Default Gender Research Articles

Fatima’s inheritance: Law, Islam, and gendered archive-making in India’s early modern global connections

Abstract Sometime around the first half of the seventeenth century, a Muslim woman known by the name Fatima brought her slaves to court over an inheritance dispute in the Indian port city of Surat. Tracing Fatima’s lawsuit and its many afterlives through the study of the transmission of its sole surviving record, this article charts the genealogies of the gendered (re)interpretations of the meaning of law and Islam from the courtroom of Surat to a Mughal official’s anthology and to a French Orientalist’s library. Along the way, Fatima’s invocation of divine legal authority in protecting her right of inheritance became abstracted by the Mughal official into a Persianate scribal articulation of ideal social order that saw the masculine as the default gender of law. This scribal vision of order then converged with the Orientalist’s universalist narrative of natural law that struggled to comprehend simultaneously the legal, economic and bodily agency of Muslim women. These layered processes of archive-making ultimately invite us to rethink not just Fatima’s story itself but also our current efforts to write gender into global history.

Cross-linguistic effects in grammatical gender assignment and predictive processing in L1 Greek, L1 Russian, and L1 Turkish speakers of Norwegian as a second language

The present study examines grammatical gender knowledge in offline production (gender marking on indefinite articles) and online gender processing (visual world paradigm) in adult second language (L2) learners of Norwegian with three different first languages (L1s): Greek, Russian, and Turkish. In particular, it investigates the role of the following factors: (1) presence vs. absence of grammatical gender in L1 (Norwegian, Greek and Russian have gender, whereas Turkish does not), (2) lexical gender congruency, (3) structural similarity between L1 and L2 in the realization of gender, and (4) proficiency in L2. In offline production, no difference was found between the three L2 groups: they all overused the default gender (masculine). However, L1 effects were observed in the eye-tracking task, where the high-proficiency L1 Greek and L1 Russian speakers showed earlier and more prominent signs of predictive gender processing compared to the high-proficiency L1 Turkish speakers. There were no effects of lexical gender congruency or structural similarity. This suggests that, when it comes to predictive gender processing, what matters is proficiency and the presence vs. absence of grammatical gender in the L1. We interpret the findings in the context of current approaches to predictive processing emphasizing the role of cue reliability and utility.

Surface transfer in the acquisition of grammatical gender in L2 Swedish. A longitudinal study

This longitudinal study explores two specific aspects of the acquisition of grammatical gender in L2 Swedish: the use of a default gender and surface transfer. Twenty-one L1 Polish university students of L2 Swedish were tested by means of an untimed gender assignment task after two, three, and four semesters of studying. The data were analysed using a two-way ANOVA for repeated measures. Participants had more success in assigning gender to Swedish nouns that shared gender across Polish and Swedish than to Swedish nouns that differed in gender across the two languages, regardless of length of experience in learning Swedish. Contrary to previous studies that observed overgeneralisation of uter gender forms in production, this study did not identify the tendency to use uter as a default, presumably because participants had unlimited time to perform the task. This finding points to a dissociation between the knowledge of grammatical gender and the ability to use it during processing.

Common Patterns of Cisgender Use in Public Health Articles and Their Implications for Gender Inclusivity Efforts, 2013‒2020.

Objectives. To identify how "cisgender" has been used in public health articles in recent years relative to the historical origins of the term to mark normative gender and describe systems of social power. Methods. I analyzed 352 US-focused public health articles (2013-2020) using a summative content analysis approach. I traced cisgender use by year and compared it by sample population (cisgender-only, mixed, not cisgender). Results. I identified 4 interlocking and mutually reinforcing patterns of cisgender use: limited and narrow use, undertheorized use, use as the default gender, and reinforcing binary categorization. These patterns largely result from the narrowing of cisgender to a demographic label. Conclusions. Cisgender is primarily used to categorize individual research participants as not transgender rather than to reflect participants' actual identity and experiences within gendered systems of power, which undermines cisgender's potential to support gender-inclusivity efforts and deepen understandings of gender-based health disparities. Public Health Implications. Two paths for creating more robust use of cisgender are (1) supporting gender inclusivity by clarifying and standardizing how and when the demographic category is used and (2) expanding the analytic potential of cisgender by returning to its historical origins as a framework for exposing and explaining patterns of power. (Am J Public Health. 2024;114(2):202-208. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2023.307441).

