The Causal Influence of Grammatical Gender on Distributional Semantics
This addresses a fundamental question in linguistics and cognitive science about the causal role of grammatical gender in shaping meaning, with implications for theories of language and cognition, though it is incremental in refining existing debates.
The paper tackled the problem of determining whether grammatical gender influences adjective choice in language, by developing a causal graphical model to analyze interactions between noun gender, meaning, and adjectives. The result showed that when controlling for noun meaning, the relationship between grammatical gender and adjective choice becomes near zero and insignificant, contradicting the neo-Whorfian hypothesis.
How much meaning influences gender assignment across languages is an active area of research in linguistics and cognitive science. We can view current approaches as aiming to determine where gender assignment falls on a spectrum, from being fully arbitrarily determined to being largely semantically determined. For the latter case, there is a formulation of the neo-Whorfian hypothesis, which claims that even inanimate noun gender influences how people conceive of and talk about objects (using the choice of adjective used to modify inanimate nouns as a proxy for meaning). We offer a novel, causal graphical model that jointly represents the interactions between a noun's grammatical gender, its meaning, and adjective choice. In accordance with past results, we find a significant relationship between the gender of nouns and the adjectives that modify them. However, when we control for the meaning of the noun, the relationship between grammatical gender and adjective choice is near zero and insignificant.