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This paper presents a cross-dialectal study of grammatical gender in Norwegian nominal phrases. Specifically, we investigate the decline of the feminine gender in three age groups across seven different dialects. The dialects vary in their morphological richness of gender marking: some dialects traditionally have more distinctive marking of the feminine gender. With an elicited production experiment, we investigate gender marking on the indefinite determiner and the definite suffix. We find that feminine gender is in decline in all dialects, but there are clear differences between the locations and between age groups. The feminine indefinite determiner ei is replaced by the masculine en at different rates and to a different degree in the various dialects. We furthermore find that the feminine definite suffix -a is retained in all locations except for Stavanger. We argue that the decline of the feminine gender can be explained by an interplay between the morphological richness of the given dialect and dialect contact. The former helps to retain the feminine as a separate category, while the latter accelerates the loss of the feminine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammatical gender languages mark gender on every noun and agreement target such as adjectives and pronouns. While the norm for personal nouns provides that the term’s grammatical gender corresponds to its referent’s gender, in certain circumstances, a discrepancy arises between the term and its referent’s gender. Taking Italian as a case study, I identify four such circumstances: reference to non-binary people, women and non-binary professionals in traditionally male-dominated fields, generic or unknown individuals and mixed-gender groups. Among these, I distinguish between usage discrepancies, which depend on how speakers (mis)use language, and structural discrepancies, which depend on structural features of the language. The latter is the case for reference to non-binary people as Italian lacks a grammatical gender corresponding to non-binary gender identities. I focus on this case and argue that it conveys a problematic representation of gender, giving rise to a specific instance of hermeneutical injustice: structural discrepancies depend on a gap in collective interpretative resources (namely, the lack of an appropriate grammatical gender) and put non-binary people at an unfair disadvantage in making sense of their social experiences. As I show, the effects of structural discrepancies possess all the hallmarks of hermeneutical injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of GENDER: Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft is the property of Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Gender inequalities are linguistically constructed and indexed through the strategic use of language representing the power structure in the physical world. Recently, #MeTooIndia, an Indian version of the global feminist movement, provided a scholarly opportunity to explore the gender stereotypes of emotional expressions. Even though some researchers have studied the sociocultural dimensions of #MeToo, the corpus-based linguistic analysis of this movement has yet to be explored significantly. Therefore, the current study investigated the discursive association of emotional representation of masculine and feminine genders in media texts. Given the societal nature of Indian patriarchal ideologies, power and gender stereotypes, we hypothesize that Indian mass media, as a powerful political actor, may attribute more positive lexicons to the masculine pronoun he and more negative markers to the feminine pronoun she. Textual genres of #MeToo were extracted from the print media by using the corpus framework of collocational and concordance methods. Our results revealed that, though the news of #MeToo heightened the feminine actor and largely produced the pronoun she in the referential position, the narratives of texts assigned more positive emotive markers to the masculine social actors. Overall, this study concludes that #MeToo as a gender movement has faced strategic linguistic resistance against feminine sexual victims, favouring the masculine actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammatical gender in New Guinea is an often neglected area in typological research, even though it is extremely diverse. For example, in New Guinea, some languages have grammatical gender systems with two sex-based categories, more than four gender-indexing targets, and no gender marking on nouns, while some languages have grammatical gender systems with much more categories, which are only marginally sex-based. This paper infers the processes of development and change of grammatical gender in Torricelli languages from two perspectives. First, it synthesizes the available data in the existing literature and hypothesizes the evolutionary pathway of gender systems in Torricelli languages. Nineteen Torricelli languages are selected as a representative coverage of the 55 Torricelli languages listed in Glottolog within the limits of the available documentation. These languages are then coded based on 6 presence-absence features relating to gender marking on verbs, adjectives, nouns, numerals, pronouns, and demonstratives. Second, it conducts an analysis with phylogenetic comparative methods to provide a quantitative assessment of the evolutionary possibilities for gender systems in Torricelli languages. The preliminary results show that gender is likely marked at the root of Torricelli languages, with pronouns and verbs being at the core of the system. This is in agreement with trends reflecting the evolution of gender systems in languages across the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The masculine form in German is used to refer to male people specifically and to people of any gender generically. While behavioural research has demonstrated that this dual function leads to male-biased responses, the neural underpinnings of this bias are still underexplored. In the present EEG study, we investigated how the presentation of generically intended masculine role nouns (vs. role nouns in the feminine–masculine and masculine–feminine pair form) affected the neural processing of references to men and women. Referring to women after generic masculine role nouns induced difficulties during perceptual processing