Gender Marking Research Articles

The decline of feminine gender: a cross-dialectal study of seven Norwegian dialects

This paper presents a cross-dialectal study of grammatical gender in Norwegian nominal phrases. Specifically, we investigate the decline of the feminine gender in three age groups across seven different dialects. The dialects vary in their morphological richness of gender marking: some dialects traditionally have more distinctive marking of the feminine gender. With an elicited production experiment, we investigate gender marking on the indefinite determiner and the definite suffix. We find that feminine gender is in decline in all dialects, but there are clear differences between the locations and between age groups. The feminine indefinite determiner ei is replaced by the masculine en at different rates and to a different degree in the various dialects. We furthermore find that the feminine definite suffix -a is retained in all locations except for Stavanger. We argue that the decline of the feminine gender can be explained by an interplay between the morphological richness of the given dialect and dialect contact. The former helps to retain the feminine as a separate category, while the latter accelerates the loss of the feminine.

Gender and age biases in the assessment of speech accuracy: A study of speech-language clinicians' ratings of /s/ accuracy.

Typically developing children assigned male at birth (AMAB) and children assigned female at birth (AFAB) produce the fricative /s/ differently: AFAB children produce /s/ with a higher spectral peak frequency. This study examined whether implicit knowledge of these differences affects speech-language pathologists'/speech and language therapists' (SLPs'/SLTs') ratings of /s/ accuracy, by comparing ratings made in conditions where SLPs/SLTs were blind to children's sex assigned at birth (SAB) to conditions in which they were told this information. SLPs (n = 95) varying in clinical experience rated the accuracy of word-initial /s/ productions (n = 87) of eight children with speech sound disorder in one of four conditions: one in which no information about the children was revealed, one in which children's SAB was revealed, one in which children's age was revealed, and one in which both were revealed. Despite there being no statistically significant differences between AFAB and AMAB children's /s/ production in researcher-determined accuracy or in one acoustic characteristic, spectral centroid, SLPs in all four conditions judged the /s/ productions of AFAB children as more accurate than AMAB children. Listeners were significantly less likely to judge the productions of AMAB children to be inaccurate in the conditions in which age or age and SAB were revealed. These effects were consistent across SLPs with greatly varying levels of clinical experience. Knowing or imputing children's age and SAB can affect ratings of /s/ accuracy. Clinicians should be mindful of these potential effects. Future research should understand how expectations about sociolinguistic variation in speech affect appraisals of their speech and language. What is already known on the subject Adult men and women produce /s/ differently. A consensus is that these differences reflect sociolinguistic gender marking, rather than being the passive consequence of vocal-tract differences. Recent studies have shown that children assigned female at birth (AFAB) and those assigned male at birth (AMAB) produce /s/ differently in ways that mirror the differences between adult men and women, and which presumably reflect gender marking. What this paper adds to existing knowledge We asked whether US-based speech-language pathologists' (SLPs) ratings of the accuracy of /s/ differ depending on whether they are rating an AFAB or an AMAB child, and whether these differences are greater in conditions in which people are told the sex assigned at birth of the child being rated. We found that SLPs were more likely to judge AFAB children's /s/ productions to be more accurate than AMAB children's, even though the productions from the AMAB and AFAB children that were used as stimuli were matched for accuracy as determined by trained researchers. What are the clinical implications of this work? SLPs/speech-language therapists should be sensitive to the influence of social variables when assessing /s/. SLPs/speech-language therapists might rate children's productions differently depending on whether they believe they are rating an AFAB or an AMAB child.