Processing of grammatical gender agreement morphemes in Polish: evidence from the Visual World Paradigm

This paper presents a psycholinguistic study of the processing of grammatical gender agreement morphemes in Polish, which has three gender categories (masculine, feminine, neuter), as well as what language-internal factors impact this processing. Results from an eye-tracking study using the Visual World Paradigm show that, during real-time language comprehension, adult monolingual speakers of Polish use cues from gender agreement on a prenominal adjective to anticipate the upcoming noun. An exploration of language-internal factors affecting this anticipatory processing finds this effect in all three genders, suggesting that encountering the relevant nominative-case agreement morpheme during language comprehension leads to automatic activation of a gender node in the mental lexicon, consistent with the literature on other languages with grammatical gender. These results hold true for the neuter agreement morpheme, despite the fact that this morpheme also instantiates default gender agreement in the language and is syncretic with the nominative plural agreement morpheme in all three genders. Further investigation finds that, while agreement morphemes for each gender prompt anticipatory processing, the reliability of a masculine agreement morpheme as a cue to gender is reduced in the presence of a neuter distractor, and vice versa. This raises questions regarding phonological proximity between the realized suffix and the suffix that would cue the distractor, with implications for the acquisition and processing of gender agreement morphology in Polish.

Always Feeling Behind: Women Auditors' Experiences during COVID-19

SUMMARY This paper examines women auditors' experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic using interviews and personal reflections. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's scholarship, we observe that COVID-19 was a destabilizing event for women auditors. Women's default gender role was brought to the fore both at work and at home. One of the key impressions we developed when analyzing the data is that positive changes that foster gender equality were nowhere near significant enough to offset the audit firms' strategies to boost their economic capital and the return of previous patriarchal roles. In short, COVID-19 most often exacerbated prior tensions in women's “work” habitus and “home” habitus, therefore further subjugating women to the power of dominant gender norms. Ultimately, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the implications of COVID-19 on women in audit firms by highlighting women auditors' fragile positions in balancing multiple demands at work and at home.

Zero-Derived Nouns in Greek

In this paper, we investigate zero-derived nouns based on irregular verbs in Greek. This is an under-explored area in Greek morpho-syntax, and in this paper, we will make three main contributions. First, we will discuss the fact that the overwhelming majority of these nouns are feminine, while neuter nouns are considerably less represented and masculine nouns are almost nonexistent. As feminine is taken to be the semantically marked gender in the case of animate nouns, asserting female sex, and neuter is argued to be the default gender in Greek for inanimates, the fact that zero abstract nouns are feminine is surprising. We will argue that feminine is the default in the case of zero derivation by exploiting an analysis of flavors of n. Second, we will show that, contrary to the findings in earlier literature, certain zero-derived nouns do have argument structure, similarly to their affixed counterparts. As not all zero-derived nouns have argument structure, we will appeal to complex head formation to explain the properties of those zero-derived nouns that have an eventive interpretation but do not surface with arguments. Finally, we will turn to an examination of the size of the domain that is nominalized. Since, in our cases, we observe root allomorphy conditioned by a nominal affix in the presence of a zero verbal head, we will suggest that Pruning is the mechanism that allows this.

Contact-Induced Change in the Domain of Grammatical Gender in Pontic Greek Spoken in Georgia

This paper presents an empirical study on the cross-linguistic influence of contact languages (Turkish, Georgian and Russian) in the domain of grammatical gender in Pontic Greek spoken by the Pontic-speaking community of Georgia. The study is based on corpus data collected during several periods of fieldwork within the Pontic-speaking community of Georgia. The questions addressed in the paper are: What innovations can be observed in the understudied variety in the gender domain, and, if any innovation is observed, are they due to the impact of contact languages? I argue that contact-induced changes in the gender domain manifest themselves in the assignment of gender to loan nouns, and contribute to the establishment of the default gender value. The main findings reveal that, in comparison with other Pontic varieties, this variety is on the one hand more sensitive to the animacy hierarchy, and, on the other, shows increased use of the feminine gender as a result of the incorporation of feminine loans from a gendered language, i.e., Russian.