in the P200 range and, crucially, also during high-level reference resolution, as indicated by an enhanced P600 amplitude over posterior sites. In contrast, no significant processing conflicts were observed after the pair form. These findings illuminate the neural consequences of grammatical gender and support the notion that the generic masculine does not represent different genders equally well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined grammatical gender processing in school-aged children with varying levels of cumulative English exposure. Children participated in a visual world paradigm with a four-picture display where they heard a gendered article followed by a target noun and were in the context where all images were the same gender (same gender), where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender than the target noun (different gender), and where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender, but there was a mismatch in the gendered article and target noun pair. We investigated 51 children (aged 5;0– 10;0) who were exposed to Spanish since infancy but varied in their amount of cumulative English exposure. In addition to the visual word paradigm, all children completed an article–noun naming task, a grammaticality judgment task, and standardized vocabulary tests. Parents reported on their child’s cumulative English language exposure and current English language use. To investigate the time course of lexical facilitation effects, looks to the target were analyzed with a cluster-based permutation test. The results revealed that all children used gender in a facilitatory way (during the noun region), and comprehension was significantly inhibited when the article–noun pairing was ungrammatical rather than grammatical. Compared to children with less cumulative English exposure, children with more cumulative English exposure looked at the target noun significantly less often overall, and compared to younger children, older children looked at the target noun significantly more often overall. Additionally, children with lower cumulative English exposure looked at target nouns more in the different-gender condition than the same-gender condition for masculine items more than feminine items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the nuanced realm of case syncretism, focusing primarily on its synchronic presence in Modern Greek (dialectal variety) and on the diachronic emergence of the phenomenon, classifying the distribution of syncretic cells in the nominal inflectional system of the language. This analysis shows that syncretism has been extended over time to many nouns, no longer limited either to neuter nouns or to the cells for the Nominative and Accusative. I suggest that the distribution of syncretic cells in Greek is influenced primarily by grammatical gender, but it is also affected by the productivity of each inflectional class, which I attribute to the morphomic (in terms of Aronoff [1994]. Morphology by itself: Stems and inflectional classes, vol. 22. MIT Press.) nature of the phenomenon. I propose a decisive new factor preventing a cell from participating in syncretic patterns: inter-paradigmatic similarity of affixes appears to block syncretism. Further, I examine the factors facilitating the development and expansion of syncretic patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A varied perspective on gender as a morphological category is investigated in this study across languages in which markers reveal how it shapes the structure of language usage as well as sociocultural perceptions. It emphasizes its significant role in differing morphological systems and their implications for linguistic theory using gender agreement, inflectional patterns and cognitive processing of gendered forms. Gender markers are also examined in the study from a socio-cultural standpoint paying attention to how they mirror or determine social attitudes about gender roles. To achieve a thorough understanding of the relationship between gender and morphology in linguistics, there will be a comparative analysis of languages with diverse gender systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Many recent studies on grammatical gender and linguistic relativity overlook the neuter, simplifying the issue to a binary gender system. This study critically and systematically reviews research from the past decade, following the PRISMA protocol. The findings reveal a significant downward trend in the number of studies conducted over the past four years and a bias toward German and English. Additionally, languages with threegender systems are often inaccurately represented by excluding the neuter, limiting generalizability. These implications affect both research on linguistic relativity and genderrelated disciplines. The lack of attention to neuter gender and the recent reduction in the number of studies raise concerns about the comprehensiveness of current research approaches and highlight the need for more inclusive and refined methodologies moving forward.

The language contact between Basque and Spanish in the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) gives rise to the production of specific linguistic features such as non-standard gender agreement (N-SGA). N-SGA in BAC Spanish has been traditionally attributed to elder Basque native speakers without much access to education, but this affirmation is not based on any empirical study. In addition, although several scholars have explored N-SGA in other language contact situations, there is no agreement on the linguistic factors that favor this production. Taking this knowledge gap as the point of departure, the present study explores 73 individual sociolinguistic interviews by a diverse population from the BAC in order to delimit (i) the community that produces N-SGA and (ii) the linguistic factors that condition it. Results follow Basterretxea Santiso’s (2022, “A triangulation study on gender agreement in Spanish by native Basque speakers.” Revista Española de Lingüística (RSEL) 52(1): 7–37) suggestion that N-SGA in BAC Spanish is present across generations: it is a well-established feature present in BAC Spanish as a result of language contact. Results also support the existence of a local gender agreement system that depends on the gender of the controller, inflectional form, number, distance, and whether the target is a clitic or adjective.

