Grammar in Art

Edward Segel,Lera Boroditsky

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00244

Abstract

Jakobson (1959) reports: “The Russian painter Repin was baffled as to why Sin had been depicted as a woman by German artists: he did not realize that ‘sin’ is feminine in German (die Sünde), but masculine in Russian (rpex).” Does the grammatical gender of nouns in an artist's native language indeed predict the gender of personifications in art? In this paper we analyzed works in the ARTstor database (a digital art library containing over a million images) to measure this correspondence. This analysis provides a measure of artists’ real-world behavior. Our results show a clear correspondence between grammatical gender in language and personified gender in art. Grammatical gender predicted personified gender in 78% of the cases, significantly more often than if the two factors were independent. This analysis offers a new window on an age-old question about the relationship between linguistic structure and patterns in culture and cognition.

Highlights

Jakobson (1959) reports: “The Russian painter Repin was baffled as to why Sin had been depicted as a woman by German artists: he did not realize that ‘sin’ is feminine in German, but masculine in Russian.” Does the grammatical gender of nouns in an artist’s native language predict the gender of personifications in art? While this question has been considered and debated by art scholars (e.g., Guthke, 1999), no quantitative analysis has been offered
The analysis was restricted to artworks from Italy, France, Germany, and Spain
We analyzed the data in a number of different ways to control for non-independence of personifications that occurred within the same artwork, that were produced for the same allegorical theme, or that were produced by the same artist

Summary

Introduction

Does the grammatical gender of nouns in an artist’s native language predict the gender of personifications in art? While this question has been considered and debated by art scholars (e.g., Guthke, 1999), no quantitative analysis has been offered. In this paper we analyzed a large art database to measure this correspondence. This analysis offers a new window on an age-old question about the relationship between linguistic structure and patterns in thought (e.g., Whorf, 1956). We take a different approach and consider a pattern of behavior in the real world: personification in art. While observational approaches like this are necessarily limited for the purposes of inferring causation, observing real-world behavior does offer a number of important advantages

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Discussion

Conclusion