The many facets of grammatical gender remain one of the most fruitful areas of linguistic research, and pose fascinating questions about the origins and development of complexity in language. The present work is a two-volume collection of 13 chapters on the topic of grammatical gender seen through the prism of linguistic complexity. The contributions discuss what counts as complex and/or simple in grammatical gender systems, whether the distribution of gender systems across the world’s languages relates to the language ecology and social history of speech communities. Contributors demonstrate how the complexity of gender systems can be studied synchronically, both in individual languages and over large cross-linguistic samples, and diachronically, by exploring how gender systems change over time. In addition to three chapters on the theoretical foundations of gender complexity, volume one contains six chapters on grammatical gender and complexity in individual languages and language families of Africa, New Guinea, and South Asia.

This volume is complemented by volume two, which consists of three chapters providing diachronic and typological case studies, followed by a final chapter discussing old and new theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of the dynamics of gender complexity.

The many facets of grammatical gender remain one of the most fruitful areas of linguistic research, and pose fascinating questions about the origins and development of complexity in language. The present work is a two-volume collection of 13 chapters on the topic of grammatical gender seen through the prism of linguistic complexity. The contributions discuss what counts as complex and/or simple in grammatical gender systems, whether the distribution of gender systems across the world’s languages relates to the language ecology and social history of speech communities. Contributors demonstrate how the complexity of gender systems can be studied synchronically, both in individual languages and over large cross-linguistic samples, and diachronically, by exploring how gender systems change over time. Volume two consists of three chapters providing diachronic and typological case studies, followed by a final chapter discussing old and new theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of the dynamics of gender complexity.

This volume is preceded by volume one, which, in addition to three chapters on the theoretical foundations of gender complexity, contains six chapters on grammatical gender and complexity in individual languages and language families of Africa, New Guinea, and South Asia.

This chapter introduces the two volumes Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity I: General issues and specific studies and Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity II: World-wide comparative studies.

In this chapter we view grammatical gender as a category type that emerges, evolvesand disappears in languages as a result of diachronic processes and whose complex-ity grows and diminishes through time (§1–§2). Traditional approaches to gram-matical gender focus on two properties that already presuppose a high degree ofmaturity of gender systems: noun classes and agreement. Here we conceive of gen-der rather as a category type with a semantic core of animacy and/or sex reflectingclasses of referents, which have a propensity to turn into classes of noun lexemes.When growing and retracting, gender characteristically follows the animacy or in-dividuation hierarchy. However, this hierarchical patterning breaks down whenanimacy leaks into the inanimate domain led astray by many different associativepathways, which is why lexical organization according to noun classes has to beinvoked to maintain some sort of order (§3). Gender manifests itself in the form ofmarking on noun-associated words, often within the local domain of noun phrases.Here we put gender marking into the wider context of nominal morphology (non-lexical markers within the noun phrase), which often originate in independent usein headless noun phrases and are extended to headed noun phrases only in a sub-sequent development (§4). As more mature manifestations of gender get organizedin the form of noun classes, they typically follow certain pathways of develop-ment that can be subsumed under the formula “From X to Y” (§5–§6). Agreementis fuzzy as its prototypical non-noun targets gradually develop by way of decate-gorialization from nouns, and controllers and targets are not always simple words,but can be complex (consist of syntactic formal groups) and controllers can be en-tirely contextual (§7). Gender should not be considered in isolation as it is – moreoften than not – parasitic on other grammatical category types, notably number,case, and person, with which it cumulates and which contribute to its high degreeof complexity (§8). Number is particularly tightly intertwined with gender in plu-ralia tantum and other phenomena related to lexical plurality (§9). As gender isorganized in form of systems, its diachronic evolution cannot be captured in termsof individual diachronic processes. When gender systems evolve, there is virtuallyalways co-evolution of connected events. Hence the study of system evolution isindispensable for understanding the complexity of gender (§10). However, the evo-lution of gender also displays characteristic areal and genealogical patterns and issensitive to external factors of language ecology (§11).

This paper proposes to integrate the diachronic dimension to the typological study of gender complexity, and focuses on the morphosyntactic encoding of gender distinctions via agreement patterns. After investigating the processes of language change that foster the reduction, loss, expansion and emergence of gender agreement in a sample of fifteen sets of closely related languages (N= 36 languages), we discuss how gender agreement systems in decline and on the rise pattern in terms of complexity. We show that declining and emerging gender agreement systems may exhibit increase or decrease in complexity and discuss how this relates to the fact that they represent transitional stages between absence of gender and full-fledged gender systems. In our analysis, we make use of typological implicational hierarchies in the domain of agreement as a tool to account for diachronic variation and for the patterns of simplification/complexification in the agreement systems of the sampled languages.

In this article we evaluate claims that language structure adapts to sociolinguistic environment. We present the results of two typological case studies examining the effects of the number of native (=L1) speakers and the proportion of adult second language (=L2) learners on language structure. Data from more than 300 languages suggest that testing the effect of population size and proportion of adult L2 learners on features of verbal and nominal complexity produces conflicting results on different grammatical features. The results show that verbal inflectional synthesis adapts to the sociolinguistic environment but the number of genders does not. The results also suggest that modeling population size together with proportion of L2 improves model fit compared to modeling them independently of one another. We thus argue that surveying population size alone may be insufficient to detect possible adaptation of linguistic structure to the sociolinguistic environment. Rather, other features, such as proportion of L2 speakers, prestige and social network density, should be studied, and if demographic numeric data are used, they should not be used in isolation but rather in competition with other sociolinguistic features. We also suggest that not all types of language structures within a given grammatical domain are equally sensitive to the effect of sociolinguistic variables, and that more exploratory studies are needed before we can arrive at a reliable set of grammatical features that may be potentially most (and least) adaptive to social structures.

This chapter investigates interactions between gender and number, and between gender and evaluative morphology in eighty-four African languages. It argues that interactions of gender with other grammatical domains (e.g. number) and/or with domains of derivational morphology (e.g. diminutive/augmentative) represent instances of non-canonical gender. This is based on two assumptions: (1) canonical morphosyntactic features should be maximally independent from each other, and (2) canonical gender should be an inherent lexical property of nouns, not manipulable for semantic or pragmatic purposes. The gender systems of the sampled languages appear to be frequently non-canonical because they are prone to interact with the morphosyntactic encoding of number distinctions and with the formation of diminutive and augmentative nouns. The chapter further outlines some suggestions as to how interactions between gender and other domains of nominal morphology may contribute to assess asymmetries between gender and other functional domains, as well as the complexity of gender systems.