Marc Allassonniere-Tang
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His research focuses on nominal classification systems, including grammatical gender systems, and how these systems interact with the human cognitive system and the sociocultural environment. He uses methods from quantitative computational typology, including phylogenetic methods. He is currently based in the interdisciplinary laboratory Ecological-Anthropology (UMR 7206) in Paris, working in interdisciplinary projects involving anthropology, linguistics, sociolinguistics, and biology. He will contribute to the linguistic and the quantitative sections of the project.
Research Interests
Linguistic typology, Computational linguistics, Nominal classification.
Unraveling the interactions between culture and language:
Does grammatical gender foster gender inequality and vice versa?
(Collaborative project, awarded a NetIAS Constructive Advanced Thinking grant, 2021-2024)
The human cognitive system interacts with the cultural environment. Within this interaction, the interplay between grammatical gender and sociocultural gender represents a societal challenge. The presence of grammatical gender (such as masculine and feminine) in language has an effect on how men and women are perceived by humans. Most studies compared languages with sex-based gender (such as masculine/feminine in Spanish) with languages that do not have a grammatical gender system (e.g., in English and Mandarin). However, other nominal classification systems such as noun classes (e.g., in Swahili) or classifiers (e.g., in Japanese) also categorize nouns of the lexicon into categories based on features such as animacy or shape. Furthermore, most languages considered in existing studies are Indo-European. Nevertheless, sex-based grammatical gender system are not restricted to this language family. For example, grammatical gender systems are also found in languages such as Mian (Ok family, Papua-New-Guinea).
We expand the data pool for testing the effect of nominal classification systems on gender parity. Information on grammatical gender and sociocultural gender is extracted from the data already gathered during the respective research of the project members. We then use quantitative methods to capture the multilevel interaction between the linguistic and the sociocultural variables.
Key Publications
Marc Allassonnière-Tang and Marcin Kilarski. 2023. Nominal Classification in Asia and Oceania: Functional and diachronic perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN: 978-9-02721-437-9
Her, One-Soon, Harald Hammarström and Marc Allassonnière-Tang. 2022. Defining numeral classifiers and identifying classifier languages of the world. Linguistics Vanguard, 8(1): 151-164. doi: 10.1515/lingvan-2022-0006.
Allassonnière-Tang, Marc, Olof Lundgren, Maja Robbers, Sandra Cronhamn, Filip Larsson, One-Soon Her, Harald Hammarström and Gerd Carling. 2021. Expansion by migration and diffusion by contact is a source to the global diversity of linguistic nominal categorization systems. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 8(331). doi: 10.1057/s41599-021-01003-5.
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