criterion here. Commented Jul 13, 2019 at 10:27
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@AdamBittlingmayer it is reasonably arbitrary, if L2 speakers getting it wrong frequently is significant enough. Active "Have kept" is pretty logical, "was got" follows maybe reasonably, but "have lost" is an outright oxymoron.– vectoryCommented Jul 13, 2019 at 12:06
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However, in a strict sense of analogy, I'd have to say that I do not see how this could have been derived by analogy from nominal gender, unless e.g. the morpheme -t related to "it" at least in some cases.– vectoryCommented Jul 13, 2019 at 12:14
English might only have one pattern of regular verb conjugation (depending on how you define "regular", the strong Germanic verbs have several sub-regularities), but many languages have several classes of regular verbs which have separate rules for conjugation. Usually these are independent from semantics.
Other than the Romance ones that others have mentioned, examples are
- Danish has two regular ways to form past tense, -ede and -te.
- Swedish has 3 regular conjugations, -er verbs, -ar verbs and -r verbs.
- Modern Japanese has two regular conjugations, godankatsuyo (5-row conjugation) and ichidankatsuyo (1-row conjugation).
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1This does not seem to have anything to do with nominal gender though, or the answer at least does not show it.– vectoryCommented Jul 13, 2019 at 12:20
I'll also throw in that some languages also have grammatical gender in their verbs. Polish, for example (I assume other Slavic languages do as well, but I'm only familiar with Polish).
Examples:
- chciałbym = I would like (male speaking)
- chciałabym = I would like (female speaking)
- byłem = I was (male speaking)
- byłam = I was (female speaking)
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5These are (gender-marked) participles fused with finite verbs. Hebrew marks the gender on finite verbs themselves (though normally only in the second or third person singular). But I don't think this is actually at all relevant to the question. Commented May 16, 2012 at 23:25
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2Yes, but it is a gender of the noun that is ruling over the verb. Commented Jun 4, 2012 at 11:46
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Well, I do think it's relevant to the question because the subject's gender is shown in the verb. The subject isn't always a person; it could be something that we English speakers don't generally consider to have gender. In this way, the verb requires morphological markers that "seem arbitrary from a semantic point of view." Commented Jun 18, 2012 at 17:49
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Wonder how this compares historically to the romance thematic vowels mentioned in other answers.– vectoryCommented Jul 13, 2019 at 12:18
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@vectory Slavic verb classes are divided according to the present stem suffixes. However, they are not just the wovels (-e, -ne, -je, -i, -a in Czech, similarly in Proto Slavic en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Slavic_verbs#Verb_classes Russian, for example, has -aje(t) where Czech has just -a). Commented Jul 13, 2019 at 20:16
There are no known languages that have this property. The top answer is incorrect.
Grammatical gender is a system where related words change form to agree with the gender of the noun.
For instance, Spanish has 2 genders, which I will call the "o" gender and the "a" gender. In Spanish, the related words are adjectives and articles.
| singular o/plural o | singular a/plural a | |
|---|---|---|
| indefinite articles | un/unos | una/unas |
| definite articles | el/los | la/las |
| adjectives | -o/-os | -a/-as |
For instance: computer=ordenador ("o" gender)
pan=sartén ("a" gender)
black=negr-
the black computer=el ordenador negro
the black pan = la sartén negra
In some languages, the gender affects the conjugation of the verb. For instance, Swahili has many genders, and 2 of them are the "m" and "ki" gender:
||"m" gender|"ki" gender| |adjective|m-|ki-| |subject|a-|ki-|
man: mwaunaume ("m" gender)
book: kitabu ("ki" gender)
big: -kubwa
fell: -lianguka
the big man fell: mwaunaume mkubwa alianguka
the big book fell: kiwaunaume kikubwa kilianguka
In this case, the adjective and verb change to agree with the gender of the noun.
For a verb to have grammatical gender, related words would have to change form to agree with the verb. For instance, imagine a language where verbs are "b" gender or "r" gender.
||b|r| |subject|b-|r-| |adverb|-b|-r|
run = boko ("b" gender)
sing = rali ("r" gender)
fast = tono
man = -apu
dog = -usu
the man runs quickly = bapu boko tonob
the dog runs quickly = busu boko tonob
the man sings quickly = rapu rali tonor
the dog sings quickly = rusu rali tonor
In this case, the VERB is driving the change. This is not behavior that exists in any language.
Verb categories are not analogous to gender, because the category a verb was in does not cause related words to change form. Verb conjugations only describe how the verb changes form. Without related words changing form, they are not genders.
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3The question isn’t asking whether any verbs have gender or something that causes the same effects as gender specifically; just whether any verbs have a property that, like gender, is mandatorily marked, but has no semantic function, only syntactic ones. The fact that the defining feature of gender is its affect on the morphology on other constituents doesn’t mean examples of what the question is after must exhibit that precise same feature. Commented Jul 16 at 17:26