Semantic Gender Research Articles

Herrarne and damerna. The variation in the plural definite noun declension in Sweden and Finland in the 19th century

In the 19th century, definiteness in the plural could be marked with two different articles, -na and -ne, but the norms regulating the variation were not universally agreed upon. In this study, I investigate how 19th-century Swedish grammars approach the variation in suffixes and how the prescriptive norms match the language used in Swedish-language newspapers from the same era, with special attention given to the differences between the varieties of Swedish spoken in Sweden and Finland. For this purpose, two historical newspaper corpora were consulted, comprised of newspapers published during the 19th century in Sweden and Finland, respectively. The findings show that from the middle of the 19th century, the grammars are generally split into two practices, with one attributing the use of the articles to the declension of the noun, while the other, mainly associated with the historical-comparative school, attributing it to the grammatical gender of the noun. In addition, grammars written in Finland stress the semantic gender of animate nouns. This difference is also reflected in the corpora: while both varieties are influenced by both the gender and the declension, the declension is the most important factor in the Swedish corpora, whereas semantic gender is the main factor in the Finnish corpora.

Semantic agreement in Russian: Gender, declension, and morphological ineffability

In this paper, I argue that declension classes are not primitives (see Aronoff 1994; Alexiadou 2004; Kramer 2015; i.a.), but are decomposed into simpler features, one of which is gender (Harris 1991; Wiese 2004; Caha 2019). The argument is based on semantic gender agreement in Russian, where a grammatically masculine noun can trigger feminine agreement if its referent is female (Mučnik 1971; Pesetsky 2013). Semantic agreement is grammatical only in those forms where a regular nominal exponent is syncretic with an exponent of a declension class that includes feminine nouns. In other forms, conflicting masculine and feminine gender features lead to ineffability in morphology (cf. Schütze 2003; Asarina 2011; Coon and Keine 2020). Ineffability arises because the Subset Principle (Halle 1997) that holds between features of a vocabulary item and a terminal at the point of Vocabulary Insertion is violated later in the derivation. This is in turn possible if Vocabulary Insertion applying cyclically bottom-up (Bobaljik 2000) is interleaved with Lowering that alters structure below a triggering node (Embick and Noyer 2001). Finally, I show that Russian also has a number of cases where conflicting gender features in a noun phrase do not result in a realization failure (Iomdin 1980). The difference between these patterns is derived in a principled way and follows from the positions where conflicting features are introduced.

Zeugen gesucht! Zur Geschichte des generischen Maskulinums im Deutschen

On the basis of synchronic and diachronic data, we argue that in the human domain German masculine nouns commonly display a “non-male” generic interpretation which we take as evidence for a separation of syntactic and semantic gender: synchronically, we s

Linguistic factors modulating gender assignment in Spanish–English bilingual speech

AbstractDrawing on naturally-occurring bilingual speech from a well-defined codeswitching community in Southern Arizona, this study examined the influence of semantic gender (a.k.a. biological gender), analogical gender, and other-language phonemic cues in modulating gender assignment in Spanish–English codeswitched speech. Thirty-four Spanish–English early bilinguals completed a forced-choice elicitation task involving two codeswitching environments: Spanish determiner–English noun switches (Task 1) and English–Spanish switched copula constructions (Task 2). The results revealed that for human-denoting nouns, bilinguals assigned grammatical gender based on the presupposed sex of a noun's referent in both syntactic environments tested. As for inanimate nouns, bilinguals were more likely to assign masculine over feminine gender to such nouns in determiner–noun switches, but not in switched copula constructions. Other-language phonemic cues did not influence the assignment mechanism. A methodological implication is that the study replicated the codeswitching patterns observed in naturally-occurring bilingual speech from the same bilingual community.

Semantic gender: Norms for 24,000 Dutch words and its role in word meaning.

Semantic gender norms are presented for 24,037 Dutch words. Eighty participants rated 6017 words each on a five-point Likert scale ranging from feminine to masculine. Each word was rated by ten male and ten female participants. The collected norms show high reliability and correlate well with similar norms in English. We show that semantic gender is distinct from other lexical dimensions such as valence, arousal, dominance, concreteness, and age of acquisition. Semantic gender is not the same as the grammatical gender of words, either. The collected norms can be predicted accurately using a semantic space based on word association data. A dimension explaining a good amount of variance is present in this space, indicating that semantic gender is an important component of the human meaning system.

