Grammatical Gender

А review of "А.Б.Копелиович. Происхождение и развитие индоевропейского рода в синтагматическом аспекте. Владимир, 1995" (Avgust B.Kopeliovich. Origin and Evolution of the Indo-European Gender In a Syntagmatic Aspect. Vladimir, 1995) published in 'Izvestija AN. Serija Literatury i Yazyka', 1997, Vol. 4, p. 67-69.

Existing studies on the translation of Nadsat – the invented language in A Clockwork Orange – neglect the fact that Nadsat is a result of language contact between English and Russian, and ignore the role that translators play in linguistic innovation, as well as the motivating factors behind their creativity. This study addresses this conspicuous gap by examining a multilingual corpus of A Clockwork Orange from a language contact and language change perspective, and creating for the first time a link between adaptation, as understood in contact linguistics, and creativity in translation. The focus is on how Russian-derived nouns in the English version have been rendered in four versions of Nadsat (French, German, Greek, and Spanish), and how these differ from naturally occurring Russian loan nouns in these languages, in terms of gender assignment and inflection. Results suggest that the level of creativity that translators demonstrate is not simply an indication of their talent, but rather a result of an interplay of factors related to translation, and that concepts from the field of language contact are particularly effective in reframing the way in which creativity is viewed in translation studies.

Available from: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Qui4mZh2eAKjKjYm8HyA/full

The current study investigates DP-internal adjectives in Spanish/English code-switching (CS). Specifically, we analyze two concomitant phenomena that have been previously investigated; namely, the distributional frequency and placement of adjectives in mixed determiner phrases (DPs). A total of 1680 DPs (477 monolingual Spanish and 1203 Spanish/English DPs), extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with 62 consultants from Northern Belize, were quantitatively examined. This paper is the first of its kind to examine adjectives in the innovative Spanish/English CS variety of Northern Belize, an understudied context where bilingual CS has thrived among younger generations. The distributional and statistical analyses revealed that the avoidance of Spanish attributive adjectives and overt gender marking is a distinguishing characteristic of mixed DPs but not monolingual Spanish DPs, a finding that supports Otheguy and Lapidus' (2003) adaptive simplification hypothesis. In terms of adjective placement, both the Matrix Language Frame model and the Minimalist approach to CS were able to account for mixed noun-adjective DPs, with the exception of a few cases that could only be predicted by the former model. The present analysis highlights the pivotal role that simplification and convergence play in code-switchers' optimization of linguistic resources in bi/multilingual discourse.

Este ensayo se enfoca en el proceso de adquisición de lengua de los hablantes de herencia, especialmente los hablantes de herencia de español en los Estados Unidos, y busca demostrar cómo este proceso de adquisición proporciona oportunidades únicas para la lingüística del bilingüismo y del desarrollo del lenguaje. Los resultados de un estudio de seguimiento ocular sobre el uso del género gramatical en Fuchs (2021) indican que los hablantes de herencia son tan capaces como los hablantes de control de usar la información referente al género en los artículos ‘el’ y ‘la’ para anticipar el sustantivo que los sigue. En este trabajo, tales resultados se evalúan en el contexto de dos discusiones mayores con el objetivo de ilustrar cómo el estudio de lenguas de herencia, —especialmente el español, que es ampliamente hablado por hablantes de herencia, estudiantes de segunda lengua e inmigrantes de primera generación en los EE. UU.— puede ayudar a identificar y decidir entre varios factores relacionados con el desarrollo de la lengua: entre (a) adquisición nativa de la lengua y competencia lingüística, a través de un estudio de caso sobre el procesamiento de concordancia del género gramatical en oraciones nominales; (b) input de lengua y desarrollo cognitivo general, a través de un estudio de caso sobre el reconocimiento del habla. En la parte final del ensayo, se señala la necesidad de que este tipo de estudios incorporen reportes sistemáticos y claros del trasfondo y la competencia lingüística de los participantes.

