scholarly journals The grammatical category of gender in noun phrases of the Lithuanian-French interlanguage

2017 ◽  
pp. 149-175
Author(s):  
Vitalija Kazlauskienė
Keyword(s):  
Native Speaker ◽  
First Language ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Linguistic Competence ◽  
French Language ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Plural Form ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Students First

It is not an easy task for a Lithuanian, who is not a native speaker of French, to learn French nouns with their inherent grammatical gender, which is expressed by suffixes and articles non-existent in L1. The understanding of the category of gender of French L2 noun phrases is a complex and time consuming process. The data of the text corpus proves that students whose French language level is B1 have not fully comprehended the grammatical category of gender on all levels of linguistic competence. As demonstrated by the results of the present investigation, a student often does not assign a fixed gender. When in doubt, he/she eventually decides on the masculine gender as a universal choice, which in French is less codified than the feminine gender and is interpreted as the main gender from which other forms such as the feminine gender and the plural form are derived. Apparently, the cause of such confusion lies in the system of the French language itself. Students tend to assign the gender of the noun by semantic analogy, the analogy of form or meaning with the students’ first language or from a well-known word in L2; sometimes other languages such as English come into play. As regards the coordination of determiners and adjectives, the determiner coordination tends to cause fewer problems than adjectives. The latter is mostly used in the masculine form, regardless of the noun gender. Despite a number of nominal gender-related problems, a substantial number of nouns have been assigned the correct gender, as demonstrated by collocates agreeing in gender with respective nouns.

scholarly journals Słowiańskie nazwy ‘brwi’ w świetle materiałów gwarowych i źródeł historycznych

2015 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 175-193
Author(s):  
Janusz Siatkowski
Keyword(s):  
The West ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Small Areas ◽  
Plural Form ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Secondary Form ◽  
Morphological Transformations

Slavic names for ‘eyebrows’ in light of dialectal materials and historical sources‘Eyebrows’ have in OlA only several more frequent names (that are marked on the map by areas), the remaining ones occupy small areas or are absolutely rare.The most frequent names are those connected with the core *-brъv-, that are internally very different. There is an expressive contrast/opposition between the northern area with forms from *brъv- and the large southern area with the forms from prefixed *obrъv-. The forms from the core *-brъv- are also divided into two areas due to the preservation of the indigenous [old Slavonic semivowel] “jor/jer”: in the west, the forms with the disappeared weak “jor” exist in the west, while in the each these forms show its secondary vocalization. These macro-divisions also include the differentiations that are the result of morphological transformations of primary forms *bry, *brъve and *obry, *obrъve that show the early transition to -i stems with the accusative form in the nominative case, in turn the transition to former -a stems or to former -ja stems, the emergence of the secondary form of the neuter *obrъvьje, and finally – most probably due to the treatment of the form of the singular of the feminine gender *(o)brъva as the plural form and its depluralization – the emergence of the singular of the neuter  *(o)brъvo.Vast areas are formed by forms from *vědja (in pl *vědję or *vědji) in the eastern part of the southern Slavic languages and by forms from the base *ob-oč- (or most frequently *//obočьje) in the Czech Republic, Morava and Slovakia and as the island-like presence can be found in Lusatia (Łużyce) and in Hungary.

LINGUISTIC ASPECT OF CONTEMPORARY GENDER CHALLENGES IN THE FRENCH LANGUAGE

2020 ◽  
pp. 60-67
Author(s):  
Mariya K. Borisenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native Speaker ◽  
French Language ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Traditional Structure ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
The Media ◽  
Internet Community ◽  
Linguistic Aspect

The article discusses the morphological features associated with the formation of feminine words to designate professions, ranks and positions. The change in the social status of a woman – a politician, public figure, government official, professional – in the fields confined to male representatives – requires adequate expression in the language. The need search correct forms that do not violate the traditional structure of the language is felt both by linguists and authorities of the country. Their acceptance or non-acceptance by the language depends on the reaction of the native speaker, the media, representatives of the Internet community. The author reviews the possibilities presented by the French language in the formation of the feminine nouns – suffix formation, epicenes. Issues related to the peculiarities of matching plural nouns are also considered. The article does not only deal with the situation in France, but also with what is being done in this direction in Geneva canton, in the French-speaking community of Belgium, in Quebec. The author found it interesting to dwell on some of the reasons that impede the entry of new forms into modern French. The conclusion contains some observations covering the period of the last two years, made on the basis of viewing media materials.

scholarly journals Grammatical Gender: Acquisition, Attrition, and Change

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-121
Author(s):  
Terje Lohndal ◽  
Marit Westergaard
Keyword(s):  
Heritage Language ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
First Language ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Indefinite Article ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Combined Data

This paper discusses grammatical gender in Norwegian by bringing together data from first language acquisition, Norwegian heritage language, and dialect change. In all these contexts, gender is often claimed to be a vulnerable category, arguably due to the relative non-transparency of gender assignment. Furthermore, the feminine gender is in the process of being lost in many Norwegian dialects, as feminine agreement forms (for example, the indefinite article) are merged with the masculine. The definite suffix, in contrast, is quite stable, as it is acquired early and does not undergo attrition/change. We argue that the combined data provide evidence that gender and declension class are separate phenomena, and we outline a possible formal analysis to account for the findings.*

scholarly journals Prejudice Nation: Hypersexualization and Abuse in Jude Dibia’s Unbridled