Gender alternation of epicene nouns in zoomorphic metaphors: a study based on data from Peninsular and Rioplatense Spanish

This paper analyzes a set of Spanish epicene nouns that, contrary to what is commonly expected from items of this class, undergo gender alternation in a particular metaphor environment, according to the semantic gender of the individual they are figuratively predicated of (e.g., Juan es un rata ‘Juan is such a penny pincher’ vs. Juan es una rata ‘Juan is such a jerk’). Arguments are provided showing that this apparently deviant behavior is explained in a principled way by bringing together the recently claimed phasal edge linker approach to D-gender (semantic gender) with the assumption from Distributed Morphology that n-gender (formal gender) is inserted at the postsyntactic morphology. The account amounts to the current body of literature that argues for the split of gender into D-gender and n-gender, and the grammatical competence of these features at different stages in the course of derivation.

Is That "Mr." or "Ms." Lemon? An Investigation of Grammatical and Semantic Gender on the Perception of Household Odorants.

Linguistic relativism is the idea that the structure of language influences thought. The present study investigates linguistic relativism by asking whether people who speak a gendered language think of objects in a way that is consistent with the grammatical gender (more masculine or feminine) more than people who speak a language without that linguistic feature. Odorants are unique stimuli for examining this question, because they carry a semantic gender without a biological one, yet gender is thought to be a central dimension of their perception. Canadian participants in the present study (native French or native English speakers) described a set of labeled odorants that varied systematically in grammatical and semantic gender to produce an implicit gender measure and also explicitly rated them for gender. Analysis of the implicit femininity contained in participants’ descriptions showed a tendency for both native French and native English speakers to produce descriptions that were consistent with semantic gender; moreover, there were no effects of grammatical gender on implicit or explicit ratings. These results suggest that in a bilingual culture, French speakers may have been influenced by the anthropomorphism associated with odorants rather than grammatical gender.

A Linguistic Perspective on Feminisation and Gender-Inclusive Language How Partitive Constructions Can Be Used to Uncover Implicit Gender Bias in Italian

This article reports the results of a study on the perception of feminisation and gender mismatches in Italian. The study probes the intuition of native Italian speakers through tasks that highlight their linguistic habits. The results point to two separate but interrelated reflections. First, they show that semantic gender can override grammatical gender in partitives. Second, they reveal that the acceptance of feminine profession nouns is not widespread, especially for those nouns that refer to prestigious professions. The work presented here stems from an Italian adaptation of a study originally designed for French and German.

Специфика гендерного аспекта в словообразовательных гнездах

Much has been said and written about the gender aspect in linguistics. But there are still open questions concerning the specifics of the gender factor in word-forming nests. Therefore, we see the purpose of our research in the need to more accurately determine the presence and uniqueness of the semantic category of gender in the families of words with ‘young — old’ and their equivalents in the English and German languages. The article reveals various ways of expressing the meaning of the female and male genders, clarifies the problem of studying the gender aspect, and actualizes attention to the peculiarity of the gender factor in families of words. The analysis is based on three gender markers: morphological, lexical, and thematic. Each of these markers is considered on the example of lexical units identified by gender in the named word-forming nests. The morphological gender marker made it possible to identify gender-oriented lexemes formed by such methods of word production as conversion, suffix derivation, and word composition. The lexical marker determined the presence of five groups of words of different gender semantics. And, finally, using a thematic marker, gender formations associated with stereotypically ‘male’ and ‘female’ topics that take place in a certain period of development of society and the country as a whole were identified. Thus, as a result, it was proved that the ways of expressing semantic gender in the families of words under consideration are different and are due to both morphological and extra-linguistic reasons related to the specifics of the language picture of the world.

Corrective Repetition of Ungrammatical Gender Agreement Stimuli: A Transcortical Sensory Aphasia Single Case Study

ABSTRACT Background Oral repetition in Transcortical Sensory Aphasia (TSA) has been shown to display linguistically informed altering of purposefully grammatically incorrect repetition stimuli, with a tendency to correct grammatical errors during repetition in spite of the absence of semantic comprehension. Aims The present TSA single-case study, conducted in Italian, investigated the processing of linguistic Gender agreement errors through a series of oral repetition tasks, with the purpose of (i) investigating whether grammatical and semantic Gender can be independently spared; and (ii) investigating whether Gender agreement errors are informative among the linguistic facts that the patient retains sensitivity towards, and if so, how. Methods and Procedures TST, a native speaker of Italian diagnosed with TSA, was administered 8 oral repetition tasks, each containing Gender agreement errors that occurred either in phrase condition (i.e., “definite article + noun”), or in sentence condition (i.e., “subject + nominal predicate”). These different conditions were formulated with the purpose of appreciating possible differences in the processing of the Gender feature in two different syntactic environments. A number of additional variables was introduced: singular/plural; feminine/masculine; Gender morphological (un)informativeness; common noun/proper name status; animate/inanimate noun referents. Outcomes and Results During repetition, the changes applied by the patient were almost exclusively corrective and mostly followed a left-to-right strategy. Among the introduced variables, those that gave significant effects were as follows: animate/inanimate noun referents and phrase/sentence agreement. Gender morphological (un)informativeness gave no significant effects, and neither did common noun/proper name status, singular/plural and feminine/masculine nouns. Implications for linguistic theory in terms of the Gender/Class pairing are discussed. Conclusions Findings indicate that (i) grammatical and semantic Gender can be independently spared; and (ii) in Italian, Gender is morphologically realized and could consequently be accessed for the purposes of agreement only in the case of nouns of the animate kind: Gender of animate nouns elicited corrective changes, while Gender of inanimate nouns was utterly ignored.

