International workshop on “Nominalization, Gender and Classifiers”
Jointly organized byCollaborative Research Project “Empirical Study of the Typology ofNominalization—from Theoretical, Fieldwork, Historical and Dialectal
Perspective”, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL),Tokyo, Japan
And
University of Foreign Language Studies-The University of DA Nang (UFLS-UD),
Da Nang, VietnamndDate: 2 January (Monday), 2023
Venue: C204
Program
8:00 to 8:15: Welcome address by Dr. Huynh Ngoc Mai Kha, Vice president, UFLS-UD
8:15 to 8:30: Introduction to the workshop by Prof. Prashant Pardeshi, NINJAL
8:30 to 10:00: Talk 1:
Toward “Dynamic Functional Typology”—Nominalization, gender, and classifiers—,
Masayoshi SHIBATANI (Rice University/Kobe University)
Break: 10:00 to 10:30
10:30 to 11:30: Talk 2:
Classifier and Gender Marking in South Asian (Indic and Dravidian) Languages: A
Nominalization Perspective, Prashant PARDESHI, National Institute for Japanese
Language and Linguistics (NINJAL), Tokyo
11:30 to 12:00: Talk 3
Classifiers in Vietnamese: their Role in Nominalization
Masaaki Shimizu, Osaka University
12:00 to 12:30 Discussions and Closing Remarks by Dr. Huynh Ngoc Mai Kha, Vice
president, UFLS-UDABSTRACTSTALK 1
Toward “Dynamic Functional Typology”—Nominalization, gender, andclassifiers—
Masayoshi SHIBATANI
Rice University/Kobe University/University of Tokyo
While Functional Typology yields certain generalizations about form-function correlations,it, like a (synchronic) descriptive grammar, does not explain how a language ends up
displaying such generalizations. By incorporating a diachronic perspective, the diverse
marking patterns of grammatical nominalizations in Amami Ryukyuan of Japan are
explained in terms of two competing economic motivations; namely, the hearer’s economy
motivating innovations toward diversity in form, and the speaker’s economy driving
changes toward form uniformity. This dynamicization of functional typology is also usefulin understanding crosslinguistic patterns of gender- and classifier-marking, which, we
contend, have been mishandled by leading researchers in the field such as Corbett (1991)
for the former and Allen (1977) and Aikhenvald (2019) for the latter. In particular, we
advance the claim that grammatical genders and (numeral) classifiers nominalize numerals,
demonstratives, and other structures and at the same time classify what is being denotedaccording to the gender- and classifier-classes of the language. In other words, genders andclassifiers are specifically classifying types of nominalization, while ordinary
nominalizations classify minimally, if at all.
TALK 2Classifier and Gender Marking in South Asian (Indic and Dravidian) Languages: A
Nominalization Perspective
Prashant PARDESHI
National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL), Tokyo
In previous studies, classifier, gender marking and relativization are treated as distinct
unrelated phenomena. The goal of this talk is to revisit these three adnominal structuresand demonstrate that they all can be treated as instances of grammatical nominalizations
as claimed by Shibatani (2021). With ample data from South Asian languages (Indic/IndoAryan and Dravidian) it would be shown that grammatical genders and (numeral)classifiers nominalize numerals, demonstratives, genitives, and adjectives and at the sametime classify what is being denoted.
TALK 3
Classifiers in Vietnamese: their Role in Nominalization
Masaaki Shimizu
Osaka University

This study reviews the previous studies on Vietnamese classifiers (M.B.Emeneau 1951,Nguyen Tai Can 1975, Cao Xuan Hao 1992, Tuong Nguyen 2008, Vu Duc Nghieu 2020,etc.) to see how their status in noun phrases has been analyzed. Among others, TuongNguyen (2008), after categorizing Vietnamese classifiers into three kinds—eventclassifiers (e.g., cái đẹp [CLF+beautiful] ‘beauty’), unit-classifiers (e.g., một bài thờ[one+CLF+poetry] ‘a poem’) and kind-classifiers (e.g., một thứ quần áo[one+CLF+pants+shirt] ‘a sort of clothes’)—points out that only event-classifiers can beused in nominalization. This presentation focuses on the function of classifiers innominalization to see which kind of adnominals (numerals, demonstratives, genitives,adjectives, and relative clauses) they can nominalize. An examination of Vietnameseclassifiers in the light of the typological study of nominalization explored by Shibatani(2021) affords an occasion of accessing how the two strains of classifiers research canbenefit from each other.