Nominal Gender in Coptic Egyptian

2021 ◽  
Vol 148 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-49
Author(s):  
Sabrina Bendjaballah ◽  
Chris H. Reintges
Keyword(s):  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Stress Assignment ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Noun Class ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Masculine Gender

Summary The interdisciplinary research (philology, typology, morphology, phonology) presented here explores the role of gender in the meaning and morphology of Coptic nouns. Coptic has a predominantly grammatical gender system, albeit with a niche for semantically based gender assignment. The gender system marks a three-way semantic contrast between a [male] versus a [female] versus an [unspecified] gender value, even where the morphology draws only a two-way distinction between grammatical masculine and feminine gender. By integrating quantitative data and morphophonological analysis, we shall argue that masculine gender is morphologically unmarked. Although no discrete morpheme can be identified, feminine gender is always morphologically marked on nouns. Masculine and feminine nouns are distinguished in terms of their templatic structure, which interacts in complex ways with vowel distributions, stress assignment, and noun class.

scholarly journals Gender Assignment in Six North Scandinavian Languages: Patterns of Variation and Change

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 264-315
Author(s):  
Briana Van Epps ◽  
Gerd Carling ◽  
Yair Sapir
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Word Frequency ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Old Swedish ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Gender Change

This study addresses gender assignment in six North Scandinavian varieties with a three-gender system: Old Norse, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Old Swedish, Nysvenska, Jamtlandic, and Elfdalian. Focusing on gender variation and change, we investigate the role of various factors in gender change. Using the contemporary Swedish varieties Jamtlandic and Elfdalian as a basis, we compare gender assignment in other North Scandinavian languages, tracing the evolution back to Old Norse. The data consist of 1,300 concepts from all six languages coded for cognacy, gender, and morphological and semantic variation. Our statistical analysis shows that the most important factors in gender change are the Old Norse weak/strong inflection, Old Norse gender, animate/inanimate distinction, word frequency, and loan status. From Old Norse to modern languages, phonological assignment principles tend to weaken, due to the general loss of word-final endings. Feminine words are more susceptible to changing gender, and the tendency to lose the feminine is noticeable even in the varieties in our study upholding the three-gender system. Further, frequency is significantly correlated with unstable gender. In semantics, only the animate/inanimate distinction signifi-cantly predicts gender assignment and stability. In general, our study confirms the decay of the feminine gender in the Scandinavian branch of Germanic.

Culture or language: what drives effects of grammatical gender?

2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sieghard Beller ◽  
Karen Fadnes Brattebø ◽  
Kristina Osland Lavik ◽  
Rakel Drønen Reigstad ◽  
Andrea Bender
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Research Strategy ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Cultural Groups ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Semantic Categories ◽  
Cultural Effects ◽  
Gender System

AbstractAlthough investigations of linguistic relativity originated in cultural anthropology, the role of culture in 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.

Transfer effects in learning a second language grammatical gender system

2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Sabourin ◽  
Laurie A. Stowe ◽  
Ger J. de Haan
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Similar System ◽  
Gender System ◽  
L1 And L2

In this article second language (L2) knowledge of Dutch grammatical gender is investigated. Adult speakers of German, English and a Romance language (French, Italian or Spanish) were investigated to explore the role of transfer in learning the Dutch grammatical gender system. In the first language (L1) systems, German is the most similar to Dutch coming from a historically similar system. The Romance languages have grammatical gender; however, the system is not congruent to the Dutch system. English does not have grammatical gender (although semantic gender is marked in the pronoun system). Experiment 1, a simple gender assignment task, showed that all L2 participants tested could assign the correct gender to Dutch nouns (all L2 groups performing on average above 80%), although having gender in the L1 did correlate with higher accuracy, particularly when the gender systems were very similar. Effects of noun familiarity and a default gender strategy were found for all participants. In Experiment 2 agreement between the noun and the relative pronoun was investigated. In this task a distinct performance hierarchy was found with the German group performing the best (though significantly worse than native speakers), the Romance group performing well above chance (though not as well as the German group), and the English group performing at chance. These results show that L2 acquisition of grammatical gender is affected more by the morphological similarity of gender marking in the L1 and L2 than by the presence of abstract syntactic gender features in the L1.

scholarly journals Investigating Gender Assignment Strategies in Mixed Purepecha–Spanish Nominal Constructions

Languages ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Bellamy ◽  
M. Parafita Couto ◽  
Hans Stadthagen-Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Task Type ◽  
Comparable Data ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Translation Equivalent ◽  
Masculine Gender