This paper investigates the transition from the grammatical gender system in Old English, with modifiers/anaphors displaying agreement with their head noun, towards the pronominal, natural gender rule operational from Middle English until today. Quantitative analyses of texts from the relevant period (~750-1250) chart this development by cataloguing the incremental changes of transitory variation in this phase of grammatical upheaval to answer the question whether the change ensued in a rather smooth and orderly fashion, i.e. as a telic development from the old to the new system, or whether the demise of the grammatical system preceded the natural gender system’s emergence substantially, effecting a period of chaotic/ad libitum gender assignment in between.

Concerning the contrast between the grammatical and the natural system, each noun belongs to one of two classes, taking its original grammatical gender as listed in the relevant reference works (e.g. Bosworth & Toller 1889/1921; Bright 1923; Hall 1916) as a base-line:
On the one hand, nouns whose gender does not reflect their referent’s sex, for instance ‘wif(neut)’ [wife/woman] (lexical class). These nouns are incompatible with the natural gender rule and thus expected to occur progressively more frequently with modifiers/anaphors reflecting the referent’s sex rather than the form’s gender. If the ‘telic development’ hypothesis pans out, the example above should occur more and more often over time with feminine modifiers/anaphors (e.g. ‘seo’) rather than with neuter ones (e.g. ‘þæt’).
On the other hand are those nouns whose gender already reflects the referent’s sex, for example ‘man(masc)’ [man] (referential class). Following the same logic, these should not occur with modifiers of a different gender than their own, as they already are compatible with the new paradigm. If they do so to a substantial degree, however, then this would provide evidence for an interim stage of disarray in gender assignment.

Results show gender mismatches between noun and modifier/anaphor to occur in both classes, with those in class 1 being about five times as frequent as those in class 2 (63.24% vs.12.05%), indicating a fairly directed development with some concomitant dissolution.
Statistical analyses of these results revealed significant impact of both semantic and grammatical facilitatory and inhibitory factors, supporting and expanding previous findings (e.g. Siemund 2008, Curzan 2003, Corbett 1991), indicating implicational hierarchies to be at work on both sides of the linguistic sign.


References:

Bosworth, J. and Toller, T.N. (1898/1921) An Anglo-Saxon dictionary, based on the manuscript collections of the late Joseph Bosworth. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bright, J.W. (1923) An Anglo-Saxon reader and grammar. London: Allen and Unwin.

Corbett, G. G. (1991) Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Curzan, A. (2003) Gender Shifts in the History of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hall, J.R.C. (1916) A concise Anglo-Saxon dictionary. Cambridge: University Press.

Siemund, P. (2008) Pronominal Gender in English. A Study of English Varieties from a Cross-linguistic Perspective. London: Routledge.

Gender assignment and exponence changed dramatically from Old to Middle English. This paper provides insights on the mechanisms and chronology of this change by quantitatively analysing the annals 1129-1154 of the Peterborough Chronicle. A logistic regression reveals substantial effects of formal, semantic and extralinguistic parameters on gender reassignment.
Lexical-to-referential-gender transition is largely a directed development in which correspondence of sex and gender plays a major role. At the same time, instances of random gender-reassignment occur and produce gendered noun-phrases incompatible with both the Old English as well as the Middle English system of gender-assignment. Pronouns adopt referential agreement before adnominals as a diachronic application of the Agreement Hierarchy (Corbett 1979) predicts.

Se reflexiona sobre la relación entre lenguaje y discriminación, centrándose, fundamentalmente, en la idea de que el lenguaje expresa e incide en la sociedad y en las representaciones. Se argumenta, primero, que en el uso del lenguaje se manifiesta un sesgo discriminatorio contra la mujer; segundo, que el género gramatical es distinto del sexo y del género social, aunque en español hay una estrecha relación (no identidad) cuando se habla de seres humanos; y tercero, que las lenguas cambian, pero ese cambio es más veloz en el vocabulario y el discurso que en la gramática y depende de su aceptación por el uso general. Finalmente,se plantea que los usos discriminatorios y sesgados del lenguaje son, en primer lugar, una cuestión discursiva. Para terminar, se muestra cómo la comprensión del lenguaje depende no solo del vocabulario y la gramática de la lengua sino también de las creencias y el modo en que las personas se representan socialmente la realidad.

