scholarly journals Stability and Change in Grammatical Gender: Pronouns in Heritage Scandinavian

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 441-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janne Bondi Johannessen ◽  
Ida Larsson
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Heritage Languages ◽  
Stability And Change ◽  
Pronominal Gender ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Internal Agreement

Previous studies on gender in Scandinavian heritage languages in America have looked at noun-phrase internal agreement. It has been shown that some heritage speakers have non-target gender agreement, but this has been interpreted in different ways by different researchers. This paper presents a study of pronominal gender in Heritage Norwegian and Swedish, using existing recordings and a small experiment that elicits pronouns. It is shown that the use of pronominal forms is largely target-like, and that the heritage speakers make gender distinctions. There is, however, some evidence of two competing systems in the data, and there is a shift towards a two-gender system, arguably due to koinéization.

The Diachrony of Semantic Gender Agreement: Findings from Middle Dutch

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margot Kraaikamp
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Semantic Interpretation ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Middle Dutch ◽  
Pronominal Gender ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Semantic Agreement

This paper presents the results of a corpus study of pronominal gender agreement in Middle Dutch. In present-day Dutch and in several other Germanic varieties, pronouns show semantic gender agreement that is based on the degree of individuation of the referent. Dutch pronouns show variation between this type of agreement and lexical gender agreement. This study investigates how old semantic agreement based on individuation is. In particular, it aims to answer the question of whether semantic agreement has developed in response to the change from the Germanic three-gender system to a two-gender system or dates back to before this change. The results show that agreement based on individuation already existed in Middle Dutch, when the original three-gender system was still in place. This shows that this type of agreement did not develop in response to the change from three to two nominal genders. The semantic interpretation of the genders along the lines of individuation apparently existed already and could be an old Germanic, possibly Indo-European, feature. What seems to have changed over time is the proportion of semantic to lexical agreement, as semantic agreement appears to occur more frequently in present-day Dutch than in Middle Dutch. This shift in agreement preference may be due to the loss of adnominal gender marking and the resulting reduced visibility of lexical gender in the noun phrase.

scholarly journals Gender Agreement Mismatches in Heritage Greek

Languages ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Artemis Alexiadou ◽  
Vasiliki Rizou ◽  
Nikolaos Tsokanos ◽  
Foteini Karkaletsou
Keyword(s):  
Life Span ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Adolescent Group ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Internal Agreement

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

scholarly journals Gender agreement hierarchy in common gender and epicene nouns in Spanish

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 279-292
Author(s):  
Anastasiia Ogneva
Keyword(s):  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Formal Rule ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Morphosyntactic Feature

Gender is a grammatical category defined as an abstract morphosyntactic feature of nouns reflected in characteristics of associated words (i.e. agreement) (Hockett, 1958; Corbett, 1991). Agreement is, in fact, easily established in “transparent” nouns which follow either semantic or formal rule of gender agreement. However, when we deal with ambiguous nouns regarding their gender, agreement is not straightforward. In this article we aim to pursue two main goals. Firstly, to review and briefly describe grammatical gender system in Spanish (§1) with a special focus on so called “ambiguous” or “problematic” nouns (§2). Secondly, to review agreement hierarchy theories and explore if they are applicable for Spanish epicenes and common gender nouns (§3). Discussion and conclusion remarks are presented in (§4).

From case to topology

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-307
Author(s):  
Bjarne Simmelkjær Sandgaard Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Case System ◽  
Multiple Processes ◽  
Constituent Order ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Sign Relations ◽  
Indexical Sign ◽  
Internal Agreement

Abstract The Scanian dialect of Middle Danish underwent a range of changes and reductions in its case system. I argue that these changes were caused neither by phonological developments nor by language contact as often assumed, but by multiple processes of grammaticalisation. The present paper focuses on one of these factors: that the relatively predictable constituent order within the Middle Danish noun phrase made case marking redundant in its function of marking noun-phrase internal agreement between head and modifier(s). This redundancy caused the case system to undergo a regrammation where the indexical sign relations changed so that the expression of morphological case no longer indicated this noun-phrase-internal agreement, leaving only topology (as well as morphologically marked number and gender agreement) as markers of this type of agreement. This factor contributed to the subsequent degrammation of the entire case system.