The general tendencies regarding the gender of nouns are dealt with in the paper with the specific aim of building a contrastive microtypology of German, Italian and English. In particular, up to six different types and functions of gender will be distinguished and will be tested against the background of empirical data drawn from the three languages. Interesting phenomena of convergence and divergence at all levels of the respective linguistic systems pop out from the contrastive analysis, starting from the phonological level up to the pragmatic and cognitive dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In German, there is a wide array of figurative designations for persons. They show various degrees of lexical complexity (simple nouns such as Sau, compounds such as Drecksau, collocations such as dreckige Sau) and different semantic domains of origin (mainly designation for animals -- Sau -- and inanimate objects -- Flasche --, but also human beings -- Strohmann --). They can refer specifically to females (Ziege, Besen), males (Windhund, Memme) or both (Kamel, Sau). Reference does not always coincide with grammatical gender. A complex interplay emerges between desemantization and resemantization processes: in the former, terms with a specific male or female reference develop unspecific reference for human beings including both sexes; in the latter, terms with originally unspecific reference come to refer to a single sex. In both processes a crucial role is played by lexical complexity, semantic (in)transparency and grammatical gender of the expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to examine, in the case of Arabic, the neutralization of gender for realities that are not necessarily gender-neutral from a grammatical point of view. It will show that some so-called "masculine" forms are in fact gender-neutral, functionally rendering the grammatical "masculine" a «neutral by default». This reminds us that there is no one-to-one relationship between grammatical gender on the one hand and gender identity on the other. To do this, several examples are taken which illustrate gender-neutralized uses, as well as particular forms of neutralization where the original masculine has been amputated of its masculine marker. Such forms suggest the existence of intrinsically neutral forms. The article shows through the example of demonstratives of distance (ḏālika ,...) and deictics "there" (hunāka) and "over there" (hunālika), all of which are formed by the addition of the kāf al-ḫiṭāb and originally had a flexion (ḏāliki, hunākumā, hunālikum, etc.), that what we see at work is the fixation of the original kāf al-ḫiṭāb as -ka. This fixation is not an erasure of the feminine and the non-singular in favour of the only masculine singular, but the result of a neutralized use, by resorting to the least marked form of the system, in order to avoid gender and number flexion according to the now «neutered» addressee of speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study describes gender assignment in Datooga nouns. The article shows that gender is linguistically expressed in Datooga nouns. Noun gender in Datooga is a non-agreeing one depicted as both overt and covert. The overt gender is morphologically represented using u/ud(v)- (feminine gender) and gi/ gid(v)- (masculine gender) prefixes. The covert gender is realised from the semantics of a given referent. The parameter size (sometimes understood in terms of consequences) of a referent, affective values associated with a referent and association with a male or female cultural sphere of life guide the semantics of noun gender assignment. Further, mythological association overrode the semantics of noun gender assignment in Datooga. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great Czech-Russian Dictionary is a digitized form of a great lexicographical work created within the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences from the 1970s up to the early 1990s. It contains a huge amount of unique vocabulary reflecting also the political and social situation at the time of its origin. Due to its considerable extension, it was not possible to revise and to update it. Containing almost 129,000 entries it is one of the largest bilingual dictionaries in the Czech lexicographical history. Technical possibilities of the electronic form (automatic links, filtering by defined parameters etc.) can be used for extracting narrowly defined groups of vocabulary (i.e. terminology) or grammatical categories (i.e. grammatical gender of nouns etc.). It was published gradually and now it is completly available, also in a mobile version. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with an important aspect of the integration of loan nouns into the grammatical systems of languages attesting to grammatical gender, namely gender assignment. Traditionally, it is assumed that gender assignment takes place according to the internal assignment rules of the replica language. In many cases, however, the original grammatical gender is borrowed along with the source word. This is the case of gender copy which often takes place under special (sociolinguistic) conditions and is used as assignment strategy in languages to a different extent. A special focus of my study is on gender assignment and particularly gender copy in the contact of languages of different assignment types (formal vs. semantic). The empirical data comes from five European languages in different sociolinguistic situations, attesting to different assignment systems and of different language branches of two language families – Indo-European (Romanian, Slavic, and Indo-Arian) and Nakh-Daghestanian (Lezgic and Tsezic). The analysis shows that gender copy is possible mostly in the contact of languages of the same assignment type. In the contact of languages of the formal assignment type, gender copy often goes along with the formal adjustment of the loan word. Sociolinguistic circumstances play an important role as to the possibility and frequency of the occurrence of gender copy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender inflection for animated nouns in Italian presents challenges influenced by societal pressures and linguistic structure, especially in morphologically complex words like compounds. The study investigates gender inflection distribution in compounds with capo- compared to other nouns (i.e., occupations traditionally performed by women, by men, and the word capo in isolation), exploring the interplay of social, etymological and morphological factors. 