Failed gender agreement in L1 English L2 Spanish: Syntactic or lexical problem?

A recent proposal attributes morphosyntactic issues in L2 to lexical factors (Grüter et al. 2012; Hopp 2013). According to this lexical account, issues with gender agreement are caused by gender assignment issues – a failure to assign a word to a target-like class. We elaborate on this idea by exploring three potential cues to gender assignment: 1) semantic gender relating to sex (e.g. ‘girl’ vs. ‘boy’) 2) morphophonological cues, and 3) morphosyntactic agreement cues. Semantic and morphophonological cues may facilitate gender agreement only for a subset of nouns, whereas agreement cues can do so for all nouns, including opaque gender nouns that do not have semantic gender.Seventeen low proficiency and sixteen high proficiency L1 English L2 Spanish speakers and eighteen native Spanish controls judged the grammaticality of 60 experimental sentences. We compared participants’ gender agreement accuracy and reaction times (RTs) on experimental items with and without semantic gender, and with and without transparent gender morphemes. Semantic gender did not serve as a cue for gender assignment/agreement; instead, it slowed down RTs in high proficiency and control participants. Morphophonological cues significantly increased accuracy and decreased RTs in all groups. Finally, agreement cues did not seem to help low proficiency learners, since their accuracy on opaque nouns was barely above chance. By contrast, high proficiency learners exhibited native-like accuracy on opaque nouns. These findings support the lexical accounts of L2 gender agreement difficulties, adding more data to the growing body of research in this field.

Processing of semantic and grammatical gender in Spanish speakers with aphasia

ABSTRACT Background: Previous studies have argued that there are two types of linguistic gender: grammatical gender, which is arbitrarily assigned to nouns, and semantic gender, which depends on the gender of the referent. Aim: We explore the hypothesis that these two types of gender entail distinct cognitive processes by investigating the performance of people with aphasia at the level of sentence processing. Methods and Procedure: Nine people with aphasia (seven with fluent aphasia) and a control group of thirteen age-matched healthy participants took part in a constrained completion choice task. The participants had to complete sentences in a way that made the last word gender congruent. The subjects of the sentences had either Semantic gender (enfermera, nurse; indicating the gender of the referent), Grammatical gender (silla, chair), or Opaque-Grammatical gender (tomate, tomato). Results: People with aphasia performed more poorly in all gender conditions than healthy controls. They also were less accurate in both the Grammatical and Opaque-Grammatical conditions than in the Semantic gender condition. Conclusion: We propose that because semantic gender provides more salient information, it is processed faster than grammatical gender.

Omissão de sujeito pronominal anafórico e as construções de dupla negação

Neste artigo, investigamos omissão e a expressão de sujeitos expressos pronominais e nulos em construções de dupla negação em português brasileiro. Para isso, analisamos um corpus de língua falada da região Sul do Brasil, o corpus VARSUL. Apesar de a literatura apontar para o fato de que o PB tem privilegiado orações com sujeito pronominal expresso em detrimento de sujeito nulo (cf. Duarte 2012, entre outros), percebemos que as construções de dupla negação, ao contrário da expectativa, favorecem o sujeito nulo. Acreditamos que tal construção favoreça o sujeito nulo porque veicula conteúdos ativados (que, por princípio, podem ser ocultados da superfície da frase). Além desse fator pragmático, investigamos também a relação desses efeitos com um fator semântico que favorece a retomada por sujeito pronominal expresso: o traço de gênero semântico do referente. Analisamos cenários de confluência e conflito entre esses princípios de natureza gramatical distinta distintos e o que encontramos na análise do corpus corrobora empiricamente nossas previsões teóricas.

Genuszuweisungsstrategien im DaF-Unterricht

Abstract This paper focuses on the phonetic, morphological and semantic principles determining the grammatical gender of nouns in German. Based on the experiments we established the main trends in determining the gender of the German equivalents and interlingual homonyms and the role of the interlingual and intralingual interference in this process. The results of two experiments show that Ukrainian students take into consideration suffixes of German nouns when choosing the correct gender. Phonetic or semantic gender allocation rules play a subordinate role. The interlingual interference determinates the gender choice in the target language: the gender of the mother tongue lemma interferes the selection of the gender in the foreign language equivalent. This effect appears more frequently in interlingual homonyms than in translation equivalents. A plausible interpretation of these results could be: the lemmas of two similar nouns or translation equivalents share the same concepts, the relationship between them is rather close, and the competition between the two lemmas and their genus nodes is strong and influences language production. This conclusion supports the hypothesis that both languages, the mother tongue and the foreign one, can be activated during language producing.

