När en infödd talare av spanska med hög behärskningsnivå i svenska samtalar med en annan individ med liknande språkbakgrund är det inte sällan fraser som ”¿me pasarías la blåbärssylt?” (”kan du skicka blåbärssylten, tack?”) uppstår. Lexikaliskt inskott (eng. noun insertion), d.v.s. att skjuta in substantiv från andraspråket i för övrigt förstaspråksdominerat tal, är ett vanligt förekommande fenomen hos tvåspråkiga. Men vad händer när de två samspelande språken har asymmetriska genussystem som spanskans och svenskans? Vilket spanskt grammatiskt genus ska man då tillskriva de inskjutna svenska enheterna som ”blåbärssylt” i rubriken? Och vad är det som styr dessa val? Två hypoteser ställs upp för att försöka få svar på dessa frågor: genusvalet styrs i större utsträckning av det inskjutna substantivets ändelsemorfem, eller så styrs det i större utsträckning av dess översättningsmotsvarighet. För att testa dessa två hypoteser genomfördes ett experiment med 30 infödda spansktalare med svenska som andraspråk där de ombads attribuera ett spanskt grammatiskt genus, maskulinum eller femininum, till en del svenska substantiv i två olika uppgifter, en lucktext och en ordlista. Resultaten visade att både de olika stimuliordens ändelsemorfem och översättningsmotsvarighet spelade en signifikativ roll för val av grammatiskt genus, och att översättningsmotsvarighet hade en relativt större påverkan på genusvalet jämfört med ändelsemorfem. Detta kan eventuellt peka på att genus hos infödda spansktalare upplevs som en inherent egenskap hos själva referenten, med påtagliga konsekvenser för hur de ser på och tänker kring omvärlden.

(in English): This thesis focuses on describing the process of assigning grammatical gender to new words and loanwords in contemporary Spanish using corpus analysis. After introducing the area of study, the second chapter sums up the theoretical foundations of grammatical gender, its definition and function in language, and sets out basic rules for its assigning. The third chapter presents a summary of historical development of the perception of grammatical gender in Spanish, from its roots in Latin to main authors of the 20th century. The fourth chapter is dedicated to the transformation of Latin gender system into Spanish. The fifth chapter sums up basic information about neology, its processes and categorisation. These theoretical foundations are drawn upon in the sixth chapter, the corpus analysis, where the thesis presents the results of the research of a sample of neologisms drawn from Banco de Neologismos and analysed using the corpus Araneum Hispanicum Maius. The thesis focuses on the relationship between the grammatical gender used by speakers using neologisms, and the natural gender, the form of neologisms, the type of neology and the etymological gender of loanwords.

The diploma thesis is concerned with the effect of the grammatical gender of Czech nouns referring to inanimate entities on their semantic meaning and conceptualization. The thesis looks into the question whether masculines are conceptulized as "men" and feminines as "women". The thesis is divided into two main parts. In the first part, theoretical insight into the question of relation between language and thought is provided. In this part, foreign experiments related to our research question are mentioned as well. In the second part, two experiments accomplished in the Czech language are presented. The objective of experiment nr. 1 was to choose such semantic differential scales which according to Czech speakers distinguish the "female and male principle" the best. In experiment nr. 2, feminine and masculine gender variants of nouns were employed (e. g. "brambor - brambora"). Experiment nr. 2 contained two tasks. The first task used the semantic differential method. In the second task, participants were asked to choose a woman's or a man's voice that the inanimate entities would have in a cartoon movie. The results of the first task indicate that the grammatical gender of nouns did not affect the decision-making as individual nouns were marked on the semantic differential scales. However, there...

