This chapter introduces the two volumes Grammatical gender and linguistic com- plexity I: General issues and specific studies and Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity II: World-wide comparative studies.
Grammatical gender is notorious for its complexity. Corbett (1991: 1) charac- terizes gender as “the most puzzling of the grammatical categories”. One reason is that the traditional definitional properties of gender – noun classes and agree- ment – are very intricate phenomena that can affect all major areas of language structure. Gender is an interface phenomenon par excellence and tends to form elaborate systems, which is why the question of how systems emerge in language development and change is highly relevant for understanding and modeling the evolution of gender systems. In addition, some of the recent literature on lin- guistic complexity claims that gender is ‘historical junk’ without any obvious function (Trudgill 2011: 156) and is likely to be lost in situations of increased non- native language acquisition (McWhorter 2001; 2007; Trudgill 1999). Not only are its synchronic functions a matter of debate, but gender also tends to be diachron- ically opaque due to its high genealogical stability and entrenchment (Nichols 1992: 142; Nichols 2003), making gender a core example of a mature phenomenon (Dahl 2004).