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.

The role of semantics and repair processes in article-noun gender disagreement in Italian: An ERP study

In this sentence reading study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the processing mechanism of article-noun gender disagreement in two kinds of nouns in Italian. The first are nouns with syntactic gender (il trenoM ‘train’; la sediaF ‘chair’) for which the processing and repair of gender disagreement entails only one repair option, namely for the article (morphosyntactic repair). The second kind are nouns with semantic gender (il bambinoM ‘boy’, la bambinaF ‘girl’). Here, there are two options for processing and repairing gender mismatch: repairing the article (morphosyntactic repair) or repairing the noun (both morphosyntactic and semantic repair). Both classes of nouns elicited the LAN, indicating that gender disagreement is always registered at the morphosyntactic level. In addition, the P600 was elicited in both conditions, but was larger for semantic gender, reflecting a more complex repair for this class of nouns.

Nominalization, verbalization or both? Insights from the directionality of noun-verb conversion in French

Nominalization in French can be done by means of conversion, which is characterized by the identity between the base and the derived lexeme. Since both noun→verb and verb→noun conversions exist, this property raises directionality issues, and sometimes leads to contradictory analyses of the same examples. The paper presents two approaches of conversion: derivational and non-derivational ones. Then it discusses various criteria used in derivational approaches to determine the direction of conversion: diachronic ones, such as dates of first attestation or etymology; and synchronic ones, such as semantic relations, noun gender or verb inflection. All criteria are evaluated on a corpus of 3,241 French noun~verb pairs. It is shown that none of them enables to identify the direction of conversion in French. Finally, the consequences for the theory of morphology are discussed. Dieser Beitrag ist ursprünglich im Peter-Lang-Verlag erschienen (https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/plg/jwf/2020/00000004/00000002/art00010)

The Effect of Semantic and Discourse Features on the Use of Null and Overt Subjects - A Quantitative Study of Third Person Subjects in Brazilian Portuguese

ABSTRACT In a corpus study and two acceptability experiments, we investigate whether semantic and discourse features of the antecedents affect the use of null and overt subjects in Brazilian Portuguese. Previous literature has proposed two hypotheses: the Hierarchy of Referentiality Hypothesis (Cyrino et al. 2000, inter alia) and the Semantic Gender Hypothesis (Creus & Menuzzi 2004, among others). We show that animacy and specificity affect the relative frequency of null and overt subjects and their acceptability in sentences. We propose an approach that accounts for previously published results as well as our new data in the light of a theory of anaphora resolution (Ariel 1990, etc).

As diferenças entre gênero gramatical e gênero semântico na recuperação de antecedentes pronominais em Português Brasileiro

A correferência é uma dependência sintática em que pronomes são ligados a referentes mencionados previamente. O objetivo deste trabalho é fornecer mais informações sobre como os antecedentes pronominais são recuperados na memória, e, mais precisamente, esclarecer o papel das pistas de gênero na recuperação de antecedentes pronominais em português brasileiro, dado que seus falantes estão costumados a depender das pistas de concordância para processar a língua, uma vez que esta possui morfologia visível. Os resultados de dois experimentos de rastreamento ocular realizados com falantes nativos de português brasileiro demonstraram que tanto as restrições estruturais quanto as pistas morfológicas de gênero são igualmente importantes na recuperação dos antecedentes na memória nos estágios iniciais do processamento da correferência. Isto é evidência a favor de que as restrições estruturais não funcionam como um filtro inicial, bloqueando as influências de candidatos a antecedentes estruturalmente inaceitáveis. Além disso, os resultados indicaram que o gênero semântico e o gênero masculino parecem ter um peso maior na memória do que o gênero gramatical e o gênero feminino, já que os candidatos a antecedentes inaceitáveis estruturalmente que carregavam os primeiros tipos de gênero causaram mais efeitos de interferência.

The Role of Semantic Gender in Name Comprehension: An Event-Related Potentials Study.

It is well known that the semantic features of gender associated with peoples' names are represented in the conceptual semantic system. However, there is scant evidence that such knowledge plays a role in name comprehension, and if so, in which processing stage this occurs. The aim of this study was to provide evidence concerning the time course of the activation of semantic gender in the processing of people's names. We recorded event-related potentials when participants saw picture-name pairs. Compared with the gender congruent condition in which the priming picture and Chinese name were matched on gender, names in the gender incongruent condition showed a mismatch effect in the time windows of 300-500ms and 500-700ms. These findings illustrate for the first time the activation of semantic gender when processing people's names, and further specify that this access occurs in the stage of name recognition rather than person identification.