This study investigates, theoretically and empirically, the role of animacy in the development of gender systems. The theoretical background is a grammaticalisation approach to language change. Concerning gender, this presupposes that classifications begin as semantic distinctions in the realm of animacy with flexible, contextually based agreement between the gender-marking elements. This kind of gender is called contextual gender. In the course of time, these classifications will spread into other areas, they become desemanticized and the agreement relation grammaticalizes into one of government where the inherent gender of the head noun controls the gender of the agreeing elements, irrespective of contextual factors When this leads to a great number of violations of the principles of contextual agreement in the realm of animacy, a new cycle of semantic classification will begin, creating layers of classifications. For German and Swedish two different layers are discerned respectively. The empirical starting point of this project was the observation of two opposite developments in the area of female person reference in Germany and Sweden. As a consequence of feminist critique of language, mainly targeted at the use of socalled masculine generics, in Germany the use of female gender-specific nouns increased substantially, the major means being female derivation with –in, so-called motion. Although similar means for female derivation exist in Swedish, i.e. -inna and -ska, the number of derivations used is decreasing. In order to isolate socio-cultural and historical facts from language-internal mechanisms behind the diverging tendencies, a historical sketch of the development of equal rights, of language criticism and of the development of the female suffixes is drawn for the respective countries. It is obvious, that the German strategy to achieve gender-fair language use is established by making women visible by means of motion, while in Sweden the use of gender-neutral forms for a long period of time has been regarded as a sign of equality. This ‘neutral’ use of former masculine and male-specific forms has been made possible by the merging of the two nominal genders masculine and feminine into uter (Sw. utrum). A contrastive study of comparable German and Swedish newspaper texts shows that the lack of motion in Swedish is partly compensated by composition and attribution with gender-specific lexemes. Still, the 64% gender-specific noun phrases in Swedish cannot compare with the 95% in German. But the use of gender-specific forms for well over half of the person references calls into doubt the general opinion shared by most Swedes that Swedish has a gender-neutral person reference system. Linguistic asymmetry persists as long as gender-specification is restricted to one half of the gendered population, whatever the means for specification. The almost exclusive use of gender-specific forms in German is seen as indicative of a grammaticalisation process. Haspelmaths invisible hand explanation of grammaticalisation is used to show how the development of -in in German fulfils just about every requirement on a grammaticalisation process – language-external as well as -internal – while -inna and -ska neither are promoted sufficiently by the speech community nor does there exist a paradigm that could accommodate them. In contrast to Swedish, where the suffixes remain strictly derivational, it is demonstrated that -in is turning into an inflectional marker. The German gender sub-system for person reference is developing into a semantically based system with genderflexible person denominations. A study of the pronouns agreeing with non-personal-agents in a parallel corpus of EU-documents shows that other aspects than purely referential or formal ones impinge on the choice of agreement forms. Non-personal-agents in certain contexts expose both agency and intentionality, which turns them into suitable agreement partners for animate pronouns. In Swedish, all animate pronouns are sexed, leaving a “Leerstelle” for these inanimate but agentive and intentional referents. In German, this problem is covered by the polysemy of the personal pronouns. Non-personal-agents are shown to be one possiblesource for the spreading of a linguistic innovation from the realm of animacy into inanimate contexts via semantic and thematic roles that share important features with animates proper. The last study makes use of different types of German monolingual corpora in order to investigate the agreement between inanimate nouns with female inherent gender – from non-personal-agents and abstracts to concrete nouns – and agent nouns which can potentially expose agreement by female derivation. Although the results are rather heterogeneous, they allow the formulation of the hypothesis that agreement is more likely to occur with nouns for which a metaphorical bridge to stereotypical conceptions of femininity can be constructed and that key collocations with high frequency such as die Kirche als Trägerin or die DNA als Trägerin der Erbinformation contribute significantly to the spread of the agreement pattern.

