Neige Rochant
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Neige Rochant’s in-progress PhD dissertation is a grammatical description of Baga Pukur, an Atlantic language of Guinea with a noun class system, while she has also been working on synchronic and diachronic aspects of the morphosyntax of Andi, an East-Caucasian language with five genders. The rest of her research revolves around the typology and evolution of gender systems. For example, she has a paper on the evolutionary tendencies of gender systems in the Atlantic family together with two other members of this team (Rochant et al., 2022) and a paper using computational methods to predict gender assignment in an East-Caucasian language, co-authoring, among others, with Marc Allassonnière-Tang (Wichers Schreur et al., under review). She will contribute to the linguistic aspects of the project.
Research Interests
Language description & documentation, Diachronic linguistics, Qualitative & quantitative methods, Atlantic, Nakh-Daghestanian, Valency, Noun classes, Morphology, Tonology
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
Rochant, Neige, Marc Allassonnière-Tang and Chundra Cathcart. 2022. The evolutionary trends of noun class systems in Atlantic languages. Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE), (pp. 624-631). doi: 10.17617/2.3398549.
Wichers Schreur, Jesse, Marc Allassonnière-Tang, Kate Bellamy and Neige Rochant. 2022. Predicting grammatical gender in Nakh languages: Three methods compared. Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads, 2(2): 93–126. doi: 10.6092/issn.2785-0943/14545.
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