Mohammad-Mehdi Esmaili
Abstract
Gender as a nominal inflectional category is found in some modern Iranian languages, although they differ in the way this concept is realized. Abyānaʾī, belonging to the Central Dialects of Iran, does not have a grammatical way of marking the gender. In other words, there are no individual formal ...
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Gender as a nominal inflectional category is found in some modern Iranian languages, although they differ in the way this concept is realized. Abyānaʾī, belonging to the Central Dialects of Iran, does not have a grammatical way of marking the gender. In other words, there are no individual formal markers (except for some nouns ending in vowels) distinguishing between the two genders. In order to determine the status of gender in this dialect, based on Corbettʼs (1991) theoretical framework, agreement was taken as the criterion for distinguishing masculine and feminine genders. By instantiating dialect materials collected by fieldwork and through interviews with four informants, the present article seeks to determine the scope of gender agreement, namely the elements showing agreement in gender with their head noun. This study showed that Abyānaʾī has an agreement on both the noun phrase and clause levels. The grammatical gender of the head noun determined the morphological form of some of its dependents, such as the numeral "one", attributive adjectives, demonstratives, predicative adjectives ending in /-ɑ/, ordinal numbers, definite article, comparative adjectives, and the quantifier "more". On the clause level, on the other hand, only the third person singular form of past verbs agreed in gender either with the subject (as in the case of intransitive), or with the object (as in the case of transitive). Because the gender distinctions appeared in the singular but not in the plural, the gender system of Abyānaʾī should be considered as a convergent type.IntroductionGrammatical gender is not observed in all languages of the world, nevertheless, together with case and number is one of the most common grammatical categories of noun declension, especially in a statistically significant number of the Indo-European languages. Studies show the commonness of this grammatical category. For example, of the 256 languages in Corbett’s (2005) sample, 112 languages (a little under half, 44% to be precise) have a gender distinction. Although Old Iranian languages generally had gender, most New West Iranian languages lost gender completely. Gender is also lost in nearly most Central Iranian Dialects, that is, northwestern, southwestern, and southeastern subgroups, but gender retention is found in certain dialects of the Northeastern subgroup, namely Abyānaʾī Abuzeydābādi and Qohrudi. This article investigated the gender agreement in the Abyānaʾī dialect, spoken in the village of Abyāne, in Esfahān province. Since agreement is mentioned as the determining criterion of grammatical gender, the purpose of this article is to investigate and determine the status of gender agreement in this dialect. In this study, the intention is to provide examples of this dialect and according to the criteria presented by Corbett (1991) and Matasović (2004) to answer these questions: Which elements on both phrasal and clausal levels show gender agreement? What form of gender agreement is used in this dialect? And finally, does gender agreement occur between masculine and feminine in the plural number?Literature ReviewAmong the first studies carried out on the grammatical gender in the Central Iranian dialects (CPD) and subsequently in the Abyānaʾī dialect, one can mention the works of Lecoq (1974; 2002), Krahnke (1976) and Yarshater (1983; 1985; 1989). In his study, Lecoq (1974: 52-53; 2002: 58-61) shows that the distinction between masculine and feminine gender is preserved in certain dialects of CPD, namely Qohrudi, Abuzeydābādi, and Abyānaʾī. He also states that unlike other neighboring dialects (Qohrudi, Abuzeydābādi, Farizhandi and Yārandi) that have partially preserved gender in some nouns with feminine animate referents, Abyānaʾī has retained this distinction in all nouns. In all four mentioned dialects, the verb agreement enables the recognition of the gender, but Abyānaʾī is the only dialect that can show the feminine gender with an optional unstressed morpheme -a (which does not seem to have a special meaning). Krahnke (1976) in his study of twenty-eight Central dialects, mentions the gender retention in three dialects of Abuzeydābādi, Abyānaʾī, and Farizandi, and believes that the extent of gender marking in Abyānaʾī is unmatched by that of any modern central Iranian language. He adds that the gender of all nouns is indicated by the agreement of the definite article, adjective, demonstrative pronouns, and some third-person singular verbs, but he does not specifically explain its details. Yarshater (1983) points out that there are seven ways of indicating gender in Abyānaʾī: (1) in substantive, the feminine generally marked by an unstressed -a, which is the most important formal marker of feminine gender; (2) in adjective by the same suffix; (3) in demonstrative adjectives; (4) in the numerical adjective e/ya “a, one,” which serves also as an indefinite article; (5) the copula in the second person singular (-a/-e) and the third (a/āsa); (6) in the third person singular of the past tenses of the intransitive verbs; (7) in the past transitive verbs in accord with the object.MethodologyThe present study has been carried out with a descriptive-analytical method to determine the status of gender agreement and its extent at both clausal and phrasal levels in the Abyānaʾī dialect. The data were collected through interviews with four Abyānaʾī informants, including three literate men who grew up in Abyāne and live in Tehran, commuting repeatedly to their birthplace, and one semiliterate woman living in Abyāne, all in the 55-80 age range. A questionnaire containing about three hundred phrases and sentences was also used. Some of the examples are also taken from the conversations and stories that the author has recorded before the present study to compile a grammatical description of this dialect. The Abyānaʾī examples were transcribed with the International Phonetic Alphabet.ConclusionThis study shows that Abyānaʾī has an agreement on both the noun phrase and clause levels. In a noun phrase, most of the dependents show agreement by taking a morphological shape corresponding to that of the head. Of course, since two of these dependents, i.e. the demonstrative pronoun and the interrogative adjective “which” that both occur before the head noun, do not always agree with their head noun, it seems that the agreement of these dependents is fading. At the clause level, intransitive verbs (only third person singular) agree with the subject while transitive verbs agree with their direct object for gender. Although Corbett (1991) states that gender agreement of a verb with a subject or direct object is less common cross-linguistically than gender agreement of an adjective with its head noun, as was mentioned in the findings, there is no difference between the two in this regard. Since in the history of Old Iranian languages, such a gender agreement between the verb and the subject or the direct object is not observed, therefore the existence of the mentioned gender agreement should be considered as the result of linguistic innovation. The presence of a single gender agreement marker, i.e. the unstressed suffix /-a/, which in addition to feminine nouns, is used for different agreement targets, can be considered similar to a particular type of gender agreement that Corbett is called alliterative concord. Because the gender distinctions appeared in the singular but not in the plural number, the gender system of Abyānaʾī should be considered as a convergent type.
