Constructing Feminine to Mean

Linguistic gender is a complex and amazing category that has puzzled and still puzzles theoretical linguists, typologists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, didacticians, as well as scholars of anthropology, culture, and even mystical (divine) sufism. In Standard and colloquial Arabic varieties, feminine morphology (unlike “common sense”) is not dedicated to mark beings of the female sex (or “natural gender”). When you name the female of a “lion” (ʔasad) or a “donkey” (ḥimaar), you use different words (labuʔat or ʔataan), as if the male and female of the same species are linguistically conceived as completely unrelated entities. When you “feminize” words like “bee” (naḥl) or “pigeon” (ḥamaam), the outcome is not a noun for the animal with a different sex, but a singular of the collective “bees,” “one bee” (naḥl-at), or an individual pigeon (ḥamaam-at). In the opposite direction, when a singular noun “carpenter” (najjar) is feminized, the (unexpected) result is a special plural, or rather a group, “carpenters as a professional group” (najjar-at). Since some of these words (contrastively) possess “normal” masculine plurals, or masculine singulars, I propose to distinguish atomicities (which are broadly “masculine”) from unities (which are “feminine”). The diversity of feminine senses is also manifested when you feminize an inherently masculine noun like “father” (ʔab), “uncle” (ʕamm), etc. The outcome (in the appropriate performative context) is that you are endearing your father or uncle, rather than “womanizing” him. More “unorthodox” senses are evaluative, pejorative, diminutive, augmentative, etc. It is striking that gender not only plays a central role in shaping individuation, or perspectizing plurality, but it is also used to distinguish what we count, or what we quantifier over. In Arabic, when you count numbers in sequence (three, four, five, six, etc.), you use the feminine, but when you count objects, you have to “negotiate” for gender, due to the “gender polarity” constraint. Your quantifier senses, which are also subtly built in the grammar, equally negotiate for gender. Wide cross-linguistic comparison extends the inventories of features, mechanisms, and typological notions used, to languages like Hebrew, Berber, Celtic, Germanic, Romance, Amazonian, etc. On the whole, gender is far from being parasitic in the grammar of Arabic or any language (including “classifier” languages). It is central as it has never been.

Centering on gender, individuation, and number, Fassi Fehri's book deals with one of the most basic and less understood aspects of the underlying structure and ontology of natural language, exposing hard to die myths such as the meaninglessness of gender or the limited structural role played by its exponents. Fassi's voice is a deeply original mix of true scholarships and analytical insights, definitely to be paid attention to in the current panorama of formal and typological studies on the topic., In this outstanding contribution, Fassi Fehri demonstrates that the traditional notion of feminine as a lexical marker of noun class is insufficient to capture the surprisingly broad range of uses of gender marking in Arabic and other languages. The study uncovers intricate interactions that connect gender, number and quantification, and permeate many linguistic phenomena. It is benchmark whose influence will be felt for years to come., Fassi Fehri’s new book is a brilliant continuation of his groundbreaking research line, contributing to understanding Universal Grammar through peculiarities of Arabic syntax. Taking grammatical features as the driving force behind many syntactic processes, the author tackles the most difficult task of investigating the role of Gender, the feature previously regarded as the least connected to deep syntactic effects. The result is an exciting model of how innovative research can be pursued within an explanatory science of human language., In this major contribution, Fassi Fehri re-thinks in depth the sense of gender and number as categories of nominality. His analysis of Arabic weaves together many neglected phenomena into an innovative approach to countability, individuation, and quantification, where morphosyntactic categories have a much broader range of functions. A robust theoretical framework places the analysis of Arabic in a cross-linguistic perspective, making the study relevant for a wide audience., Fassi Fehri demonstrates how grammatical gender in Arabic varieties plays new roles at various levels of nominal and clausal syntax, making an astonishingly wide range of semantic distinctions in terms of individuation, classification, number, quantification, and much more. The findings are remarkable, yet almost incontrovertible, once they are clearly laid out and analysed, as in this book, a veritable treasure trove for anyone interested in the role of gender in the grammar.

Abdelkader Fassi Fehri is professor of arts and human sciences at Mohammed V University of Rabat