In the mountainous area of the Greater Hindukush in northern Pakistan, north-western Afghanistan and Kashmir, some fifty languages from six different genera are spoken. The languages are at the same time innovative and archaic, and are of great interest for areal-typological research. This study investigates grammatical gender in a 12-language sample in the area from an areal-typological perspective. The results show some intriguing features, including unexpected loss of gender, languages that have developed a gender system based on the semantic category of animacy, and languages where this animacy distinction is present parallel to the inherited gender system based on a masculine/feminine distinction found in many Indo-Aryan languages. / I den här studien undersöks grammatiskt genus i ett antal språk som talas i ett bergsområde beläget i norra Pakistan, nordvästra Afghanistan och Kashmir. I området, här kallat Greater Hindukush, talas omkring 50 olika språk från sex olika språkfamiljer. Det stora antalet språk tillsammans med den otillgängliga terrängen har gjort att språken är arkaiska i vissa hänseenden och innovativa i andra, vilket gör det till ett intressant område för arealtypologisk forskning. Resultaten av den här undersökningen visar att en del språk i urvalet helt har tappat sitt grammatiska genus trots att det anses vara ett relativt stabilt språkdrag. Några språk har utvecklat ett nytt grammatiskt genus baserat på en animacitetsdistinktion, antingen som det enda kvarvarande systemet, eller parallellt med ett nedärvt indoariskt genussystem baserat på biologiskt kön. / Language contact and relatedness in the Hindukush region (421-2014-631)

The present study investigates the gender systems of 20 languages in the New Guinea region, an often overlooked area in typological research. The languages were classified with five criteria used by Di Garbo (2014) to classify gender systems of African languages. The results showed that the gender systems were diverse, although around half of the languages have two-gendered sex-based systems with semantic assignment, more than four gender-indexing targets, and no gender marking on nouns. The gender systems of New Guinea are remarkably representative of the world, although formal assignment is much less common. However, the gender systems of New Guinea and Africa are very different. The most significant difference isthe prevalence of non-sex-based gender systems and gender marking on nouns in Africa, whereas the opposite is true in New Guinea. However, gender in Africa is also less diverse largely due to the numerous Bantu languages. Finally, four typologically rare characteristics were found in the sample: (1) size and shape as important criteria of gender assignment, with large/long being masculine and small/short feminine, (2) the presence of two separate nominal classification systems, (3) no gender distinctions in pronouns, and (4) verbs as the most common indexing target. / Denna studie undersöker genussystemen hos 20 språk i Nya Guinea-regionen, vilken ofta förbises i typologisk forskning. Språken klassificerades utifrån fem kriterier som användes av Di Garbo (2014) för att klassificera genussystem i Afrika. Resultaten visade att genussystemen var varierade, men ungefär hälften av språken har könsbaserade genussystem med tvaå genus, semantisk genustilldelning, fler än fyra genusindex och ingen genusmarkering på substantiv. Genussystemen är anmärkningsvärt representativa för världen, men formell genustilldelning är mycket mindre vanlig. Jämfört med genussystemen i Afrika är dock Nya Guinea väldigt annorlunda. Den viktigaste skillnaden är den större utbredningen av icke-könsbaserade genussystem och genusmarkering på substantiv i Afrika, medan motsatsen gäller i Nya Guinea. Genus i Afrika är dock till stor del mindre varierat på grund av de talrika bantuspråken. Slutligen hittades fyra typologiskt sällsynta karaktärsdrag i urvalet: (1) storlek och form som viktiga kriterier för genustilldelning, där stort/långt är maskulint och litet/kort feminint, (2) närvaron av två separata nominalklassificeringssystem, (3) inga genusdistinktioner i pronomen och (4) verb som det vanligaste genusindexet.