The representation of grammatical gender in the bilingual lexicon: Evidence from Greek and German

2007 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANGELIKI SALAMOURA ◽  
JOHN N. WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Mental Lexicon ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Word Form ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Gender Representations ◽  
Bilingual Lexicon ◽  
Same Gender ◽  
Gender System

This paper investigates the shared or independent nature of grammatical gender representations in the bilingual mental lexicon and the role word form similarity (as in the case of cognates) plays in these representations. In a translation task from Greek (L1) to German (L2), nouns that had the same gender in both languages were translated faster than nouns with different genders, but only when the L2 target utterance required computation of gender agreement (adjective + noun). This tendency held for both cognates and noncognates. Unlike noncognates, however, gender-incongruent cognates yielded more errors than gender-congruent cognates. These results are interpreted as evidence for a shared L1–L2 gender system with L2 cognates relying more heavily on the L1 gender value than noncognates.

scholarly journals El género gramatical en español entre los hablantes de herencia y los hablantes nativos

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew M Gill
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Heritage Languages ◽  
Oral Production ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Study Support ◽  
Heritage Speakers Of Spanish

Los hablantes de herencia, es decir, las personas que hablan una lengua desde el nacimiento que acaba convirtiéndose en una lengua no dominante con el tiempo, constituyen un grupo tradicionalmente poco estudiado; sin embargo, últimamente está recibiendo mayor atención. Un área que ha emergido en los últimos años es la realización del género gramatical en las lenguas de herencia. Las investigaciones previas indican que existe una diferencia significativa entre los hispanohablantes nativos y los de herencia (Montrul, 2014; Valenzuela et al., 2012); por tanto, el propósito de este estudio es contribuir a la literatura de los hablantes de herencia. En el presente estudio, se dividió a 43 participantes hispanohablantes en grupos dependiendo de si eran nativos o de herencia. Cada participante llevó a cabo una Elicited Oral Production Task. Los resultados demuestran que los hablantes de herencia tienden a cometer un número de fallos de género significativamente mayor que los hablantes nativos y que usan ciertas estrategias, como la autocorrección, significativamente más que los nativos para evitar cometer dichos fallos. Los resultados del estudio respaldan las conclusiones de investigaciones previas, que indican que los hablantes de herencia no realizan el género gramatical de manera nativa. Heritage speakers, that is, speakers of a language that is spoken since birth but becomes a non-dominant language over time, are classically an understudied group. However, in the field of linguistics, the subfield of heritage speakers is rapidly expanding. Specifically, the realization of grammatical gender in heritage languages has not been studied extensively until just recently. Previous research indicates that a significant difference exists between native and heritage speakers of Spanish (Montrul, 2014; Valenzuela et al., 2012); thus, the purpose of this study is to contribute to the literature of this growing subfield. In the present study, 43 Spanish-speaking participants were divided into groups depending on whether they were native or heritage speakers. Each of the participants carried out an Elicited Oral Production Task. Results demonstrate that heritage speakers tend to make significantly more gender errors than native speakers and that heritage speakers also utilize certain strategies, like self-correction, significantly more than native speakers in order to avoid committing these errors. Results from this study support the findings in previous research, which indicate that heritage speakers are not native-like in their realization of grammatical gender.

scholarly journals Stable and vulnerable domains in Germanic heritage languages

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 503-526
Author(s):  
Marit Westergaard ◽  
Tanja Kupisch
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Heritage Languages ◽  
The World ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Germanic Languages