Purepecha has no grammatical gender, whereas Spanish has a binary masculine–feminine system. In this paper we investigate how early sequential Purepecha–Spanish bilinguals assign gender to Purepecha nouns inserted into an otherwise Spanish utterance, using a director-matcher production task and an online forced-choice acceptability judgement task. The results of the production task indicate a strong preference for masculine gender, irrespective of the gender of the noun’s translation equivalent, the so-called “masculine default” option. Participants in the comprehension task were influenced by the orthography of the Purepecha noun in the -a ending condition, leading them to assign feminine gender agreement to nouns that are masculine in Spanish, but preferred the masculine default strategy again in the -i/-u ending condition. The absence of the “analogical criterion” in both tasks contrasts with the results of some previous studies, underlining the need for more comparable data in terms of task type. Our results also highlight how task type can influence the choices speakers make, in this context, in terms of the choice of grammatical gender agreement strategy. Task type should therefore be carefully controlled in future studies.

scholarly journals GRAMMATICAL GENDER AND LINGUISTIC LOANING: FEMININE GENDER ASSIGNMENT IN ITALIAN ANGLICISMS

2019 ◽  
pp. 161-175
Author(s):  
Mila Samardžić
Keyword(s):  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Loan Words ◽  
Loan Word ◽  
Masculine Gender ◽  
Living Being

The paper deals with the problem of gender assignment of loan words from predominantly isolating languages (such as English) in languages with (partly) flexible morphology (such as Italian). The English as a donor language does not have grammatical gender, whereas in recipient language (Italian) it is obligatory. How to assign the gender to English loans in Italian if the loan word does not indicate a living being scilicet does not have the natural gender? The aim of this paper is to determine the rules for assigning feminine gender to English nouns in Italian because the nouns become feminine only on the basis of the rule (otherwise, in cases where no rule can be used, the noun would be, by default, of the masculine gender). The research is conducted on word corpus consisting of examples taken from Italian dictionaries and newspapers as well as from Google.

scholarly journals Factors of success and failure in the acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch

2008 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonie Cornips ◽  
Aafke Hulk
Keyword(s):  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Success Factors ◽  
Age Of Onset ◽  
Structural Similarity ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Gender System

The goal of this article is to examine the factors that are proposed in the literature to explain the success—failure in the child L2 (second language) acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch definite determiners. Focusing on four different groups of bilingual children, we discuss four external success factors put forward in the literature: (1) early age of onset, (2) lengthy and intensive input, (3) the quality of the input and (4) the role of the other language. We argue that the first two factors may indeed contribute to explaining the differences in success between the less and more successful bilingual children. However, the influence of the quality of the input in (standard) Dutch appears to be inconclusive, whereas the (structural) similarity of the gender systems in the two languages may reinforce the children's awareness of the grammatical gender category. Moreover, it appears that individual bilingualism vs. societal bilingualism, that is the sociolinguistic context in which Dutch is acquired, is not a factor for failure or success with respect to the acquisition of grammatical gender. In the final part of this article, we hypothesize that the important role of the input is related to a language internal factor, which distinguishes the Dutch gender system of the definite determiner from that of other languages, resulting in different acquisition paths.

scholarly journals Gender Resolution in Croatian, Slavic and Proto-Indo-European

Fluminensia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-29
Author(s):  
Ranko Matasović
Keyword(s):  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Historical Explanation ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Resolution Rule ◽  
The Common ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Masculine Gender

This paper deals with the origin and development of the gender resolution rule according to which the predicate adjective agrees with the masculine antecedent when there is agreement with a conjunction of subjects at least one of which denotes a male person. Apart from Croatian, such a rule exists (or existed) in the other Slavic languages, as well as in Baltic languages, so it can safely be posited for Proto-Slavic and Proto-Balto-Slavic. We further show that most contemporary and ancient Indo-European languages had such a gender resolution rule. Where such a rule does not exist (as in Germanic languages), there is a plausible historical explanation. In Hittite, which preserves the most ancient gender system of Indo-European (with only common and neuter genders, and no feminine gender), the default agreement is with the common gender noun. Recent advances in our understanding of the development of gender in Indo-European allow us to show that the rule taking the masculine as the default gender has developed from the rule taking the common gender as default. This is because the morphemes showing gender agreement on adjectives and pronouns of the masculine gender have developed from Early Proto-Indo-European morphemes expressing the common gender.

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