Default gender in Belgian Dutch

AbstractGrammatical gender has been thoroughly investigated in codeswitching (CS) research. When (only) one of the languages involved in CS has grammatical gender, it has repeatedly been shown that (simultaneous) bilinguals assign default gender to a codeswitched noun from a genderless language (Liceras et al. 2008;Valdés Kroff et al. 2017;Parafita Couto 2019). For Spanish, “[t]here is little doubt that masculine is the unmarked or default gender” (Harris, 1991, 43). When looking at Belgian Dutch however, the picture is a bit more complicated, as it is not clear which determiner is unmarked for gender.Rooryck (2003)argues that the neuter gender is the under-specified category, while the masculine and feminine are marked for gender. This would predict that English nouns would be preceded by a neuter determiner when incorporated in a Belgian Dutch sentence. However, it seems to be the case that masculine, rather than neuter, is the preferred determiner for English codeswitches into Dutch. This paper reports on an acceptability judgment task in which simultaneous bilinguals were asked to rate (Belgian) Dutch sentences containing an English noun on a 7 point scale. Results surprisingly show a preference for feminine gender, in addition to neuter being dispreferred. I speculate that this unexpected result is due to influence from Standard Dutch.

Gender Assignment Strategies Among Simultaneous Spanish/English Bilingual Children from Miami, Florida

AbstractWe examined gender assignment patterns in the speech of Spanish/English bilingual children, paying particular attention to the influence of three gender assignment strategies (i.e., analogical gender, masculine default gender, phonological gender) that have been proposed to constrain the gender assignment process in Spanish/English bilingual speech. Our analysis was based on monolingual Spanish nominals (n = 1774), which served as a comparative baseline, and Spanish/English mixed nominal constructions (n = 220) extracted from oral narratives produced by 40 child bilinguals of different grade levels (second graders vs. fifth graders) and instructional programs (English immersion vs. two-way bilingual) from Miami Dade, Florida. The narratives, available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, Brian. 2000.The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), were collected by Pearson, Barbara Z. 2002. Narrative competence among monolingual and bilingual school children in Miami. In D. Kimbrough Oller & Rebecca E. Eilers (eds.),Language and literacy in bilingual children, 135–174. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Results revealed that in Spanish nominal constructions, children across both instructional programs and grade levels evinced native-like acquisition of grammatical gender. In mixed nominals, children overwhelmingly assigned the masculine gender to English nouns. Notably, irrespective of schooling background, simultaneous Spanish/English bilingual children used the masculine default gender strategy when assigning gender to English nouns with feminine translation equivalents. This suggests that from age seven, simultaneous Spanish/English child bilingual acquisition of grammatical gender is characterized by a predisposition towards the employment of the masculine default gender strategy in bilingual speech.

Referring to women using feminine and neuter gender

In German, gender is a strongly grammaticalized category and has the function of indicating grammatical agreement between syntactic units. Usually, each noun is assigned one of three grammatical genders. In standard German, nouns denoting women are typically feminine. However, Luxembourgish and some German dialects show a peculiarity: here, the gender of female first names and other parts of speech (e.g. pronouns) referring to women can be both feminine and neuter, depending on the nature of the interpersonal relationship between the speaker and the female referred to. In these varieties, gender assignment is governed by sociopragmatic factors. Sociopragmatic gender assignment is a result of de-grammaticalization, which is reflected in both syntagmatic and paradigmatic gender variability. The study shows that there is considerable diatopic variation in the use and function of gender in references to women. In some dialects, the neuter has become the default gender of female first names; this is a case of re-grammaticalization.