192 native Italian speakers inflected masculine nouns to feminine forms after hearing the stimulus. Results reveal that respondents’ attitudes towards gender-fair language significantly determine the use of feminine, indicating a complex interplay between linguistic structures and social perceptions. Despite historical resistance, the word capa in isolation shows increasing acceptance, challenging entrenched norms. In compounds, capo- element’s gender inflection appears more resistant due to morphological complexity, with an interaction with number. This study advances our understanding of gender inflection, with implications for broader conversations about gender representation and language inclusivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In German, symmetrical treatment of women and men through gender-fair language is well established and the use of feminine forms is evaluated positively. In the present study (N = 331), we examined the mechanisms behind this positive evaluation. Female job applicants were evaluated as more linguistically competent and as more competent in general, which translated into more favorable hiring decisions when using a feminine (vs. a masculine) job title. These results illuminate positive effects of successful language reform for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The grammatical gender of a noun can be sensitive to a number of different factors, including the noun's lexical semantics, nominalizing morphology, or arbitrary requirements imposed by particular roots (e.g. Corbett 1991, Kramer 2020), though the limits on possible factors are not currently understood, with some work proposing that a noun's gender can even be valued 'at a distance' via agreement with other nominals. The current study explores the understudied phenomenon of gender-possession interactions (Evans 1994), investigating whether being possessed, or being possessable, can have an impact on which gender a noun is assigned. Evidence is provided from four unrelated languages supporting the existence of such interactions. Strikingly, however, these interactions are restricted to inalienable possession; no such interactions have been identified for alienable possession. I propose that this falls out from a general gender locality hypothesis (GLH), which restricts the domain of gender assignment within a phrase nP. The GLH captures the gender asymmetry between 'local', inalienable possessors introduced within nP and 'nonlocal', alienable possessors introduced outside of nP, for example, in a phrase PossP (Alexiadou 2003, Myler 2016). The GLH also makes further predictions for other features with respect to what may or may not factor into gender assignment, severely restricting or outright prohibiting gender-assignment effects from number, definiteness, and case. Broadly, the work expands our understanding of which types of elements can be relevant to gender assignment and sheds light on underexplored gender-, possession-, and agreement-related phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a passage from Tacitus' Annales 11.11.3, which discusses a rumor that Nero was guarded by snakes in his bedroom. The author argues that the phrase "unam omnino anguem" should not be interpreted literally, but rather as a mocking reference to Nero's mother, Agrippina. The feminine gender of the word "anguis" is seen as significant, suggesting that a treacherous woman is being referred to. The author supports this interpretation by referencing accounts from Suetonius and Dio Cassius. [Extracted from the article]

Translation studies in the 1960s have evolved due to the concept of culture turn which embodies gender translation problems. Gender is a culture-specific problem because languages have different peculiarities of natural gender, grammatical gender, and dual gender, which need a semantic cultural approach. This paper is a comparative qualitative study on translators' manipulation of gender in translation. Being a product-oriented study, it examines and compares existing translations of the novels, "I am Malala" and "Things Fall Apart" from English into Malay, French and Spanish to construct a translation modelling. The source texts (STs) and target texts (TTs) are wholly read; data related to natural gender, grammatical gender, and dual gender are identified, collected, and analyzed. The analysis is done following Leech's (1974/1981) theory on meaning. The research reveals that natural gender is translated literally from English into Malay, French, and Spanish; grammatical gender is also translated literally from English into French and Spanish, whereas in Malay a generalization is used for grammatical gender owing to the Malay language peculiarities. The research reveals also that there are meaning losses and malpresentation of women in dual gender nouns translation in French and Spanish due to biased orthodox patriarchal manipulation preference, which makes the masculine represent the feminine in dual gender nouns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the effect of task demands on the predictive processing of morphosyntactic cues (word class, noun/adjective gender, case, and number) in reading among Heritage Speakers of Russian (N = 29), comparing them with Russian language learners (N = 29) and monolingual Russian speakers (N = 63). Following the utility account of bilingual prediction, we hypothesized that the predictive use of morphosyntactic cues would be more evident in a less-demanding reading cloze task (Experiment 1) than in a more-challenging eye-tracking reading task (Experiment 2), and for cues that RHSs regard as more reliable (word class and number vs. gender and case cues). The results confirmed our predictions: In Experiment 1, Heritage Speakers (and L2 learners) used all cues predictively to generate the upcoming lexical item, with higher accuracy for word class and number cues compared to gender and case cues. In Experiment 2, in contrast to monolingual readers, neither Heritage Speakers nor L2 learners used gender cues on adjectives to anticipate the gender of the upcoming noun. The results are discussed in respect to the interplay between task demands, cue weight, oral fluency, and Russian literacy experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that declension classes are not primitives (see Aronoff 1994; Alexiadou 2004; Kramer 2015; i.a.), but are decomposed into simpler features, one of which is gender (Harris 1991; Wiese 2004; Caha 2019). The argument is based on semantic gender agreement in Russian, where a grammatically masculine noun can trigger feminine agreement if its referent is female (Mučnik 1971; Pesetsky 2013). Semantic agreement is grammatical only in those forms where a regular nominal exponent is syncretic with an exponent of a declension class that includes feminine nouns. In other forms, conflicting masculine and feminine gender features lead to ineffability in morphology (cf. Schütze 2003; Asarina 2011; Coon and Keine 2020). Ineffability arises because the Subset Principle (Halle 1997) that holds between features of a vocabulary item and a terminal at the point of Vocabulary Insertion is violated later in the derivation. This is in turn possible if Vocabulary