Posted: Sep 21, 2010 1:45 pm
Think of the set of words in a language. If this language has noun classes or genders, some subset of the words will belong to one class, some will belong to another class ...
Now, as the language develops, there's no knowledge of what utterances will be made. Words, by a variety of approaches, fall into some class (some, in some languages, fall into several; etc etc etc - there's myriads of ways this can happen).
The choice of what class a word belongs to may diachronically be clear (although words do change gender on occasion through a language's history) but synchronically it may approximate randomness pretty well.
An actual statement will have words we can't entirely predict, and these will belong to classes we wouldn't necessarily have been able to predict without the specific knowledge that a given noun belongs to such-and-such a gender.
Does this make sense to you?
In that way, it's a sort of communications protocol where the redundancy markers (or distinct classes that can be separately referred to with different anaphora) have been predetermined in a more or less random fashion.
Now, as the language develops, there's no knowledge of what utterances will be made. Words, by a variety of approaches, fall into some class (some, in some languages, fall into several; etc etc etc - there's myriads of ways this can happen).
The choice of what class a word belongs to may diachronically be clear (although words do change gender on occasion through a language's history) but synchronically it may approximate randomness pretty well.
An actual statement will have words we can't entirely predict, and these will belong to classes we wouldn't necessarily have been able to predict without the specific knowledge that a given noun belongs to such-and-such a gender.
Does this make sense to you?
In that way, it's a sort of communications protocol where the redundancy markers (or distinct classes that can be separately referred to with different anaphora) have been predetermined in a more or less random fashion.