What are the various rules to deal with "markedness" if the speaker doesn't know?

Question

I mean obligatorily marking a word for number, gender, animacy, direction etc, I don't actually know what I'm asking about.

For example, in English, we have that awkward situation where we don't know if the cat in the box is dead or alive, and might not know if it is a she or he, so is it an it, he or she (or singular they)? I'm sure style guides have rules for this, or maybe not.

I tried to ask a similar question about Russian which has a puacal number (single, a few, many) marked on nouns. On that site, the native speakers didn't understand the question and only repeated the style guideline rule. For example, "Tell me about your problems" -- Would a speaker have to get into a big circumlocution to avoid implying that a person has exactly 1, 2-5, or more than 5? (Tell me about your problem or your 2 to 5 problems or your list of problems greater than five)

Guugu Yimithirr is famous for requiring a north/south/east/west orientation just to utter certain words. I wondered how they would discuss things on a erratically spinning asteroid, in the fictional book Flatland, or if they just didn't know.

Also, in Icelandic, I've asked people how they deal with inanimate collections of mixed or unknown genders-- since there are 3 ways to say "they" (a collection of bus alone, cars alone is different from a mixed collection of buses and cars)

Are there any recognized patterns on this topic?

Answer 1

The question concerns why certain semantic features seem to be 'unmarked'. As an example, we can consider the fact that, at least in certain (especially older) varieties of English, the masculine pronoun he/him is used as the 'default'. Consider a scenario where a class consisting of both male and female students have finished their homework, (1) is generally considered to be felicitous, whereas (2) is not:

(1) Every student has finished his homework
(2) # Every student has finished her homework

(2) is only licit in a scenario where it is known by the speaker that every student who has finished her homework is female.

Within formal semantics, so-called 'phi-features', such as gender features, are modelled as presupposition triggers. This means that a gendered pronoun is treated in formal semantics as a partial function from individuals to individuals. For example, we can treat the denotation of 'she' as a partial function from individuals to individuals just in case the referent is female - the output of the function is undefined for non-female referents. We capture the unmarkedness of 'he' by not associating the feature [masculine] with any presupposition. Semantically, 'he' merely denotes the referent. The feature [masculine] is semantically vacuous.

We now introduce the pragmatic principle 'maximise presupposition', which means, without getting into the formal specifics, that given a set of alternative sentences, we prefer to use the alternative that is presuppositionally stronger. This explains the fact that, if all students are known to be female, (2) is licit, whereas (1) is not. (1) and (2) are semantically identical aside from the fact that (2) is presuppositionally stronger, and in this instance, the presupposition associated with (2) (that every student is female) is satisfied.

The masculine pronoun can only be used when the presupposition associated with the feminine pronoun is not met. (2) presupposes that for each student, that student is female. In a scenario with a mixed-gendered class, the presupposition is not met, which explains why (2) is infelicitous in this scenario, whereas (1) is not. Since [masculine] does not introduce any presupposition, the masculine pronoun may be used in a mixed-gender scenario.

Similar analyses can be (and have been) given for animacy and number features. See Yasutada Sudo's (2012) thesis for an excellent overview of the pertinent data and the formal specifics of the kind of analysis i outline here: http://web.mit.edu/ysudo/www/pdf/dissertation-final.pdf

Note Before someone points it out, i want to make it clear that in my English, the masculine pronoun isn't unmarked. Rather i use the plural pronoun 'they' as a bound pronoun in a mixed gender scenario, or in a scenario where gender isn't known. It's relatively trivial to give an account of this variety in a similar framework: We simply say that both [masculine] and [feminine] are presupposition triggers, whereas 'they' is semantically vacuous. The role of number features introduces additional complications here, but they can be accommodated. See the linked-to thesis for details.

Answer 2

I agree with P Elliott and his explanation that this is a question of markedness. His examples are from English, which has natural, but not grammatical gender. It might be interesting to see how this works in a language that has grammatical gender, and where grammatical gender usually trumps natural gender.

In German, all nouns are marked for gender (= grammatical gender). Then noun die Katze (cat) is female, i.e. female is the unmarked gender for cats. There is also a male variant, der Kater.

Female die Katze or the pronoun sie is used if

• the speaker does not know the sex of the cat
• the speaker knows the sex of the cat, but does not want to specify it
• the speaker knows the sex of the cat, wants to specify it, and the cat is female.

Male der Kater or the pronoun er is used if

• the speaker knows the sex of the cat, wants to specify it, and the cat is male.

Nouns referring to persons also pose an interesting problem. Das Kind (child) and das Mädchen (girl) are both neuter, which suggests that the unmarked grammatical gender for pronouns referring to them is also neuter. Indeed, prescriptive German grammar has it that neuter nouns can only be referred to by neuter pronouns, as in this example:

• Hast du das Mädchen gesehen? Es geht in diesselbe Schule wie ich.
• Have you seen that (neuter) girl? She (neuter) is in the same school as I.

However, in spoken German this is quite uncommon and only used in formal contexts. The colloquial variant has natural gender trump grammatical gender:

• Hast du das Mädchen gesehen? Sie geht in diesselbe Schule wie ich.
• Have you seen that (neuter) girl? She (female) is in the same school as I.