Insertion applying cyclically bottom-up (Bobaljik 2000) is interleaved with Lowering that alters structure below a triggering node (Embick and Noyer 2001). Finally, I show that Russian also has a number of cases where conflicting gender features in a noun phrase do not result in a realization failure (Iomdin 1980). The difference between these patterns is derived in a principled way and follows from the positions where conflicting features are introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: The primary goal of this study was to investigate the knowledge of Russian gender in young heritage speakers through different agreement constructions. Design/methodology/approach: Participants were 30 Russian–Spanish–Catalan multilinguals from Spain aged 7–11 years, divided into two proficiency groups, and a baseline group of 24 age-matched Russian monolinguals residing in Russia. All participants completed four experiments using an oral elicited production task addressing different linguistic conditions. Data and analysis: The accuracy scores were compared between the two proficiency groups and between the heritage and monolingual speakers to document any changes as a function of the type of agreement construction, gender value, noun form transparency, and crosslinguistic congruency. Findings/conclusions: The results demonstrated a hierarchy of gender values; masculine being the easiest gender value, neuter the most difficult, and feminine in between the two. The crosslinguistic influence was yelled under vulnerable conditions: when (1) the proficiency in heritage language is low, (2) in opaque and (or) incongruent nouns, and (3) in agreement construction which is absent in Spanish and Catalan. The results also suggest that the heritage language from the high-proficiency group can attain monolingual-like gender agreement knowledge. Originality: We documented gender agreement production in trilingual speakers, which is an under-explored topic. The study employs a new method of analysing gender in several constructions, including adjectival and verbal agreement at Noun Phrase and sentence levels. Significance/implications: The study provides insights into heritage language development during the early years of exposure to the two majority languages. The results may offer a greater understanding of the characteristics of heritage language/L2 development in trilingual children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the extensive research on bilingual development, our understanding of how lexical competition unfolds in the bilingual mind remains limited. Previous studies have predominantly focused on crosslinguistic competition, neglecting the examination of the competition process within each language and the influence of diverse bilingual experiences, such as first language attriters, heritage speakers, or sequential bilinguals. Consequently, there is a critical gap in our knowledge regarding how bilinguals navigate and resolve competition dynamics during spoken word recognition in the context of language attrition. We compare the within-L1 and within-L2 competition mechanisms of Spanish-English attriters (N = 65) with two monolingual control groups (Spanish and English speakers). Participants completed two visual world tasks with manipulation of onset/rhyme overlap. Results indicate a contrast between the competition mechanisms exhibited by the L1 monolingual group and the Spanish attriters during L1 spoken word recognition. Our findings highlight the role of bilingual experiences in modulating L1 competition dynamics, shedding light on the complex relationship between bilingualism and lexical competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Making adults learn from larger linguistic units can facilitate learning article–noun agreement. Here we ask whether initial exposure to larger units improves learning by increasing the predictive associations between the article and noun. Using an artificial language learning paradigm, we taught 106 Hebrew‐speaking participants novel article–noun associations with either segmented input first or unsegmented input first, and tested their learning of the article–noun association and their ability to use articles to predict nouns. Our results showed that participants exposed to unsegmented input first were more likely to treat the article–noun unit as one word and were more accurate at learning the correct article–noun associations. However, participants in the unsegmented‐first condition did not show increased gaze to the target compared to those in the segmented‐first condition. We discuss how these findings inform our understanding of the challenges that adults face when learning a second language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study focuses on the challenges faced by Pushto speakers who desire to learn Urdu or seek a career in mastering a language. It suggests possible tactics for reducing the level of difficulty in learning grammatical gender through chunking technique by using experimentation method that helps the Pashto speakers in labelling grammatical gender to inanimate objects in Urdu language while focusing on adjective-noun pairs. The research quantitatively collects data from an experimental group of Pashto speakers living in Charsadda-Khyber Pakhtunkhwa through pre-tests and post-tests. The sample size of the study includes eight students of grade 8th of Indus Private School Charsadda, who were selected through purposive sampling. The participants were provided with teaching sessions of 60 minutes' duration for ten days. However, the teaching sessions were conducted online through Zoom Cloud Meeting application due to COVID19 epidemic situation in the country. The learners were taught by providing the list of masculine and feminine adjective-nouns and the use of prepositions, verbs and possessive pronouns in inanimate objects by exposing the gender. The findings clearly show improvement in the average score of student's pre-tests and post-tests. As a result, the chunking strategy is recommended for learners who use Urdu as their second language, particularly when the grammatical gender of their first language varies. The study recommends the practice of connecting adjectives with nouns by using the chunking technique as a pedagogical tactic to teach Urdu language to Pashto speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines online processing and offline judgments of subject-verb person agreement with a focus on how this is impacted by markedness in heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian. To this end, 54 adult HSs living in Germany and 40 homeland Italian speakers completed a self-paced reading task (SPRT) and a grammaticality judgment task (GJT). Markedness was manipulated by probing agreement with both first-person (marked) and third-person (unmarked) subjects. Agreement was manipulated by