Gender Agreement Mismatches in Heritage Greek

This paper investigates gender agreement mismatches between nominal expressions and the targets of agreement they control in two groups (adults and adolescents) of Heritage Greek speakers in the USA. On the basis of language production data elicited via a narration task, we show that USA Greek Heritage speakers, unlike monolingual controls, show mismatches in gender agreement. We will show that the mismatches observed differ with respect to the agreement target between groups, i.e., noun phrase internal agreement seems more affected in the adolescent group, while personal pronouns appear equally affected. We will argue that these patterns suggest retreat to default gender, namely neuter in Greek. Neuter emerges as default when no agreement pattern can be established. As adult speakers show less mismatches, we will explore the reasons why speakers improve across the life span.

Gender in Unilingual and Mixed Speech of Spanish Heritage Speakers in The Netherlands

This study examines heritage speakers of Spanish in The Netherlands regarding their production of gender in both their languages (Spanish and Dutch) as well as their gender assignment strategies in code-switched constructions. A director-matcher task was used to elicit unilingual and mixed speech from 21 participants (aged 8 to 52, mean = 17). The nominal domain consisting of a determiner, noun, and adjective was targeted in three modes: (i) Unilingual Spanish mode, (ii) unilingual Dutch mode, and (iii) code-switched mode in both directions (Dutch to Spanish and Spanish to Dutch). The production of gender in both monolingual modes was deviant from the respective monolingual norms, especially in Dutch, the dominant language of the society. In the code-switching mode, evidence was found for the gender default strategy (common in Dutch, masculine in Spanish), the analogical gender strategy (i.e., the preference to assign the gender of the translation equivalent) as well as two thus far unattested strategies involving a combination of a default gender and the use of a non-prototypical word order. External factors such as age of onset of bilingualism, amount of exposure and use of both languages had an effect on both gender accuracy in the monolingual modes and assignment strategies in the code-switching modes.

El masculino inclusivo en español

The present study critically considers recent proposals that question both the use and the very existence of the so-called generic masculine in Spanish. A model of the grammatical structure of Spanish gender is developed, according to which person masculine nouns (with certain exceptions) do not include semantic information related to sex and are, therefore, epicenes with default gender. It is argued that the use of this Spanish inclusive masculine is not the cause of the invisibility of women in discourse, and that its avoidance is unnecessary and grammatically inconsistent.

Gender flip and person marking in Benchnon (North Omotic)

Subject agreement in the North Omotic language Benchnon (Rapold 2006) lacks dedicated person marking, but indirectly indicates person distinctions through asymmetries in the distribution of gender markers. In one verbal paradigm, first and second person subjects are expressed by feminine morphology, and in the other paradigm they are expressed by masculine morphology. This is hard to reconcile with any known notion of how gender assignment works. I show that it can be explained as the particular instantiation of a rare but cross-linguistically recurrent pattern in which a (reduced) person marking system is generated by restrictions on gender agreement: only third person subjects control semantic gender agreement, while first and second person are assigned default gender. In Benchnon the default gender switched from feminine to masculine over the course of its history, yielding two contrasting verbal paradigms. The older one is morphologically frozen, the newer one is a reflection of still-active agreement conditions. Further developments show that the older paradigm can be adapted to conform to the newer conditions, showing that the division between morphosyntactically motivated and arbitrarily stipulated morphology is a fluid one.

Gender assignment in loanwords in Jordanian Arabic

This study examines gender assignment in 531 English loanwords in Jordanian Arabic. Results show that the most common gender in the corpus is the masculine and the most important factor that determines the gender of the adapted loanword is the phonological/phonetic form of the loanword while semantic factors play a minor role. Most importantly, the paper provides evidence that the masculine, which is also morphologically unmarked, is the default gender in JA and probably in Arabic in general. In other words, Jordanian Arabic native speakers perceive English loan nouns as masculine unless strong evidence suggests otherwise. The paper contributes to studies on gender assignment in both Arabic and world languages by shedding light on the mechanisms of the complicated process of gender assignment in Jordanian Arabic. The study concludes with a number of implications for gender assignment in Arabic and second language acquisition of Arabic.

