Work

Sex, Syntax, and Semantics

Year: 2003

Type: book-chapter

Abstract: Many languages have a grammatical gender system whereby all nouns are assigned a gender (most commonly feminine, masculine, or neuter).Two studies examined whether (1) the assignment of genders to nouns is truly arbitrary (as has been claimed), and (2) whether the grammatical genders assigned to nouns have semantic consequences.In the first study, English speakers' intuitions about the genders of animals (but not artifacts) were found to correlate with the grammatical genders assigned to the names of these objects in Spanish and German.These findings suggest that the assignment of genders to nouns is not entirely arbitrary but may to some extent reflect the perceived masculine or feminine properties of the nouns' referents.Results of the second study suggested that people's ideas about the genders of objects are strongly influenced by the grammatical genders assigned to these objects in their native language.Spanish and German speakers' memory for object--name pairs (e.g., apple--Patricia) was better for pairs where the gender of the proper name was congruent with the grammatical gender of the object name (in their native language), than when the two genders were incongruent.This was true even though both groups performed the task in English.These results suggest that grammatical gender may not be as arbitrary or as purely grammatical as was previously thought.

Source: The MIT Press eBooks

Parent work: Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought

DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/4117.003.0010

Authors: Lera Boroditsky, Lauren A. Schmidt, Webb Phillips

Institutions: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University

Language: English

Topic: Categorization, perception, and language

Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Gender equality

Open Access status: green