[English] Based on the results of a tripartite study of possible correlations between grammatical gender and semantic properties, the uter (or common) gender is suggested to form a prototype category, with human individuals as its core members. Nouns with semantic properties that are perceived as having characteristic features (such as animacy, temporal stability, spatial extendedness, boundedness and non-collectivity) in common with human individuals are co-categorized with those, whereas neuter gender is negatively defined. The unmarked uter category can be described as a domain with an internal structure and an element in its centre, while the marked neuter cateogory lacks a corresponding internal structure and is characterized by the absence of the properties defining the uter category.

[Swedish] De systematiska samband mellan genus och semantiska faktorer, som påvisas i en tredelad undersökning leder fram till beskrivningen av utrum som en prototypisk kategori, med mänskliga individer som centrala medlemmar utifrån vilka andra substantiv samkategoriseras på grundval av upplevda gemensamma särdrag - animathet, temporal stabilitet, rumslig utbredning, begränsning och icke-kollektivitet - medan neutrum är en negativt definierad kategori. Den omarkerade utrumkategorin kan grafiskt beskrivas som en domän med intern struktur och ett element i centrum medan den markerade neutrumkategorin som innefattar det i förhållande till utrumkategorin avvikande saknar intern struktur.

"Cappadocian Greek is an extreme case of language change
and dialectal variation among the Modern Greek dialects in
having lost the tripartite grammatical gender distinction into
masculine, feminine and neuter nominals, a distinction
operative in Greek since its earliest recorded stages. In this
paper, I argue that this linguistic innovation should not be
viewed exclusively as the result of language contact with
Turkish, as is most commonly assumed in the literature, but
rather as the result of a series of language-internal analogical
levellings of gender mismatches in polydefinite constructions,
a process most probably accelerated by language contact but
certainly not triggered by it."

Ключевые слова: гендер, пол, гендерные исследования, гендерная асимметрия, гендерные роли, гендерные стереотипы, патриархальное сознание, фольклор, гендерные идеалы.
В данной работе основное внимание направлено на лингвистические аспекты гендерных идеалов, изображенных в народных сказках. В связи с резко меняющимися функциями женщины и мужчины в современном обществе, возникает острая необходимость избавляться от гендерных стереотипов уже на уровне речевой деятельности с целью осуществления цивилизованного акта коммуникации.

This article is focused on the grammatical and social aspects of the use of feminatives in the Ukrainian language. It was shown that the unreasonable use of feminatives may result in a number of inconsistencies leading to violation of grammatical and phonological rules and to the degradation of the language expressive ability. Helping little to make a woman more visible, this practice leaves no room to correctly denote non-binary persons and personified objects. It was shown also that the feminatives with the final «-kynja» are questionable from the phonological view. To resolve the grammatical issues resulting from the feminative usage, we propose to recognize the general gender that, similarly to the common one, is a complex gender. In contrast to the common gender, the general gender combines simple genders by means of the logical «OR» instead of the «AND». The corresponding names should be used in place of the masculine nouns in the generalizing function.

Although previous work on sexist linguistic structures has identified the causes of sexism in language as stemming from an androcentric world view, it has not described the social and semiotic processes involved in the historic production and reproduction of this kind of linguistic sexism. This article uses the three processes of iconisation, fractal recursivity, and erasure to bring together what appear to be disparate phenomena (such as the masculine generic, and even the very existence of the feminine grammatical gender) into a unifying theory. Iconisation results in the binary division of humanity into females and males; fractal recursivity explains how this division was projected onto language; and erasure demonstrates how certain discourses have been ignored, to the profit of others. A Queer critique of the two concepts of binarity and markedness (which arise as a result of iconisation) opens up exciting new ways to approach sexism in language, and to revitalise research in this area.