Using Social Recognition To Address the Gender Difference in Volunteering for Low-Promotability Tasks

Research shows that women volunteer significantly more for tasks that people prefer others to complete. Such tasks carry little monetary incentives because of their very nature. We use a modified version of the volunteer’s dilemma game to examine if non-monetary interventions, particularly, social recognition can be used to change the gender norms associated with such tasks. We design three treatments, where a) a volunteer receives positive social recognition, b) a non-volunteer receives negative social recognition, and c) a volunteer receives positive, but a non-volunteer receives negative social recognition. Our results indicate that competition for social recognition increases the overall likelihood that someone in a group has volunteered. Positive social recognition closes the gender gap observed in the baseline treatment, so does the combination of positive and negative social recognition. Our results, consistent with the prior literature on gender differences in competition, suggest that public recognition of volunteering can change the default gender norms in organizations and increase efficiency at the same time.

Gender switch in Sidaama

Abstract In Sidaama, a Highland East Cushitic language spoken in Ethiopia, the majority of nouns are feminine in the plural, regardless of their gender in the singular. We refer to this as ‘gender switch’ and we investigate how best to analyze this puzzling change in morphosyntactic behavior. We compare gender switch in Sidaama to the well-studied gender switch in Somali, arguing that Sidaama is different in that it is a true morphological syncretism unrelated to the syntax of plurality. We develop an analysis of Sidaama gender switch in the framework of Distributed Morphology and show how this analysis correctly predicts that feminine is the default gender in Sidaama. Overall, the paper provides a better understanding of gender switch in Sidaama and of the relationship between gender and number generally, it contributes to the very small theoretical-linguistic literature on Sidaama, and it offers some empirical support for Distributed Morphology.

Representing gender and defaults: Evidence from Lithuanian

This study examines gender representation and defaults in Lithuanian by investigating the inflection on predicative adjectives (PAs). We provide novel evidence for two types of defaults in the representation of gender, masculine being the unmarked gender, and neuter being the absence of gender. It is demonstrated that neuter PAs appear when the subject lacks gender features accessible for agreement with the PA, which we refer to as non-agreement. In contrast, masculine PAs appear when the PA agrees with a subject bearing an unmarked gender feature. We analyze masculine and feminine as sharing a feature [GEND] that originates on n, the locus of gender features (following Lecarme 2002; Lowenstamm 2008; Kramer 2015; 2016), with the default gender – the masculine – bearing only this feature, and the more marked gender – the feminine – having an additional feature [FEM]. Neuter corresponds to the absence of these features. By placing gender features on the nominalizing head n, our account explicitly relates the distribution of gender inflection to nominal syntax and agreement.

Nominal agreement in the interlanguage of Dutch L2 learners of Spanish

Abstract Inflectional morphology causes persistent difficulties for second language (L2) learners (Montrul, Silvina & Kim Potowski. 2007. Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish-English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism 11(3). 301–328; Montrul, Silvina, Israel de la Fuente, Justin Davidson & Rebecca Foote. 2013. The role of experience in the acquisition and production of diminutives and gender in Spanish: Evidence from L2 learners and heritage speakers. Second Language Research 29(1). 87–118). Learners operate with a default gender value, and overgeneralize the masculine forms of determiners and modifiers (White, Lydia, Elena Valenzuela, Martyna Kozlowska-Macgregor & Ingrid Leung. 2004. Gender and number agreement in nonnative Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics 25(1). 105–133; Schlig 2003). 111 essays written were collected containing 799 correct uses and 281 errors from Dutch students whose written ability in Spanish is A2 (Common European Framework). The results show that singular masculine nominal agreement marking at the determiner is significantly better produced by Dutch L2 learners of Spanish than when the marking of nominal agreement is plural, feminine or at the adjective. This study corroborates the previous results where learners operate with a default gender value and overgeneralize the masculine forms of determiners. Also these results show that L2 learners of Spanish are significantly less accurate in gender agreement with adjectives than with determiners.