Quantifying the Semantic Core of Gender Systems
This addresses a foundational question in linguistics about the arbitrariness of language systems, providing empirical evidence that could influence theories of language evolution and cognitive science.
The paper tackled the problem of whether grammatical gender assignments for inanimate nouns are arbitrary by conducting a large-scale investigation across languages, finding that 18 languages show a significant correlation between grammatical gender and lexical semantics.
Many of the world's languages employ grammatical gender on the lexeme. For example, in Spanish, the word for 'house' (casa) is feminine, whereas the word for 'paper' (papel) is masculine. To a speaker of a genderless language, this assignment seems to exist with neither rhyme nor reason. But is the assignment of inanimate nouns to grammatical genders truly arbitrary? We present the first large-scale investigation of the arbitrariness of noun-gender assignments. To that end, we use canonical correlation analysis to correlate the grammatical gender of inanimate nouns with an externally grounded definition of their lexical semantics. We find that 18 languages exhibit a significant correlation between grammatical gender and lexical semantics.