El índice del presente paper es el siguiente:

1. La familia lingüística chon
2. La lengua selknam
3. Aspectos de la fonología del selknam
4. El género y la lengua selknam
    4.1. Generalidades sobre el género
    4.2. El género en selknam
            4.2.1. Índices enclíticos de género
            4.2.2. Prefijos de animacidad
                        4.2.2.1. Prefijos de animacidad en verbos
                        4.2.2.2. Prefijos de animacidad en posposiciones
                        4.2.2.3. Prefijos de animacidad en interrogativos
            4.2.3. Sufijos de género
                      4.2.3.1. Sufijos de género en verbos
                      4.2.3.2. Sufijos de género en numerales
4.3. Género y morfología derivacional
4.4. Interacción entre género y alineamiento
      4.4.1. Los prefijos de animacidad y el alineamiento
      4.4.2. Los sufijos de género y el alineamiento
5. A manera de conclusión
6. Referencias bibliográficas.
7. Ejercicios

Abstract
In this study, we aim to explore the ways in which grammatical gender affects human thought
and perception. In particular, we aim to establish a link between the genders ascribed to
inanimate objects by a given gendered language, and the values and qualities which native
speakers associate with these objects. We endeavour to do so by conducting a comparative
research between languages which have disparate systems of grammatical gendering. For the
purpose of this study we have chosen Hindi as our gendered language, and a number of
Dravidian Languages as our non-gendered languages.
We seek to conduct our investigation on two levels. First, we aim to prove the transference of
grammatical gender categories onto the way native speakers of Hindi classify inanimate objects.
Second, we wish to explore if this system of classification into male and female categories leads
native Hindi speakers to associate stereotypically masculine and feminine qualities with
grammatically masculine and feminine nouns respectively.

Pre-publication draft.

Zusammenfassung:

Dieser Artikel betrachtet die Entwicklung der theoretischen und ideologischen Standpunkte, die einem großen Teil der wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten zum Thema des Manx-Gälischen vom 19. Jahrhundert bis heute zugrunde liegen. Vorgeschlagen wird, dass in Diskussionen des Manx die Annahme herrscht, die Sprache sei ein zerfallener, anglisierter bzw. kreolisierter Dialekt, was in O’Rahillys bekannter Erklärung dargelegt wird: ‘Manx hardly deserved to live’. O’Rahillys Ansichten haben zu unterschiedlichen Graden die Auffassung nachfolgender Wissenschaftler von der Sprache beeinflusst, so sehr sie auch seine rhetorischen Exzesse verwerfen mögen. Der Artikel untersucht die Behauptungen dieser Wissenschaftler und stellt die generelle Ansicht bezüglich kontaktinduzierten Sprachwandels im Manx-Gälischen infrage. Kritisch betrachtet wird auch Williams’ Theorie eines mittelalterlichen nordisch-gälischen Patois als Grundlage des späteren Manx angesichts Trudgills Ideen zur soziolinguistischen Typologie.

The article examines the state of the grammatical category of gender in Modern Bulgarian and Modern Greek languages. Remarkable changes have occurred in the morphological and syntactic structure of the two Balkan languages throughout their centuries-long history. The grammatical category of gender exhibits a high degree of stability and conservatism against the background of all developmental processes in the Bulgarian and Greek nominative and verbal systems, its state barely altered since Proto-Indo-European times. This study pays special attention to the feminine gender and tendencies playing an impact on it, predominantly the so called masculinisation in Modern Bulgarian when juxtaposed with Modern Greek.

