The feminine anaphoric gender gram, incipient gender marking, maturity, and extracting anaphoric gender markers from parallel texts.

The aim of this paper is to carry out a typological study of feminine anaphoric gender grams (such as English she/her) in a large world-wide convenience sample of 816 languages based on a strictly procedural definition. The investigation pursues a radically functional approach where the functional equivalence of the forms under study is assured by exploring an identical search space in parallel texts (translations of the New Testament) in all languages of the sample. This is the first large scale typological study of grammatical gender based on parallel texts, and a large part of the paper is devoted to methodological aspects. The study shows that gender has a functional core like any other grammatical category, and that it can at least partly be studied without resort to the notions of noun class, agreement and system. The results show that a large number of languages possess simple forms of gender, often representing incipient gender from a grammaticalization perspective. The paper discusses how simple gender differs from more mature and genealogically more stable forms of anaphoric gender. Finally the feminine anaphoric gram type is considered in its wider context, reconciling it to the traditional global approach focusing on the notions of system, noun class and agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]