The evolutionary dynamics of grammatical gender in Torricelli languages

Abstract Grammatical gender in New Guinea is an often neglected area in typological research, even though it is extremely diverse. For example, in New Guinea, some languages have grammatical gender systems with two sex-based categories, more than four gender-indexing targets, and no gender marking on nouns, while some languages have grammatical gender systems with much more categories, which are only marginally sex-based. This paper infers the processes of development and change of grammatical gender in Torricelli languages from two perspectives. First, it synthesizes the available data in the existing literature and hypothesizes the evolutionary pathway of gender systems in Torricelli languages. Nineteen Torricelli languages are selected as a representative coverage of the 55 Torricelli languages listed in Glottolog within the limits of the available documentation. These languages are then coded based on 6 presence-absence features relating to gender marking on verbs, adjectives, nouns, numerals, pronouns, and demonstratives. Second, it conducts an analysis with phylogenetic comparative methods to provide a quantitative assessment of the evolutionary possibilities for gender systems in Torricelli languages. The preliminary results show that gender is likely marked at the root of Torricelli languages, with pronouns and verbs being at the core of the system. This is in agreement with trends reflecting the evolution of gender systems in languages across the world.

Non-conforming dialect and its (social) meanings: younger and older speakers’ reactions to hyperdialectisms in Brabantish

Abstract This paper discusses the social meaning of variation in adnominal gender marking in the Dutch dialect of North Brabant. Previous studies reveal that the masculine gender suffix gains social meaning at the expense of grammatical function. However, it remains unclear what kinds of meanings the suffix can have, and how it becomes part of a Brabantish speech style. Therefore, we present statements from ten focus group interviews featuring 50 younger and older speakers. In these sessions, participants were asked to reflect on hyperdialectal usages of the gender suffix. We argue that the indexicalization of the suffix does not yield one fixed social meaning but rather a range of potential meanings, i.e. indexical field, that can be called upon by individual speakers depending on the context. However, the ranges of potential meanings clearly differ between both age groups, unraveling the different norms associated with the suffix.

Gender Issues between Gemini and ChatGPT: The Case of English-Arabic Translation

The study focuses on the gender-related issues that face English-Arabic machine translation. It aims to investigate and evaluate gender accuracy in the translations provided by two prominent large language models, Gemini and ChatGPT, recognizing the rich morphological system of Arabic that includes gender marking. The researchers develops a test suite to evaluate gender accuracy in the translation outputs of Gemini and ChatGPT. The evaluation is performed by two professional annotators. That is followed by an analysis of the patterns of the gender-related issues that appear in the translation outputs of the models under study. The results show that Gemini outperformed ChatGPT in almost every aspect when it comes to gender-related translation issues. Both the number of the annotated issues as well as the gender accuracy evaluation came in favor of Gemini. The study introduced different patterns of gender-related translation issues. It also provides recommendations for future research.

Maskuliniteter i förändring på mansdominerade arbetsplatser. Exemplet gruvindustrin

This article discusses how changes in male-dominated work are connected to changes in gender constructions in the workplaces. The discussion is based on results from research conducted 2001–2021, mainly qualitative empirical studies of mine work. Although the development of the mining industry will not be as technologically deterministic and rapid as the usual dystopian and utopian visions predict, our research shows that there has already been changes that have affected mine work and workplaces. These changes have challenged the old, gendered mining workplace cultures and the implementation of new technology and reorganisation initially met resistance in the workplace. Workplace cultures seemed to be lagging behind in their acceptance of technological and organizational changes. The resistance was shaped in relation to intertwined masculinities and miner identities linked to the old ‘macho masculin-ity’, a form of local hegemonic masculinity built upon overarching myths and discourses about both mining and rural communities. The subsequent changes of mining work resulted in new gender encodings of the new technology and the new spaces of work – which created new organisational gender boundaries and new forms of inequality. At the same time, there are new forms of masculinities and feminini-ties emerging in mining organizations, which can provide openings for gender equality. Although mine work continues to be male dominated, we can see that new places, new technology, improved work environment and increased gender equality seem to imply that it has become difficult to preserve the old (‘macho’) miner masculinity and to maintain the gender marking of mining work as male and the image of the miner as male. As of now, the ‘green transition’ and the acceleration of new digital technologies implemented in mine work is beginning to shape the industrial workplaces of northern Sweden. The discourses of “green” and “technological transformation” are permeated by gendered preconceptions, by some expected to reshape the masculine workplace of the mine. Yet, our conclusion is that transformation of gendered structures in mining is not foremost dependent of technological change. Rather, we have seen complex connections between gender, technology, work and place for these male-dominated industrial workplaces, including processes of both stability and change, suggesting that changes in workplaces does not only challenge but also reproduce and reconfigure gender-based preconceptions and social constructions of gender.

