Gender Of Nouns Research Articles

Neuter gender in the languages of Aru

This paper examines gender agreement in three little-known languages of the Aru Islands and places them within the larger pattern of “neuter gender” in eastern Indonesia. For each language, I look first at the variety of agreement targets that are controlled by gendered nouns. Secondly, I look at the semantics of nouns that control agreement. I show that whilst having a strongly semantic base involving animacy, gender in Aru languages is a grammatical category in which many nouns denoting certain types of entities that lack discernable biological animacy are assigned to the same gender as that of animate referents. I conclude by considering the system of gender in proto-Aru.

Culture or language: what drives effects of grammatical gender?

AbstractAlthough investigations of linguistic relativity originated in cultural anthropology, the role ofculturein the interplay of language and cognition has rarely been addressed. The debate on whether the grammatical gender of nouns affects how people represent the entity denoted by the respective noun is a typical example of this. A common research strategy has been to compare the gender associations for non-animate entities as a function of their grammatical gender between two languages spoken in different cultural groups. In the study reported here, we try to disentangle linguistic and cultural effects on such gender associations, by focusing on members of one cultural group speaking two language variants that differ in whether or not they distinguish masculine and feminine gender. Participants were asked to assign a male or female voice to nouns from a broad range of semantic categories (animates, allegories and artefacts). Our findings indicate that the gender system does indeed have an impact on voice assignment. However, this grammatical effect is small compared to the variation induced by culturally conveyed associations within and across the semantic domains. In conclusion, we discuss some implications and guidelines for future research on how to control for culture as a problematic confound in cross-linguistic studies.

It’s all about gender: Hebrew speakers’ judgment of adjective plural agreement

The current study investigated the role of morpho-phonological and syntactic factors in judging the marking of Hebrew adjectives in agreement with plural nouns of differing categories of regularity. Participants were 36 literate adult speakers of Hebrew, who were administered a judgment test of 144 sentences (half grammatical and half ungrammatical), each containing a plural adjective in agreement with a nominal head. The task sentences were divided into three different syntactic configurations of the adjective in relation to the noun—predicative adjectives, attributive adjectives in sentence-initial NPs and attributive adjectives in sentence-final NPs. The agreement-assigning nouns were classified according to three morphological criteria: Noun gender (masculine and feminine), Noun suffix (regular, irregular, and ambiguous), and noun stem (changing and non-changing stems). Results showed that gender was the most important factor affecting agreement judgment: adjectives agreeing with ambiguous and opaque feminine nouns taking irregular suffixes yielded the lowest accuracy scores and the longest reaction times. Syntactic position affected judgment scores as well, with predicative and attributive-initial adjectives being more difficult to process than attributive-final adjectives. These results support the view that categories of number and gender emerge from the morpho-phonological properties of words learned in their syntactic and semantic contexts.

Input Variability Facilitates Unguided Subcategory Learning in Adults.

This experiment investigated whether input variability would affect initial learning of noun gender subcategories in an unfamiliar, natural language (Russian), as it is known to assist learning of other grammatical forms. Forty adults (20 men, 20 women) were familiarized with examples of masculine and feminine Russian words. Half of the participants were familiarized with 32 different root words in a high-variability condition. The other half were familiarized with 16 different root words, each repeated twice for a total of 32 presentations in a high-repetition condition. Participants were tested on untrained members of the category to assess generalization. Familiarization and testing was completed 2 additional times. Only participants in the high-variability group showed evidence of learning after an initial period of familiarization. Participants in the high-repetition group were able to learn after additional input. Both groups benefited when words included 2 cues to gender compared to a single cue. The results demonstrate that the degree of input variability can influence learners' ability to generalize a grammatical subcategory (noun gender) from a natural language. In addition, the presence of multiple cues to linguistic subcategory facilitated learning independent of variability condition.

Stylistic analysis of grammar teaching and learning application plan - based on the gender of French nouns

Stylistic analysis of grammar teaching and learning application plan - based on the gender of French nouns

Can colors, voices, and images help learners acquire the grammatical gender of German nouns?