crossing first-person marked subjects with third-person unmarked verbs and vice versa. Crucially, person violations with 1st person subjects (e.g., io *suona la chitarra “I plays-3rd-person the guitar”) yielded significantly shorter RTs in the SPRT and higher accuracy in the GJT than the opposite error type (e.g., il giornalista *esco spesso “the journalist go-1st-person out often”). This effect is consistent with the claim that when the first element in the dependency is marked (first person), the parser generates stronger predictions regarding upcoming agreeing elements. These results nicely align with work from the same populations investigating the impact of morphological markedness on grammatical gender agreement, suggesting that markedness impacts agreement similarly in two distinct grammatical domains and that sensitivity to markedness is more prevalent for HSs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like all modern Romance languages, French has a sex-based grammatical gender with two genders, feminine and masculine, and a lexicon that is highly sex-differentiated. These characteristics give rise to a number of issues, including the problematic generic use of the masculine grammatical gender, coupled with the challenge of sex categorization itself, and the epistemological difficulty of an adequate sociological description and analysis of what gender commonsense categories really are about. To remedy these concerns, several authors have proposed the creation of an additional, epicene grammatical gender. We have identified three such systematic proposals, or solutions, which specify various morphological options for new epicene nouns and gender markers on their satellite elements. These options include the use of non-standard or rarely used characters, the merging of feminine and masculine gender markers, as well as consonantal and vowel changes. In the simplest proposal, referred to as "solution I," new epicene forms are mostly derived from feminine forms by systematically replacing with an i the final e that generally differentiates feminines from their masculine counterparts in written French. Although these solutions are used in some communities, their learnability has not been addressed so far, even though it could be a determining factor in their popularity and their eventual integration into standard French. In the present study, we provide a first assessment of this aspect by means of an online translation test. For each solution, French-speaking participants were instructed that they would be trained to learn an "alien" language that does not mark sex/gender categories (these alien languages correspond to standard French where only gendered words referring to people are replaced by the new epicene forms recommended by each solution). After a short learning-by-example phase, participants were required to translate into the alien language a set of 16 standard French sentences. The translations were analyzed as a function of several variables including the participants' self-reported age and sex, the word categories and the solutions themselves. While all solutions proved quickly learnable, participants' responses with solution I achieved the highest accuracy score, in particular with regard to the production of non-standard epicene forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a review of the book "Gender: Two Novellas in Verse" by Anne Harding Woodworth. The book consists of two novellas that explore the concepts of femininity, masculinity, and the limits of categorization. The first novella, "Martin/Martina," tells the story of a person who was thought to be born female but later dressed as male and joined a monastery. The second novella, "Aftermath," is set in a post-apocalyptic world and follows three groups of survivors. The review highlights the use of language and symbolism in the novellas and recommends reading them multiple times to fully appreciate their nuances. [Extracted from the article]

Within Western culture, gender is frequently interpreted in terms of binarism (male versus female), derived from biological sex at birth. Nevertheless, there is an accelerating percentage of non-binary and transgender people, who are not related to binary nomenclature, and they also need to resort to legal documentation and their renderings into other languages. This fact becomes a troublesome issue that must be nowadays solved, especially when translating into Spanish, a grammatical gender language, from English, a non-grammatical gender language. In this paper we will first select a corpus of eight British legal documents representing highly demanded translation briefs. We will then search for 15 problematic lexical items, searching for their lexicographic definitions and translations, and we will later resort to their most feasible translations into the Spanish language, considering both gendered translations and genderless ones. Our research shows how the Spanish language has its own translation techniques, especially paraphrasing, to be able to provide the English-Spanish target readership with binary legal terms, and especially with non-binary ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The environmental crisis is one of global society's most extreme grand challenges. One of the supply‐side factors that can help cope with it is corporate environmental innovation. Based on the upper echelon and value belief theory and with significant empirical analyses, our results strongly support that the presence of women on the board positively impacts innovation aimed at environmental sustainability. The results are based on a sample of 19,800 firm‐year observations of 2966 unique firms in 54 industry groups domiciled in 52 countries for the 2003–2019 period. The global distribution of the firms means that the sample is diverse enough to examine our main hypotheses. In addition, we show that culturally masculine societies, as captured by their grammatical gender marking, have a negative impact on such innovation. The masculine culture also moderates the impact of gender board diversity on innovation for environmental sustainability. Our results are robust to a battery of empirical tests and definitions, including instrumental variable approach and propensity score matching causality tests. We further explored firms' attitudes toward innovation for environmental sustainability by adding a qualitative case study research design to our quantitative analysis. That was based on semi‐structured interviews with board members and executives. The case studies provided additional support to the results in the quantitative analysis part. This study's empirical results have various broad theoretical and practical implications for board composition, taking into account the linguistic environment of the firm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is learning the gender of nouns so difficult