This paper provides an overview of Germanic languages as heritage languages, i.e. languages acquired naturalistically by children in parts of the world where these languages are not the majority language. Summarizing research on different types of heritage speakers of Danish, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish, we identify certain stable and vulnerable domains. We focus on the so far best studied areas, word order and grammatical gender, adding evidence from other lesser studied domains, such as definiteness and phonology. We propose that in addition to the linguistic make-up of the phenomena in question, the size of the heritage community and, relatedly, opportunities to use the language need to be taken into account. The latter may explain, for example, why moribund varieties of German and the Scandinavian languages in North America appear to be less stable than the language of second-generation heritage speakers in Europe.

scholarly journals Weighing Psycholinguistic and Social Factors for Semantic Agreement in Dutch Pronouns

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-66
Author(s):  
Lien De Vos ◽  
Gert De Sutter ◽  
Gunther De Vogelaer
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Lexical Access ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Multivariate Statistical Analysis ◽  
Social Factor ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Multivariate Statistical ◽  
Syntactic Function ◽  
Pronominal Gender

Previous research has shown that Dutch pronominal gender is in a process of resemanticization: Highly individuated nouns are increasingly referred to with masculine and feminine pronouns, and lowly individuated ones with the neuter pronoun het/’t ‘it’, irrespective of the grammatical gender of the noun (Audring 2009). The process is commonly attributed to the loss of adnominal gender agreement, which is increasingly blurring distinctions between masculine and feminine nouns and, therefore, requires speakers to resort to semantic default strategies (De Vogelaer & De Sutter 2011). Several factors have been identified that influence the choice of semantic vis-à-vis lexical agreement, both linguistic and social. This article seeks to weigh the importance of both structural and social factors in pronominal gender agreement in Belgian Dutch, using the Belgian part of the Spoken Dutch Corpus. A multivariate statistical analysis reveals that most effects are structural, including noun semantics and the syntactic function of the antecedent and the pronoun, as well as the pragmatic status of the antecedent. The most important social factor is speech register. We argue that these effects support a psycholinguistic account in which resemanticization is seen as a change from below, caused by hampered lexical access to noun gender.

scholarly journals The problematic issue of grammatical gender in Arabic as a foreign language

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima A. Alkohlani
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Considerable Difficulty ◽  
Learner Corpus ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Problematic Issue ◽  
Demonstrative Pronouns ◽  
Gender System

AbstractMany languages of the world have a grammatical gender system that divides all nouns into gendered categories. The gender assigned to a given noun requires gender agreement with associated items in the sentence, such as: determiners, adjectives, and demonstrative pronouns. Research in the area of grammatical gender acquisition has found that this grammatical category poses considerable difficulty for L2 learners. However, rarely was this area of difficulty the focus of L2 studies in Arabic. The present study focuses on the problematic issue of grammatical gender in Arabic as a foreign language. It examines advanced Arabic L2 learners’ written errors of gender assignment and agreement in the Arabic Learner Corpus (ALC) v2, compiled by Alfaifi, Atwel, and Hedaya (2014). Based on the classification and analysis of the errors, possible factors of the difficulty facing L2 learners in assigning the correct gender are discussed, and recommendations to reduce their effects are suggested.

Grammatical gender in Romanian-French bilinguals

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 390-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amelia Manolescu ◽  
Gonia Jarema
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Picture Naming ◽  
First Language ◽  
Naming Task ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Lexical Representation ◽  
Bilingual Lexicon ◽  
Gender Information ◽  
Gender System

We explored the way grammatical gender is represented in the bilingual mental lexicon in order to determine whether the grammatical gender of the first language (L1) affects the production of nouns in the second language (L2). Furthermore, we explored the representation of the Romanian “neuter” gender to see if it is distinct from the masculine and feminine. Romanian-French bilinguals were tested using a picture-naming task in L2 (Experiments 1 and 2) and a translation task from L1 to L2 (Experiment 3). Participants had to use either a bare noun (Condition 1) or a noun phrase (Condition 2). Responses were faster on gender congruent than on gender incongruent stimuli in both conditions, and neuter was found to be distinct from masculine and feminine. These results suggest that grammatical gender information is available at the level of lexical representation and that the bilingual lexicon is structured in a manner that allows information from the lexical level of both languages to interact. They also point to a tripartite gender system in Romanian.

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