Third Gender Marking in Spanish: Evaluation of Current Options from a Linguistic Change Point of View

Third Gender Marking in Spanish: Evaluation of Current Options from a Linguistic Change Point of View

Effects of Grammatical Gender on Gender Inferences: Experimental Evidence From Italian Common Gender Nouns

Recent psycholinguistic research has focused on how different grammatical gender marking strategies affect people's mental representation of referents’ gender. Such works particularly explored how explicitly encoded linguistic elements, such as grammatical gender markers, may drive the inferential process as attentional clues. Results of reading comprehension tasks in French and German have shown that the explicit encoding of masculine gender in plural forms of role nouns often leads to a male bias, a specific masculine inference corresponding to the grammatical gender clue, even when the masculine form was intended as generic, thus including women and men. Moreover, comparing generic masculine forms with gender-fair alternatives revealed that the latter significantly reduce this male bias. The present study examines the impact of three gender marking strategies on the construction of generic mental representations. Indeed, the experiment tested generic masculine against two gender-fair forms (split masculine/feminine forms and ambiguous syntactic reformulations) among 38 Italian speakers. No significant effect was found in generating a generic mental representation through form manipulation. However, ambiguous syntactic reformulation realised by presenting target nouns from the Italian common gender noun class and through the neutralisation of determiners’ gender, increased the probability of a male-specific inference. Additionally, a keen interest in gender-fair language topics was linked to longer reaction times, indicating a higher cognitive effort during the inference process.

Gender, number and person: a three-way interaction

Abstract According to the principle of informativity, more useful information is more likely to be coded than less useful information. This principle underlies Greenberg’s Universals 37 and 45, which state that a larger number of (sex-based) gender contrasts are on average found in singular than in non-singular forms. As an increase in group size lowers the probability of same sex groups, gender-specific personal pronouns are less useful in the non-singular than in the singular. Curiously enough, the principle of informativity also makes the opposite prediction: in the first person, non-singular forms are predicted to show a gender contrast more frequently than singular forms do. Moreover, exclusive forms are predicted to develop gender distinctions more often than inclusive forms. In this paper, these predictions are put to a typological test. A total of 51 languages from 17 different families and 24 different genera has been found in which the first person singular personal pronoun is gender-neutral while one or more of its non-singular counterparts inflect for gender. It is argued that Universals 37 and 45, as well as their counterclaim, are empirically adequate. This apparent paradox dissolves in a three-way interaction of gender, number and person in pronominal paradigms. In keeping with the principle of informativity, there is a bias in favour of gender marking in the third person singular but also a bias in favour of gender marking in the first person non-singular.

The gendered effect of populism on innovation

This research addresses the impact of the remarkable rise in populism on innovative new ventures. Integrating institutional theory with gender role congruity theory, we reason that the surge of populist discourse by a nation's top political leaders decreases the innovativeness of new ventures, and this negative relationship is more pronounced for women entrepreneurs. We also consider two critical yet overlooked institutions, gender inequality and grammatical gender marking in the dominant languages that entrepreneurs speak, and propose that they reinforce this negative relationship. Data from 69,406 observations of entrepreneurs across 40 countries during the period of 2005–2018, analyzed with a difference-in-differences (DiD) design, support our hypotheses. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed for the challenges of promoting innovation among women entrepreneurs, in countries with greater gender inequality and where the dominant language exhibits greater intensity of grammatical gender marking, with populism on the rise worldwide.

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.