Knowledge of lexical items is arguably the most essential aspect of being able to communicate in a foreign language (Richards, 2000). Many studies have examined effective strategies for retaining the meaning of foreign words, but studies investigating the effectiveness of different methods for the retention of essential grammatical features of those words are unfortunately fewer. This study investigates whether memorizing the gender of German nouns concomitantly to their meaning results in a decreased ability by undergraduate native speakers of English to remember noun meaning, and whether a mnemonic approach to retaining the grammatical gender of German nouns may prove effective. In possibly the largest study of its kind ( n = 283), the effectiveness of several mnemonic devices (colors, voices, images, and a combination of these) is also investigated for the retention of noun gender in German. The sole use of images simultaneously coding for noun meaning and gender led to the best observed results, as indicated by scores on two post-tests. The use of images seems to be a promising mnemonic technique for helping learners remember the gender of German nouns, while at the same time not significantly compromising their ability to recall noun meaning. The results of the present study have possible implications for German materials development and teaching, and for computer assisted language learning (CALL) in general.

Introduction: The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation: New Approaches

Introduction: The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation: New Approaches

Inventing a Male Writer in Mechtild of Hackeborn's Booke of Gostlye Grace

ABSTRACT The translator of The Booke of Gostlye Grace, a Middle English translation of Mechtild of Hackeborn's mystical text, presents his readers with a familiar narrative of how the mystic composed her text with the assistance of a male confessor. In the original Latin Liber Specialis Gratiae, however, two nuns act as scribes for Mechtild, composing the book in secret before permitting her to read and approve the work. The Middle English translator, I argue, deliberately changes the gender and number of nouns and pronouns and highlights this false narrative of a single male scribe in order to make the mystic's revelations more appealing to a fifteenth-century English audience. This systematic rewriting of the text emphasizes Helfta's role as a worshiping and reading community, rather than a writing one, with implications for the reception of Mechtild's visions then and now.

Choosing referring expressions in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch: Effects of animacy

It has been argued that animate entities are referred to with more attenuated expressions than inanimate entities, because they are more accessible in memory. Two previously untested claims made for Dutch suggest that the situation may be more complex. Firstly, it has been stated that full pronouns can only refer to animate entities, while reduced pronouns can also refer to inanimate entities. This seems to be inconsistent with the accessibility account. Secondly, inanimate entities may be pronominalized less to avoid gender-marked expressions when grammatical gender is unclear. Using a sentence completion task, we tested these claims by investigating the effect of animacy on both the choice of pronouns versus more specific expressions and the choice of reduced versus full pronouns in Dutch. We compared speakers of Netherlandic Dutch, who have generally lost intuitions about masculine and feminine grammatical gender of nouns, with speakers of Belgian Dutch, for whom these intuitions are still relatively intact. Both groups showed an effect of animacy on pronominalization, suggesting that this effect cannot only be explained as a gender avoidance strategy. At the same time, the choice between full and reduced pronouns cannot be explained by accessibility. Implications for theories of reference production are discussed.

Resolving Conflicts in Natural and Grammatical Gender Agreement: Evidence from Eye Movements

The present research investigated the attraction phenomenon, which commonly occurs in the domain of production but is also apparent in comprehension. It particularly focused on its accessibility to conceptual influence, in analogy to previous findings in production in Hebrew (Deutsch and Dank, J Mem Lang, 60:112-143, 2009). The experiments made use of the contrast between grammatical and natural gender in Hebrew, using complex subject noun phrases containing head nouns and prepositional phrases with local nouns. Noun phrases were manipulated to produce (a) matches and mismatches in grammatical gender between heads and local nouns; and (b) inanimate nouns and animate nouns with natural gender that served either as head or as local nouns. These noun phrases were the subjects of sentences that ended with predicates agreeing in gender with the head noun, with the local noun, or both. The ungrammatical sentences were those in which the gender of the predicate and the head noun did not match. To assess the impact of conflicts in grammatical and natural gender on the time course of reading, participants' eye movements were monitored. The results revealed clear disruptions in reading the predicate due to grammatical-gender mismatches with head and local nouns, in analogy to attraction in production. When the head nouns conveyed natural gender these effects were amplified, but variations in the natural gender of local nouns had negligible consequences. The results imply that comprehension and production are similarly sensitive to the control of grammatical agreement by grammatical and natural gender in subject noun phrases.

The Reflection of Markedness in Prototype Category Theory on Semantic Level and Its Implications for Second Language Acquisition

Markedness is one of the analytical principles of linguistics; it indicates the existence of asymmetric relationship inside the language category, and this concept is widely used in phonology, semantics, syntax analysis, sentence structures, pragmatics and applied linguistics. Therefore, the markedness is quite valuable to the analysis of languages. Prototype category theory is an important theory in cognitive linguistics. It is totally different from the traditional category theory and claims that categories are constituted by the Family Resemblance among the members but not by the essential and enough circumstances. This paper mainly discusses the markedness phenomenon on semantic level and tries to explain it by using the prototype category theory which belongs to the category of cognitive linguistics. With the analysis of different word meanings, this paper tries to explore the reflection of markedness by using prototype category theory in three different areas, that is, antonyms, gender nouns and polysemous words in English. With the research results obtained from the analysis of markedness on semantic level, the paper will discuss the implications of markedness for language transfer and vocabulary teaching and learning in second language acquisition.

