On the Relationships Between the Grammatical Genders of Inanimate Nouns and Their Co-Occurring Adjectives and Verbs
This addresses a linguistic problem for researchers in NLP and cognitive science, but it is incremental as it confirms existing hypotheses with broader data.
The study investigated whether grammatical genders of inanimate nouns relate to the adjectives and verbs they co-occur with in six languages, finding statistically significant relationships in all cases.
We use large-scale corpora in six different gendered languages, along with tools from NLP and information theory, to test whether there is a relationship between the grammatical genders of inanimate nouns and the adjectives used to describe those nouns. For all six languages, we find that there is a statistically significant relationship. We also find that there are statistically significant relationships between the grammatical genders of inanimate nouns and the verbs that take those nouns as direct objects, as indirect objects, and as subjects. We defer a deeper investigation of these relationships for future work.