Evolutionary pathways of complexity in gender systems

Abstract Humans categorize the experience they encounter in various ways, which is mirrored, for instance, in grammatical gender systems of languages. In such systems, nouns are grouped based on whether they refer to masculine/feminine beings, (non-)humans, (in)animate entities, or objects with specific shapes. Languages differ greatly in how many gender assignment rules are incorporated in gender systems and how many word classes carry gender marking (gender agreement patterns). It has been suggested that these two dimensions are positively associated as numerous assignment rules are better sustained by numerous agreement patterns. We test this claim by analyzing the correlated evolution (Continuous method in BayesTraits) and making the causal inferences about the relationships (phylogenetic path analysis) between these 2 dimensions in 482 languages from the global Grambank database. By applying these methods to linguistic data matched to phylogenetic trees (a world tree and individual families), we evaluate whether various types of gender assignment rules (semantic, phonological, and unpredictable) are causally linked to more gender agreement patterns on the global level and in individual language families. Our results on the world language tree suggest that semantic rules are weakly positively correlated with gender agreement and that the development of agreement patterns is facilitated by different rules in individual families. For example, in Indo-European languages, more agreement patterns are caused by the presence of phonological and unpredictable rules, while in Bantu languages, the driving force of agreement patterns is the variety of semantic rules. Our study shows that the relationships between agreement and rules are family-specific and yields support to the idea that more distinct rules and/or rule types might be more robust in languages with more pervasive gender agreement.

The Role of Language Experience in the Acquisition of Spanish Gender Agreement: A Study with Nonce Nouns

Why is learning the gender of nouns so difficult for some bilinguals? We test the hypothesis that different language learning backgrounds or life experience with Spanish determine how learners follow different morphosyntactic cues for gender assignment in Spanish by testing learners with early and late language experience in an experiment with invented nouns. A total of 44 monolingually raised native speakers, 44 heritage speakers, and 44 L2 learners of Spanish were trained to learn 24 nonce words in Spanish presented in four input conditions that manipulated the number and type of cues to gender marking (determiner, word marker, adjective). After the learning sessions, the participants completed a word naming task, an elicited production task, and a debriefing questionnaire. The L2 learners were different than native speakers and heritage speakers in learning nonce nouns. They used morphosyntactic cues differently, relying on adjectives as their most-used strategy to assign gender, unlike native speakers and heritage speakers who used all cues. Our findings confirm processing differences between L2 learners and heritage speakers and suggest language learning background determines how learners discover reliable morphosyntactic cues to the gender of nouns in the input.

Exploring Gender Marking in Political Discourse: A Linguistic Analysis of Election Speeches

The prevailing hallmark within contemporary paradigms of humanitarian research is anthropocentrism, characterized principally by its invocation of Homo Loquens, or "speaking man." Within this context, the scrutiny of discourse, which embodies the pivotal facet of human existence expressed through language, assumes a paramount role. It is not fortuitous that discursive linguistics has presently become an integral component of anthropocentric linguistics, introducing innovative methodologies for acquiring, describing, and interpreting linguistic materials. The discursive dimension mandates an examination of linguistic phenomena in conjunction with cultural-historical, socio-situational, and communicative-pragmatic attributes. The effective deployment of communicative strategies necessitates the utilization of rhetorical devices such as metaphor, analogy, epithet, anaphora, and the like. The integrated utilization of diverse linguistic resources undoubtedly amplifies the potency of language, which constitutes the primary objective in constructing the requisite persona of a political figure. Keywords: elections, linguistic analysis, gender-neutral units, gender-determined units.

Hyperdialectisms revisited

Abstract Ongoing processes of dialect leveling and loss have given rise to the widespread use of the concept of hyperdialectism in sociolinguistic research. Hyperdialectisms are considered to be a reaction to dialect loss: a typical dialect feature that is distinctive from the standard language or a neighboring dialect is overgeneralized. However, there is pitfall in using the concept as an umbrella term for all deviating dialect forms. In this paper, we aim to provide a revisited view of hyperdialectisms based on written dialect sources. In doing so, we use hyperdialectal adnominal gender marking in southern Dutch Brabantish dialects as a case study. We show that unexpected forms were already present in early twentieth-century dialect use, despite dialect grammar descriptions from the second half of the century often being used as a point of reference for ‘correct’ grammar. Furthermore, we argue that the concept of hyperdialectism requires careful layering in sociolinguistic analysis.