Key is a llave is a Schlüssel: A failure to replicate an experiment from Boroditsky et al. 2003

AbstractIn this paper, we present two attempts to replicate a widely-cited but never fully published experiment in which German and Spanish speakers were asked to associate adjectives with nouns of masculine and feminine grammatical gender (Boroditsky et al. 2003). The researchers claim that speakers associated more stereotypically female adjectives with grammatically feminine nouns and more stereotypically male adjectives with grammatically masculine nouns. We were not able to replicate the results either in a word association task or in an analogous primed lexical decision task. This suggests that the results of the original experiment were either an artifact of some non-documented aspect of the experimental procedure or a statistical fluke. The question whether speakers assign sex-based interpretations to grammatical gender categories at all cannot be answered definitively, as the results in the published literature vary considerably. However, our experiments show that if such an effect exists, it is not strong enough to be measured indirectly via the priming of adjectives by nouns.

Gender Agreement: a psycholinguistic and aphasia case study.

Gender Agreement: a psycholinguistic and aphasia case study.

Is grammatical gender considered arbitrary or semantically motivated? Evidence from young adult monolinguals, second language learners, and early bilinguals.

It is generally assumed that speakers of grammatical gender languages consider grammatical gender arbitrary, but this assumption has never been tested. Research shows that the grammatical gender of nouns can affect perceptions of the masculinity or femininity of the noun's referent in speakers of languages with masculine and feminine noun classes. However, bilingualism facilitates the development of lexical arbitrariness awareness, and could therefore affect awareness of grammatical gender arbitrariness. This study then compared three groups of young adult speakers of a grammatical gender language: monolinguals, early bilinguals, and instructed second language learners. Participants evaluated the gender assignments of 25 nouns of entities (animals, abstract concepts, natural kinds, and artefacts), and answered open and closed questions about grammatical gender. Participants considered grammatical gender as semantically motivated and mostly related gender assignments to perceived masculine or feminine connotations of referents. Knowledge of an additional grammatical gender language was linked to increased awareness of the arbitrariness of first language gender assignments in both early bilinguals and later instructed learners. It is argued that grammatical gender awareness deserves further investigation. Knowing more than one grammatical gender language can increase awareness of grammatical gender arbitrariness. Implications are discussed for language teaching and language reform.

The acquisition of grammatical gender in L2 German by learners with Afrikaans, English or Italian as their L1

In recent years there has been an increase in research on the acquisition of morphological aspects of a second language (L2). Specifically, a number of studies have been conducted on the acquisition of grammatical gender in the L2. The study reported in this paper investigated the adult L2 acquisition of grammatical gender in German by first language (L1) speakers of Afrikaans, English and Italian, respectively. The aim of the study was to determine how similarities and differences between the L1 and L2 in terms of grammatical gender affect the acquisition of this aspect of the target L2. Two experimental tasks – a picture naming task and a sentence completion task – were designed to determine to what extent the grammatical gender of nouns is accurately reflected on determiners and adjectives. Throughout, the L1 Italian group outperformed the other two groups. Since Italian (like German) expresses grammatical gender on determiners and nouns, while neither English nor Afrikaans does, the results indicate that the acquisition of grammatical gender in an L2 is easier for learners whose L1 also expresses grammatical gender. Specifically, the results provide evidence for so-called "deep transfer" (transfer of abstract grammatical properties) from the L1 to the L2 in this area of L2 acquisition: since the grammatical gender systems of Italian and German are not congruent, the Italian speakers' advantage over the other two L1 groups cannot be the result of simple "surface transfer" (transferring knowledge of the grammatical gender of specific nouns in the L1 to the L2) and must be attributed to deep transfer.