for some bilinguals? We test the hypothesis that different language learning backgrounds or life experience with Spanish determine how learners follow different morphosyntactic cues for gender assignment in Spanish by testing learners with early and late language experience in an experiment with invented nouns. A total of 44 monolingually raised native speakers, 44 heritage speakers, and 44 L2 learners of Spanish were trained to learn 24 nonce words in Spanish presented in four input conditions that manipulated the number and type of cues to gender marking (determiner, word marker, adjective). After the learning sessions, the participants completed a word naming task, an elicited production task, and a debriefing questionnaire. The L2 learners were different than native speakers and heritage speakers in learning nonce nouns. They used morphosyntactic cues differently, relying on adjectives as their most-used strategy to assign gender, unlike native speakers and heritage speakers who used all cues. Our findings confirm processing differences between L2 learners and heritage speakers and suggest language learning background determines how learners discover reliable morphosyntactic cues to the gender of nouns in the input. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a psycholinguistic study of the processing of grammatical gender agreement morphemes in Polish, which has three gender categories (masculine, feminine, neuter), as well as what language-internal factors impact this processing. Results from an eye-tracking study using the Visual World Paradigm show that, during real-time language comprehension, adult monolingual speakers of Polish use cues from gender agreement on a prenominal adjective to anticipate the upcoming noun. An exploration of language-internal factors affecting this anticipatory processing finds this effect in all three genders, suggesting that encountering the relevant nominative-case agreement morpheme during language comprehension leads to automatic activation of a gender node in the mental lexicon, consistent with the literature on other languages with grammatical gender. These results hold true for the neuter agreement morpheme, despite the fact that this morpheme also instantiates default gender agreement in the language and is syncretic with the nominative plural agreement morpheme in all three genders. Further investigation finds that, while agreement morphemes for each gender prompt anticipatory processing, the reliability of a masculine agreement morpheme as a cue to gender is reduced in the presence of a neuter distractor, and vice versa. This raises questions regarding phonological proximity between the realized suffix and the suffix that would cue the distractor, with implications for the acquisition and processing of gender agreement morphology in Polish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined grammatical gender processing in school-aged children with varying levels of cumulative English exposure. Children participated in a visual world paradigm with a four-picture display where they heard a gendered article followed by a target noun and were in the context where all images were the same gender (same gender), where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender than the target noun (different gender), and where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender, but there was a mismatch in the gendered article and target noun pair. We investigated 51 children (aged 5;0–10;0) who were exposed to Spanish since infancy but varied in their amount of cumulative English exposure. In addition to the visual word paradigm, all children completed an article–noun naming task, a grammaticality judgment task, and standardized vocabulary tests. Parents reported on their child’s cumulative English language exposure and current English language use. To investigate the time course of lexical facilitation effects, looks to the target were analyzed with a cluster-based permutation test. The results revealed that all children used gender in a facilitatory way (during the noun region), and comprehension was significantly inhibited when the article–noun pairing was ungrammatical rather than grammatical. Compared to children with less cumulative English exposure, children with more cumulative English exposure looked at the target noun significantly less often overall, and compared to younger children, older children looked at the target noun significantly more often overall. Additionally, children with lower cumulative English exposure looked at target nouns more in the different-gender condition than the same-gender condition for masculine items more than feminine items.

Languages can express grammatical gender through different ortho-phonological regularities present in nouns (e.g., the cues “-o” and “-a” for the masculine and the feminine respectively in Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish). The term “gender transparency” was coined to describe these regularities (Bates et al., 1995). In gendered languages, we can hence distinguish between transparent nouns, i.e., those displaying form regularities; opaque nouns, i.e., those with ambiguous endings; and irregular nouns, i.e., those that display the typical form regularities but are associated with the opposite gender. Following a descriptive analysis of such regularities, languages have been recently classified according to their degree of gender transparency, which seems relevant in regard to gender acquisition and processing. Yet, there are certain inconsistencies in determining which languages are overall transparent and which are opaque. In particular, it is not clear whether some other complex regularities such as derivational suffixes are also “transparent” cues for gender, what really constitutes an “opaque” noun, or which role orthography and morphology have in transparency. Given the existing inconsistencies in classifying languages as transparent or opaque, this work introduces a proposal to assess gender transparency systematically. Our methodology adapts the standardized factors proposed by Audring (2019) to analyse the relative complexity of gender systems. Such factors are adapted to gender transparency on the basis of the literature on gender acquisition and processing. To support the feasibility of such a proposal, the concepts have been instantiated in a quantitative model to obtain for the first time an objective measure of gender transparency using European Portuguese and Dutch as instances of target languages. Our results coincide with the theoretically expected outcome: European Portuguese obtains a high value of gender transparency while Dutch obtains a moderately low one. Future adaptations of this model to the gender systems of other languages could allow the continuum of gender transparency to sustain robust predictions in studies on gender processing and acquisition.