Negotiating local in-group norms in times of globalization. Adnominal gender variation in two urban youth varieties in the Netherlands

This paper discusses variation in adnominal gender marking in two urban youth varieties in the Netherlands, i.e., Moroccan Dutch in the city of Gouda and leveled local dialect, Brabantish, in the city of Eindhoven. In both settings, linguistic practices are influenced by language contact with Standard Dutch, the dominant language in society, resulting in variation patterns such as omissions and overgeneralizations (i.e., hyperforms). Interestingly, we find overgeneralizations of common gender determiners in Moroccan Dutch, as described in previous research, but also of neuter gender determiners. This hypercorrect usage of the (neuter) prestige variant contrasts with the variation found in the Brabantish variety, as the Eindhoven speakers tend to overuse the local dialect form instead of the standard variant. However, we show that both variation patterns may well be driven by the same underlying mechanism of (re-)indexicalization. Data from speech recordings and online peer conversations as well as focus group discussions reveal that in both cases the gender feature acquires different indexical meanings, depending on the register and stylistic practices speakers are involved in. These indexical meanings are not fixed, but result from a dynamic process of negotiating in-group norms on the local level of peer interactions.

Gender marking by compounding in English: terms denoting female physicians in English

Gender marking by compounding in English: terms denoting female physicians in English

Gender-Marking -ess: The Suffix that Failed

Abstract Languages with grammatical gender typically have affixes, sometimes called motion affixes, for converting grammatically masculine, semantically male human nouns into grammatically feminine, semantically female ones (e.g. German -in, as in Professor “male professor”, Professorin “female professor”). It it widely assumed that the English suffix -ess (as in actress, waitress) is such an affix. We show that this assumption is false. By the time the suffix entered the language via French and Latin loanwords from the 13th century onwards, English had lost its grammatical gender system and human nouns without gender marking were no longer interpreted as male by default. While the suffix initially served a function in deriving female correlates to lexically male human nouns (for example, nouns referring to members of the clergy or the so-called nobility), it gradually shifted to a suffix invoking female-directed stereotypes. This is a fundamental difference to motion affixes and ultimately led to the disappearance of -ess as a productive derivational morpheme. Based on an empirical analysis of roughly 780 derivations and loanwords documented in the OED and various large corpora, we trace this shift and discuss it in terms of morphological theory, in particular, with respect to the notion of productivity.

Gender marking in the first-person singular: A case of paradigm (in)consistency – ERRATUM

Gender marking in the first-person singular: A case of paradigm (in)consistency – ERRATUM

Gender marking in the first-person singular: A case of paradigm (in)consistency

Since the sex of the speaker is normally as obvious as can be, there is no point in coding first-person singular gender – or so it may seem. This typological study examines the extent of sex-based gender marking in personal pronouns, possessive determiners, predicative adjectives, and verbs across first-, second-, and third-person singular. A worldwide perusal of grammars in addition to data elicitation yields a total of 115 languages with first-person gender. The paradigms of pronouns and possessives are found to be highly inconsistent, whereas those of verbs show a tendency towards consistency. Gender marking on adjectives is fully consistent. The likelihood of first-person gender is increased by a general sensitivity to gender and a dedicated gender morpheme. A distinction is made between pronouns and possessives as referential units and gender markers on verbs and adjectives as grammatical units. By their very nature, referential markers are sensitive to the contingencies of the extralinguistic world and subject to communicative constraints such as redundancy and economy. They therefore end up being organized in inconsistent paradigms. By contrast, grammatical units are largely untouched by these extraneous influences and may therefore develop consistent paradigms.