Constructing Feminine to Mean: Gender, Number, Numeral, and Quantifier Extensions in Arabic

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 (asad) or a donkey (imaar), you use different words (labuat or ataan), as if the male and female of the same species are linguistically conceived as completely unrelated entities. When you feminize words like bee (nal) or pigeon (amaam), the outcome is not a noun for the animal with a different sex, but a singular of the collective bees, one bee (nal-at), or an individual pigeon (amaam-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 (ab), uncle (amm), 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. See more