1 Calibrating complexity: How complex is a gender system? Jenny Audring Draft, Sept 23, 2015 ABSTRACT Grammatical gender is a many‐sided phenomenon, involving complex relations between semantics, morphology, phonology, and syntax. Yet, not all gender systems across the world are equally complex. This paper presents a way to assess the descriptive complexity of gender systems in natural languages, building on the typological data collected in Corbett (1991 and 2013) and applying the insights from Canonical Typology (chiefly Corbett 2006, 2012; Corbett & Fedden 2017). The result is a typologically responsible evaluation of the ways in which grammatical gender can be more or less complex. The analysis provides a descriptive basis for experimental assessments of difficulty in acquisition and processing. Moreover, it demonstrates the set‐up and use of calibration tools for the complexity of a grammatical subsystem, a methodology that can be applied to other linguistic domains. 1. INTRODUCTION Speakers have intuitions about language complexity, and so do linguists. Asked about complex grammatical gender systems, most linguists would mention French or Swahili rather than Italian or English. However, the gender systems of Swahili and French differ markedly in the way they are complex, and English gender might be complex in yet other ways. One of the languages with a proverbially complex gender system is German. In a famous monograph, Köpcke (1982) proposed a set of rules that account for the gender of 90% of the language’s monosyllabic nouns. This was – and still is – hailed as a remarkable feat, since German gender was thought to be complex to the point of arbitrariness (Maratsos 1979). Yet, Köpcke’s model in itself is considerably complex: it involves a total number of 44 different rules. Köpcke’s study, however, only investigates a single dimension of complexity: it focusses entirely on the rules of gender assignment. Other central aspects of gender, especially agreement, are not considered. This leaves the question of how simple or complex German gender might be in other dimensions, and indeed what these dimensions are. How can the complexity of a gender system be described and evaluated in a typologically responsible way? Following up on a preliminary attempt in Audring (2014) and drawing on the wealth of available typological and theoretical work, this paper develops a methodology to answer this question. Here, the focus is on absolute rather than relative complexity (see Miestamo 2008 and Kusters 2003 for details on the