Progress or regress in typology: a rebuttal of Plank (2026)

In a series of articles, I investigated the interaction of gender and other grammatical categories from a typological perspective.In Berg (2020) I examined the interaction of nominal gender and word class, in particular personal pronouns and possessive determiners.The latter were broken down into possessors and possessums because they can be independently marked for gender.Berg (2024aBerg ( , 2024b) ) focussed on the interaction of gender and person.Two major objectives of Berg (2024a) were to provide a survey of gender marking in the singular, especially in the first-person singular, across a number of different targets (e.g.verbs and possessive determiners) and to determine how consistently gender is implemented in person paradigms.The focus shifted to first-person plural in Berg (2024b), i.e. to a three-way interaction of gender, person and number.This study was framed within the principle of informativity, which predicts not only that a gender contrast is more likely to emerge in singular than in non-singular forms (Greenberg's Universals 37 and 45) but also that a gender distinction is more likely to emerge in first-person plural than in first-person singular forms.The key claim was that there is a typological effect of gender attraction by first-person plural pronouns, named the first-person non-singular asymmetry.Though seemingly contradictory, this asymmetry and Greenberg's Universal 45 were argued to be equally valid.The proposed solution was to assign Universal 45 to the third person and the non-singular gender effect to the first (and second) person.It may be added that the principle of informativity also made the correct prediction for the interaction of gender and clusivity.All three papers were based on genealogically stratified language samples.Owing to the relative infrequency of first-person gender marking, I endeavoured to