Competing influences on gender assignment: Variable process, stable outcome

Abstract

In languages which have a nominal classification system such as grammatical gender, it is often problematic why a given word is assigned one gender rather than another. Factors which may act in concern or compete in influencing assignment include the phonological shape of the word, sex of the (animate) referent, and placement of the word within a semantic class. Evidence from loanwords can help evaluate these and other influences on gender assignment. In contrast with the previous literature, we analyze here the simultaneous contributions of a series of quantitative constraints on the assignment of gender to English nouns borrowed into Puerto Rican Spanish, constraints which may all be active at the time of introduction of the loanword. We also examine intergenerational and interlinguistic patterns by (1) comparing the behavior of adults with that of their children, and (2) comparing Puerto Rican patterns with Montreal French, a language which is typologically similar to Spanish and which has coexisted with English even longer than Puerto Rican Spanish. We show that, although the gender of loanwords once assigned is not variable, it is the factors involved in its initial assignment which are. A variationist approach to gender assignment further reveals that constraints on this process are not universal, but language-specific.