«Perché il rapporto di potere tra i sessi cambi in senso veramente paritario si deve anzitutto acquistare consapevolezza delle varie forme in cui la disparità viene mantenuta». Così scriveva Elena Marinucci, Presidente della “Commissione Nazionale per la realizzazione della parità tra Uomo e Donna presso la Presidenza del Consiglio”, istituita il 12 giugno 1984, composta da 30 donne e da lei presieduta fino al 1987. La citazione è la Presentazione al volume rivoluzionario Il sessismo nella lingua italiana, pubblicato nel 1987 ad opera della linguista, saggista, insegnante e attivista Alma Sabatini, la quale apriva il dibattito partendo dall’assunto che la lingua riflette la società in cui viviamo e che una lingua che nasconde la presenza femminile sia l’immagine di una società in cui, a sua volta, la femmina è invisibile. Una lingua può essere sessista? Quanto è rilevante l’uso che i parlanti fanno della lingua? Influenzando l’uso, e quindi modificando la lingua, è possibile “modificare” anche la società dei parlanti? E i parlanti sono pronti ad allontanarsi dalla tradizione e ripensare il linguaggio? Scopo di questa dissertazione è ripercorrere le tappe dall’apertura del dibattito, passando per le prime svolte istituzionali e non, arrivando al presente, cercando di capire quali e di quale tipo siano stati quei cambiamenti linguistici tanto auspicati da Sabatini in primis, seguita da esperti/e della lingua, accademici/che e parlanti. Durante le lezioni del corso accademico scelto, ci sono state varie difficoltà nel tradurre espressioni dall’inglese come «the actresses of the war», corrispondente all’italiano «gli attori di guerra» e non «le attrici», così come nel caso del tedesco «die Ehepräsidentin», «il presidente onorario» e non «la presidente onoraria» come, invece, vorrebbe l’originale. Perché esistono questi ostacoli nell’italiano? Si tratta di una mancanza nel sistema morfologico della lingua o di un “blocco” dei parlanti riguardo alle forme femminili, condizionato dalla storia e dalla società? Si cercherà di rispondere a queste domande da un lato indagando l’iter intrapreso dal problema, consultando pubblicazioni e linee guida di linguisti e linguiste, dizionari della lingua italiana, documenti delle amministrazioni e delle università, e dall’altro analizzando il comportamento odierno dei parlanti attraverso un test linguistico i cui risultati, si spera, permetteranno alcune importanti riflessioni.

In this dissertation, I investigate a number of interrelated developments affecting the morphosyntax of nouns in Cappadocian Greek. I specifically focus on the development of differential object marking, the loss of grammatical gender distinctions, and the neuterisation of noun inflection. My aim is to provide a diachronic account of the innovations that Cappadocian has undergone in the three domains mentioned above. Αll the innovations examined in this study have the effect of rendering the morphology and syntax of nouns in Cappadocian more like that of neuters. On account of the historical and sociolinguistic circumstances in which Cappadocian developed as well as of the superficial similarity of their outcomes to equivalent structures in Turkish, previous research has overwhelmingly treated the Cappadocian developments as instances of contact-induced change that resulted from the influence of Turkish. In this study, I examine the Cappadocian innovations from a language-internal point of view and in comparison with parallel developments attested in the other Modern Greek dialects of Asia Minor, namely Pontic, Rumeic, Pharasiot and Silliot. My comparative analysis of a wide range of dialect-internal, cross-dialectal and cross-linguistic typological evidence shows that language contact with Turkish can be identified as the main cause of change only in the case of differential object marking. On the other hand, with respect to the origins of the most pervasive innovations in gender and noun inflection, I argue that they go back to the common linguistic ancestor of the modern Asia Minor Greek dialects and do not owe their development to language contact with Turkish. I show in detail that the superficial similarity of these latter innovations’ outcomes to their Turkish equivalents in each case represents the final stage in a long series of typologically plausible, language-internal developments whose early manifestations predate the intensification of Cappadocian–Turkish linguistic and cultural exchange. These findings show that diachronic change in Cappadocian is best understood when examined within a larger Asia Minor Greek context. On the whole, they make a significant contribution to our knowledge of the history of Cappadocian and the Asia Minor Greek dialects as well as to Modern Greek dialectology more generally, and open a fresh round of discussion on the origin and development of other innovations attested in these dialects that are considered by historical linguists and Modern Greek dialectologists to be untypically Greek or contact-induced or both.

Il genere grammaticale rappresenta un’affascinante sfida per i linguisti: cercare di comprenderne il funzionamento e ricercare i fattori che ne causano la nascita o il declino sono operazioni che portano a notevoli traguardi della ricerca implicando numerosi campi che vanno dalla neurolinguistica fino alla grammatica storica.  La motivazione del presente studio nasce dal duplice interesse nei confronti di questo tratto grammaticale e della sua distribuzione tipologica nella regione del Mediterraneo antico. L’obiettivo pratico di questo studio consiste nell’elaborazione di mappe geografiche della regione Mediterranea che, sul modello del Wals [DRYER & HANSPELMAT], fornisca un’agile strumento per valutare la distribuzione delle caratteristiche tipologiche del genere grammaticale nella zona in esame.

