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• Colette Grinevald

dans le cadre du thème transversal Langues en danger : Terrain, Documentation, Revitalisation

Sara Petrollino : « Gender and augmentatives in Hamar (Ethiopia) »

Gender, number and evaluative morphology in Hamar are closely intertwined in a complex noun classification system. Hamar does not have special ‘evaluative’ markers, but gender marking is functional to the encoding of size (augmentation). The encoding of size-related meanings is mentioned in the literature on noun classification among the possible semantic values of gender systems (Corbett 1991, Croft 1994, Aikhenvald 2003), and the interaction between sex-based gender systems and evaluation is quite common in African languages: Di Garbo (2012), in her typological study of gender systems and evaluative morphology in African languages shows that the majority of the languages with sex-based gender in her sample encode diminution and augmentation by shifting a noun from one gender to the other. Hamar however differs in many respects from the languages surveyed: it does not employ ‘gender shift’ as the strategy to encode augmentation, and it reverses the stereotypical semantic associations ‘female-small’ and ‘male-big’ attested cross-linguistically. After introducing the Hamar language and the functioning of its gender system, I will illustrate and discuss the expression of augmentation in the light of Di Garbo’s typological survey.

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