[pt] Esta tese diz respeito à identificação do sistema de gênero, focalizando a atribuição de um valor particular ao traço de gênero de nomes [- animado] por crianças. A hipótese de trabalho assumida é de que o valor do traço de gênero do Nome é identificado a partir da concordância no DP, com base em informação morfo-fonológica nos elementos da Categoria D. A perspectiva teórica adotada visa a conciliar um tratamento psicolingüístico para a aquisição da linguagem com uma teoria lingüística. O tipo de operação de concordância que viabilizaria a transferência do valor do gênero de D para N é considerado e 4 experimentos são relatados, nos quais são avaliadas a sensibilidade de crianças aos itens da Categoria D e sua habilidade de processar concordância de gênero. Os resultados são compatíveis com a hipótese e sugerem acesso precoce à categoria funcional D. / [en] This thesis is concerned with the identification of the gender system by focusing on the ascription of a particular value to the gender feature of [-animate] nouns by children. The working hypothesis assumed here is that the value of the gender feature of the Noun is identified due to DP agreement on the basis of morpho-phonological information provided by the elements of the D Category. The theoretical approach adopted here aims at reconciling a procedural account to language acquisition with a theory of language. The sort of agreement operation that would allow gender value transferring from D to N is considered and 4 experiments are reported, which aimed at evaluating children`s sensibility to the elements of the D category and their ability to process gender agreement. The results provide support to the hypothesis and suggest early access to the functional category D.

Language and culture are deeply intertwined. Language reflects and influences the attitudes, perceptions and behaviors of its users. Therefore, the use of non-sexist language can contribute to achieving gender equality in society. This study focuses on the perceptions of a group of Mexican teenagers towards inclusive language. In particular, their acceptance degree towards various gender morphemes are studied and compared to the generic use of the masculine gender. The results of the survey show a clear preference for the alternatives that are easy to pronounce, so called, normative gender morphemes, including the generic use of the masculine compared to new, non-normative gender morphemes that are inclusive but difficult to pronounce. Women prefer the splitting strategy (“desdoblamiento”) to a larger degree than men do. Men have a more conservative posture and prefer the generic use of the masculine and reject non-normative gender morphemes. The differences among informants of different socioeconomic levels are smaller. Still, it seems that informants of a higher socioeconomic level have a more conservative attitude towards inclusive language than informants of a lower socioeconomic level.

This work deals with possible interferences in gender conceptualization of inanimate objects in bilingual speakers of Hungarian and Slovakian language. It closely pursues the grammatical category of gender (which is present in one of the examined languages, in Slovakian, and absent in the other one - Hungarian). The aim of the performed experiment, in which two groups of speakers participated (one was the previously mentioned group of bilingual speakers of Hungarian and Slovakian, and the second one was a control group of Hungarian monolingual speakers) was to verify if the presence of grammatical gender in one of the two languages, spoken by the bilingual group of speakers, will affect their conceptualization of gender of the inanimate referents. Another aspiration was to find out if bilingual speakers, as well as the monolingual speakers of Hungarian had accordant responses to some of the inanimate objects, and also if there was a congruence in the responses between the two participating groups of speakers. A secondary aim of this experiment was to examine a phenomenon, which appeared in the previous conducted research (Červenková, 2017), which was the effort of the respondents to make the first phoneme of their response identical with the first phoneme of the name of particular object in...

This thesis investigates the correlation between the grammatical gender of generic nouns denoting animals and the perceived biological sex of their referents. Based upon an approach by Imai et al. (2014), a reaction task experiment was conducted in which participants had to make inferences about the biological sex of specific animals. Four languages with differing grammatical gender systems were tested: Spanish, French, German and English. The experiment was conducted with native speakers in their respective languages. The results showed that Spanish, French and German speakers were influenced by grammatical gender when completing the task, while results in the English test group remained unaffected by this factor. In the Spanish and French sample there were several test conditions where gender effects were significant, whereas for the German sample significant effects could only be found in one test condition. Furthermore, in the French and German test groups, significant gender effects were found only when the target words were accompanied by gender-marked definite articles. For Spanish, effects were significant even when the stimuli were presented in the plural form without articles. These results imply that structural features, such as gender marking articles and the transparency of the Spanish gender system, seem to facilitate the projection of sex-specific properties onto grammatical gender. This study can be taken as weak support for linguistic relativity.