This study examined differences in the Seven Network's primetime coverage of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games on all of its channels. Over 102 hr of total coverage was analyzed for clock time, name mentions, and the descriptions of athletes by announcers divided by gender. Results found that male athletes received the bulk of the clock time; 13 of the top 20 most-mentioned athletes were men. There were also gender differences in the word for word descriptors of success, failure, physicality, and personality. From a theoretical perspective, results found the framing of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games to favor male Olympians. The top three sports that were broadcast featuring women were ice hockey, freestyle skiing, and snowboarding, which differs from other studies in this line of scholarship, so differences in the sports covered in the Australian context provides a unique context to study the Winter Olympics. Theoretical and practical implications are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses the acquisition of second language (L2) Spanish grammatical gender by native speakers of two typologically different languages: English (n = 39) and Russian (n = 37). We aim to explore if the presence or absence of gender features in the first language (L1) influences the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender. Participants completed an acceptability judgment task consisting of 40 sentences with grammatical and ungrammatical Spanish Determiner Phrases (DPs). They included masculine and feminine Ns (Nouns) with transparent or opaque endings. Our findings show that (1) both groups are sensitive to gender non-matching structures, although L1 Russian speakers gave the lowest scores to ungrammatical structures in Spanish; (2) higher rating scores to masculine matching DPs point to the use of masculine as default by both L2 groups; (3) Ns with transparent endings act as cues for L2 Spanish learners, since both groups of participants rated the non-matching DPs with transparent Ns more accurately than those with opaque Ns. Therefore, our findings suggest that gender in L2 Spanish can be acquired regardless of the presence or the absence of these grammatical property in the L1, although its presence in the L1 seems to accelerate this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic gender norms are presented for 24,037 Dutch words. Eighty participants rated 6017 words each on a five-point Likert scale ranging from feminine to masculine. Each word was rated by ten male and ten female participants. The collected norms show high reliability and correlate well with similar norms in English. We show that semantic gender is distinct from other lexical dimensions such as valence, arousal, dominance, concreteness, and age of acquisition. Semantic gender is not the same as the grammatical gender of words, either. The collected norms can be predicted accurately using a semantic space based on word association data. A dimension explaining a good amount of variance is present in this space, indicating that semantic gender is an important component of the human meaning system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Revista de Lengua para Fines Específicos is the property of Revista de Lengua para Fines Especificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, I explore the properties and the uses of the past participles in the Arbëresh variety of S. Nicola dell'Alto, an Albanian dialect still spoken in Southern Italy, which has been in contact with Italo-Romance varieties for more than five centuries. The data are discussed in comparison to standard Albanian and the contact language, Italian. In Albanian grammar, there is only one type of participle: the past participle. It has both verbal and adjectival properties. As a verbal form, the participle is used in compound and in periphrastic tenses, in combination with both the auxiliaries KAM 'have' and JAM 'be'. It can also be used in combination with other particles to create non-finite verbal forms such as gerund or infinitive or to build up temporal expressions. Finally, it can also be used after some modal impersonal verbs. Verbal participles never show agreement. Albanian participles can also be adjectival. All the adjectives derived by a participial verb take a linking article and always agree with the noun they modify in gender, number, Case and definiteness. The formal distinction of the verbal participles from adjectival participles seems to correlate with the aspectual properties of the construction: a verbal participle appears in eventive structures, whereas an adjectival participle occurs in stative structures. But, as we shall see, this is not always the case. Arbëresh participles have maintained the same morphological and syntactical properties of Albanian. They can be used both in stative and in eventive contexts, but in Arbëresh eventive passives, which are built up as in Italian rather than as in Albanian, the adjectival participles are always inflected. Agreement is obligatory in all the contexts where it is in Italian. This is a clear contact-induced change. The data presented in this paper show that Arbëresh, on the one hand, preserves features of Albanian grammar, whereas, on the other hand, it has undergone changes under the influence of the surrounding Italo-Romance varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Lalies is the property of Editions Rue d'Ulm and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article discusses the topic of grammatical gender in bi/multilingual language acquisition research. It presents an exoskeletal approach to understanding grammatical gender, which involves the syntactic combination of a gender head with a phrase. The article explores the nature of gender features and the relationship between these features and the root of a noun. It also discusses the cross-linguistic variation in gender features and their interpretability on nouns and pronouns. The article concludes by suggesting that the ease or difficulty of acquiring grammatical gender in different languages can be predicted based on the complexity of their gender systems. [Extracted from the article]

This article, titled "Feature-exponence mapping in language contact," discusses the relevance of models of grammar that distinguish between underlying syntactic features and their morpho-phonological representation in analyzing bilingual and multilingual data. The paper argues that feature reassembly, a framework developed in the 90s for studying second language acquisition, is unnecessary when using these models. The article also explores the relationship between complexity and embeddedness in feature bundles and the importance of scrutinizing the feature-exponence mapping using multilingual data. It concludes by discussing the implications of different morphological theories on the relationship between exponents and features. The article provides valuable insights into the study of language contact and its effects on grammar. [Extracted from the article]

The use of words to portray gender and therefore apportion benefits or disadvantages is true in both verbal and written communication. This is even truer in legislative drafting, as the use of gendered language may depict a more serious problem of sexism, discrimination and paternalism in the society. Using the doctrinal approach, this paper examined gendered language in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 relating to the qualification and appointment of judicial officers, to analyse the effect of such gendered language on the interpretation of the constitution and the likelihood of the female gender suffering disadvantage thereby. The paper found that the gendered language used in the 1999 constitution of Nigeria in the qualification and appointment of judicial officers, is gender insensitive, ambiguous and capable of excluding the female gender from consideration for appointment to such offices. It also found that the gendered language in the relevant constitutional provisions exhibit masculinity and does not promote the required gender equality in a legal draft. The paper recommended amendment to reconstruct the language of the constitution to achieve gender neutrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]