French gender assignment revisited

Abstract

This paper offers several proposals for predicting the gender assignment of French nouns. It is argued that it is possible to distinguish between masculine and feminine shapes of nouns, either in terms of phonological shape or morphological composition. This proposal, however, goes beyond previous claims in the research on French gender, in that it does not use phonic endings exclusively as the basis of gender assignment, irrespective of semantic and derivational considerations; also, it regards the distinction between phonic ending and suffix as a decisive factor. Semantic rules for gender assignment are proposed which demonstrably play a role in French gender. Finally, this paper also proposes a principle for resolving gender rule conflict or competition in the case of phonic ambiguity in the endings of French nouns (e.g. réfectoire ‘refectory’ (m) and trajectoire ‘trajectory’ (f)), namely, that masculine is the default-gender. That is to say that masculine nouns (with the exception of animates) are not significantly gender-marked and receive their gender assignment by default if there is no phonic, morphological or semantic reason for them to be feminine. Following these proposals, the task of gender assignment is considerably reduced, such that for the most part only rules for feminine gender assignment need be identified.