Grammatical Gender in the Early Modern Hasidic Hebrew Tale

This paper offers the first analysis of grammatical gender in nineteenth and early twentieth century Hasidic Hebrew hagiographic tales. Hasidic Hebrew grammatical gender is noteworthy because it exhibits conspicuous differences from that of other historical forms of Hebrew, including non-standard noun and pronoun gender as well as widespread noun-adjective and subject-verb gender discord. While these phenomena initially appear highly erratic, examination suggests that in most cases the seemingly inconsistent usages are actually governed by relatively regular patterns, many of them phonetic. These trends underscore the need to re-evaluate Hasidic Hebrew as an independent linguistic system with its own grammatical conventions.

Die mystische Lyrik des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts: Untersuchungen–Texte–Repertorium

Die mystische Lyrik des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts: Untersuchungen–Texte–Repertorium

Dutch Double Gender Nouns: Arbitrary or Motivated Agreement?

Recent studies on spoken Dutch emphasize an ongoing recategorization of pronominal gender on semantic grounds, with no apparent con-nection to lexical gender (Audring 2006, 2009; De Vogelaer 2006, 2009; De Vogelaer & De Sutter 2010; De Vogelaer & De Vos 2011). In fact, gender instability is not confined to the pronominal domain: Some Dutch nouns display more than one lexical gender (de/het-nouns), a phenomenon that has not been linked to the process of pronominal re-semanticization. The aim of this paper is to identify the common semantic and pragmatic basis for pronominal gender agreement and the choice of a determiner for double gender nouns.

Stimulus Equivalence, Generalization, and Contextual Stimulus Control in Verbal Classes

Stimulus generalization and contextual control affect the development of equivalence classes. Experiment 1 demonstrated primary stimulus generalization from the members of trained equivalence classes. Adults were taught to match six spoken Icelandic nouns and corresponding printed words and pictures to one another in computerized three-choice matching-to-sample tasks. Tests confirmed that six equivalence classes had formed. Without further training, plural forms of the stimuli were presented in tests for all matching performances. All participants demonstrated virtually errorless performances. In Experiment 2, classifications of the nouns used in Experiment 1 were brought under contextual control. Three nouns were feminine and three were masculine. The match-to-sample training taught participants to select a comparison of the same number as the sample (i.e., singular or plural) in the presence of contextual stimulus A regardless of noun gender. Concurrently, in the presence of contextual stimulus B, participants were taught to select a comparison of the same gender as the sample (i.e., feminine or masculine), regardless of number. Generalization was assessed using a card-sorting test. All participants eventually sorted the cards correctly into gender and number stimulus classes. When printed words used in training were replaced by their picture equivalents, participants demonstrated almost errorless performances.

Šiaurinių širvintiškių daiktavardžio kamienai ir jų hierarchija

NOUN STEMS AND THEIR HIERARCHY IN THE NORTHERN SIRVINTISKIAI SUBDIALECT Summary In the Northern Sirvintiskiai subdialect, a noun stem is treated as independent if it differs from other stems in at least the ending of one case form. With regard to this condition, the i stem and the consonant stem are subdivided into the masculine and feminine gender stems. In the subdialect, tradi­tional stems have been better retained in nouns having mobile stress. Due to shortening of unstressed long vowels, partial stress retraction and other reasons, barytone nouns have deviated to a great extent from the primary paradigms. In the Northern Sirvintiskiai subdialect, the number of noun stems is lower than that in standard Lithuanian and in the majority of its dialects, as iu , ia 1 and ia 2 stem nouns are inflected in a totally homogeneous way, i. e. according to the ia 2 stem implicative model. Nouns of mobile stress have a , ia 2 , u , ā , i ā , ē , i m , i f , C m and C f stems. Barytone stress nouns only have six stems, i. e. a , ia 2 , u , ā , ē , and i f stems. The i ā stem has coincided with the ē stem. Meanwhile, the i m , C m and C f stems are not found in words with barytone stress. Hierarchic stem grouping “trees” that are produced using three methods (the maximum, minimum and average methods) indicate existence of three different types of noun declension: the masculine model (embracing the a , ia 2 and u stems), the feminine model (the ā and i ā stems) and the mixed model (the i m , i f , C m and C f stems). The ē stem is isolated: it embraces feminine gender nouns, yet according to declension there is a tendency towards the mixed declension type to a slightly greater extent. The a , ia 2 , ā , i ā and ē stems are stable. They do not decline or rarely decline from their implicative models, and have no additional (complementary) paradigms. They are all (except for the i ā stem) highly productive, open, constantly enriched with words from standard Lithuanian, other dialects and languages, and also with words having unstable stems. Unstable stems are as follows: u , i m , i f , C m and C f .They are unproductive, and often have complementary paradigms and lose part of words belonging to them.