MPhil Dissertation at the University of Oxford, awarded Distinction

What does Istanbul Judeo-Spanish do when it borrows words from Turkish and French? This thesis represents the first in-depth linguistic study of the Ladino Database Project (LDP), which was conceived in 2008 as the ultimate document of what may be the last generation of native Judeo-Spanish speakers, in the last major community of Sephardic Jews in the former Ottoman Empire. In spite of these “lasts”, this project attempts to join those in Istanbul resisting the diagnoses of imminent language death by focusing on an oft-overlooked aspect of language contact: loanword integration. By analyzing a 10-speaker sample of the LDP corpus and nearly 1500 tokens of loanwords used in fluid speech, this thesis seeks to describe how – and how much – native grammatical systems continue to be used in the borrowing process. The analysis addresses the morphosyntactic integration of Turkish and French lexical borrowings of four form classes (verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs), with reference throughout to the possible social and linguistic factors affecting integration patterns. What emerges is a picture of the diverse Istanbul speaker community in contact — borrowing, adapting, and preserving Judeo-Spanish all at once.

Experimental research on grammatical gender and cognition provides evidence for grammatical gender effects on various aspects of speakers' cognition. Some researchers argue that such effects are limited to languages with a two-gender system. Other studies, however, find that the grammatical category of gender impacts on cognition also in languages with a three-gender system. Based on a sex attribution task, the present paper examines the relationship between grammatical gender and cognition in two languages with a three-gender system, Greek and German, and aligns with the second group of studies. The overall results are discussed in the light of previous research from a critical perspective.

Hebrew has two suffixed plural morphemes: -ōṯ and -īm. Typically, grammars describe the plural morpheme -ōṯ as marking the plural of feminine nouns and the plural morpheme -īm as marking the plural of masculine nouns. However, the distribution of plural morphemes
with substantives is not always predictable, although gender assignment
is not affected. The question of this gender-number morphological mismatch in all phases of Hebrew is a long-standing problem; attempts
to explain it have mostly been synchronic and restricted to evidence from Hebrew. In this paper, I contextualize the Hebrew
case within a wider Semitic context and ask whether this system
is especially typical of Hebrew, and, if not, what that tells us
about plural formation in Hebrew.

The study focuses on grammatical gender primarily conceived as an inherent and classifying property of Italian and Polish nouns. Our main aim is to contrastively discuss multiple connections of this formal category with the grammar and semantics of the languages under examination. The grammatical gender is a complex and highly versatile theoretical construct. As a fixed and syntactically independent property of nouns, it formally contributes to the enrichment of lexical resources. As a co-regulator of morphosyntactic relations between sentence constituents, it plays an important role in the decoding of a sentence structure, and more globally, of the internal text structure.

Det huvudsakliga syftet är att pröva antagandet att svenskans genussytem är grundat på semantiska uppdelningar. Teorin utgår framför allt ifrån Greville Corbetts idéer om att alla genussystem har en semantisk kärna och dennes The Animacy Hierarchy och The Agreement Hierarchy står i fokus.
Jag har undersökt några olika typer av substantiv, som verkar ha vacklande genus, för att se vilket genus de har i autentiska texter. De kontexter som undersöks är pronomenval, attributiv kongruens och predikativ kongruens. Analysen består av fem delar: en kvantitativ undersökning av pronomenval för animata neutrer, en kvantitativ undersökning av animata neutrers predikativa kongruens, en kvantitativ undersökning av maskulin kongruens vid stark adjektivböjning, en kvalitativ undersökning av enligt vilka principer genus tilldelas med avledningar som kan få både utralt och neutralt genus, en kvalitativ undersökning av -is-avledningarnas genustilldelning och sist en kvalitativ undersökning om hur de animata neutrernas genustilldelning skulle kunna förklaras diakront.
Slutsatserna som kan dras av studien är att semantiken spelar en större roll för svenskans genussystem än vad som ofta hävdats i bl.a. SAG. Detta märks både i tilldelningen hos substantiv med vacklande genus, i den predikativa kongruensen hos hybrid nouns och i den attributiva kongruensen i kontexter där den maskulina -e-formen är optionell, men ändå dominerar samt i pronomenvalet. Dessutom visar studien att substantiv vars genus bryter mot en semantisk princip kan förklaras genom att ett diakront perspektiv används.