The role of core and non-core semantic rules in gender assignment

Abstract

In the literature on gender assignment, some scholars claim that semantic assignment rules always win, others that there is no type-wise ranking (i.e., ranking according to whether the rules are semantic, morphological or phonological) at all. This discussion necessitates a further look at semantic assignment rules that have nothing to do with the semantic core for gender. Such non-core rules are referred to as “crazy” here. Evidence for non-core rules is presented, and the paper presents criteria for distinguishing between plausible and implausible such rules. Some rules that have been proposed in the literature clearly fall short of the criteria. Other ‘crazy’ rules fare better. The paper also presents a scenario for the origin of crazy rules and discusses what they tell us about gender and about the nature of linguistic generalisations, which can be quite “local”.