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402110326
Author(s):  
Chinenye Amonyeze ◽  
Stella Okoye-Ugwu
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Implicit Bias ◽  
Girl Child ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Culture Of Silence

With the global #Metoo movement yet to arrive in Nigeria, Jude Dibia’s Unbridled reflects an emblematic moment for the underrepresented to occupy their stories and make their voices heard. The study analyzes patriarchy’s complicated relationship with the Nigerian girl child, significantly reviewing the inherent prejudices in patriarchy’s power hierarchies and how radical narratives explore taboo topics like incest and sexual violence. Contextualizing the concepts of hypersexualization and implicit bias to put in perspective how women, expected to be the gatekeepers of sex, are forced to navigate competing allegiances while remaining submissive and voiceless, the article probes the struggles of sexual victims and how hierarchies in a patriarchal society exacerbate their affliction through a culture of silence. Arguing that Dibia’s Unbridled confronts the narrative of silence in Nigerian fiction, the article explores ways the author empowers gender by challenging social values and traditional gender roles, underscoring gender dynamics and the problematic nature of prevalent bias against the feminine gender in Nigeria.

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.

Grammatical Gender in the German Multiethnolect

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-29
Author(s):  
Peter Auer ◽  
Vanessa Siegel
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
First Language ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Immigrant Background ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Bare Nouns ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Germanic Languages

While major restructurings and simplifications have been reported for gender systems of other Germanic languages in multiethnolectal speech, this article demonstrates that the three-way gender distinction of German is relatively stable among young speakers from an immigrant background. We investigate gender in a German multiethnolect based on a corpus of approximately 17 hours of spontaneous speech produced by 28 young speakers in Stuttgart (mainly from Turkish and Balkan background). German is not their second language, but (one of) their first language(s), which they have fully acquired from childhood. We show that the gender system does not show signs of reduction in the direction of a two-gender system, nor of wholesale loss. We also argue that the position of gender in the grammar is weakened by independent innovations, such as the frequent use of bare nouns in grammatical contexts where German requires a determiner. Another phenomenon that weakens the position of gender is the simplification of adjective-noun agreement and the emergence of a generalized gender-neutral suffix for prenominal adjectives (that is, schwa). The disappearance of gender and case marking in the adjective means that the grammatical category of gender is lost in Adj + N phrases (without a determiner).

The role of prosody in morphological change: The case of Hebrew bound numerals

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irit Meir
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Grammaticality Judgments ◽  
Rapid Changes ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The One

AbstractThe morphological system of cardinal numerals in Modern Hebrew is currently undergoing rapid changes, enabling linguists to unravel the forces shaping the change as it takes place. In the free forms, gender marking on numerals is neutralized by collapsing both masculine and feminine forms into one paradigm, the feminine paradigm. In the bound (definite) forms, an opposite direction is attested, in that at least for some numerals, the masculine forms become more prevalent. The study reported here aims to determine whether the factor determining the change is prosodic or functional in nature, by eliciting production and grammaticality judgments of noun phrases containing bound numerals from five different age groups of native speakers. The results suggest that prosody plays a role in shaping the change, as forms with penultimate stress are favored over those with ultimate stress. In addition, processes of production and processes of grammaticality judgments seem to be subject to different kinds of constraints. This state of affairs indicates that the tension between the tendencies toward simplification on the one hand and maximal distinctness on the other occurs at the morphological level as well.

scholarly journals Gender Change in Norwegian Dialects: Comprehension is affected before Production

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (s1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Björn Lundquist ◽  
Yulia Rodina ◽  
Irina A. Sekerina ◽  
Marit Westergaard
Keyword(s):  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Language Variation And Change ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Indefinite Article ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Gender System ◽  
Gender Change

AbstractThis article investigates language variation and change in the grammatical gender system of Norwegian, where feminine gender agreement is in the process of disappearing in some Northern Norwegian dialects. Speakers of the Tromsø (N=46) and Sortland (N=54) dialects participated in a Visual Word experiment. The task examined whether they used indefinite articles (en, ei, et) predictively to identify nouns during spoken-word recognition, and whether they produced feminine articles in an elicited production task. Results show that all speakers used the neuter indefinite article et as a predictive cue, but no speakers used the feminine ei predictively, regardless of whether they produced it or not. The masculine article en was used predictively only by the speakers who did not produce feminine gender forms. We hypothesize that in dialects where the feminine gender is disappearing, this change in the gender system affects comprehension first, even before speakers stop producing the feminine indefinite article.

Variable stem-final fricative voicing in American English plurals: Different pa[ð ~ θ]s of change

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurel MacKenzie
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
First Language ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Plural Form ◽  
Potential Source ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Small Set ◽  
Audio Data ◽  
Fricative Voicing

AbstractThis paper investigates analogical leveling in a small set of English nouns that have irregular plural forms. In these nouns, all of which end in a voiceless fricative, the fricative standardly voices in the plural (e.g., wolf–wol[v]es, path–pa[ð]s, house–hou[z]es). Using audio data from three large spoken corpora of American English, I demonstrate that this stem-final fricative voicing is variable and conditioned by a number of factors, most notably the identity of the stem-final fricative—with /f/-final lexemes (e.g., wolf), /θ/-final lexemes (e.g., path), and the /s/-final lexeme house all patterning differently in apparent time—and the frequency of a lexeme in its plural form. I argue that the way these two factors affect the variation is reminiscent of the patterns seen in children's first language acquisition errors, providing a potential source for the variation and underscoring the importance of considering morphophonological factors when accounting for patterns of change.

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