Eve A. Ross and Dr. Cynthia L. Hallen, Linguistics
Gender in language is currently a hot topic in linguistics and related fields. One somewhat neglected branch of this subject is grammatical gender. Grammatical gender refers to the gender of a word that does not correspond to the gender of the real world object the word represents. Grammatical gender does not exist in English, but it does exist in all of the Romance languages. For example, the French word for “month” is masculine, even though months themselves are not masculine.
Traditional grammar has rules of grammatical gender because it is difficult for students learning a second language to memorize individually the gender of every word they learn. Therefore, teachers and textbook writers often try to classify words according to gender. They usually base their classifications on the last letter or last few letters of each word. But the gender rules of traditional grammar are extremely complex and are riddled with exceptions. For that reason, I believe that the last few letters of a word cannot be the only factor in the assignment of grammatical gender.
In my research, I have developed a theory of grammatical gender assignment that accounts not only for the gender of words that follow the rules of traditional grammar, but also accounts for the gender of words that are exceptions to those rules. The theory includes four factors, which combine to accurately explain the assignment of grammatical gender in Romance languages. Those four factors are similarity of form (which includes the word endings used by traditional grammar), similarity of meaning, contiguity of form, and contiguity of meaning. In general, if two words have similarity of form or contiguity of form, they will share the same grammatical gender. On the other hand, if two words have similarity of meaning or contiguity of meaning, they will differ in their grammatical gender.
I applied the concepts of similarity and contiguity of form and meaning to selected words from seven Romance languages: Latin, Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. Using dictionaries, I chose nouns in each of the languages from five semantic fields: 1) days of the week; 2) months of the year; 3) seasons of the year; 4) fruits and fruit trees; and 5) rooms in a house. Such groupings were necessary because words in any given semantic field have readily apparent relationships of similarity and contiguity of form and meaning, whereas randomly chosen words are unlikely to have such relationships.
The majority of the words I studied fell neatly into the pattern of my hypothesis; words that were related in form had the same gender, and words that were related in meaning had different gender. Nonetheless, there were still exceptions to the pattern. For instance, the months of the year fit the pattern in that they were overwhelmingly similar in form, and they all had the same gender. (The names of the months of the year were all masculine in all of the languages I studied.) However, each month is contiguous in meaning to the month that precedes it and the month that follows it in the year. Relationships of meaning, according to the hypothesis, generally coincide with different gender. But the months are all masculine; their gender is the same.
The explanation for this anomaly, and for all of the exceptions in my data set, lies in the fact that two opposing tendencies are at work. When words are related in form and in meaning, their gender should be the same according to the relationship of form, and it should be different according to the relationship of meaning.
This conflict can be resolved by a “majority rule” approach. In the example of the months of the year, the contiguity of meaning relationship only exists between the month in question and two other months (the preceding month and the following month). However, the similarity of form relationship exists between the given month and every month whose name ends in the same letters (as many as six other months) plus the Latin name for the given month. Because the name for each month is affected by more relationships of form than relationships of meaning, the relationships of form take precedence. Relationships of form occur in the presence of similar grammatical gender, and the months of the year are similar in gender.
This research has many ramifications for scholarship in linguistics. One of the most interesting implications is in regard to the distinction between form and meaning. Many linguists have wondered whether the form of a word can really be separated from its meaning. If, as my research suggests, form truly tends toward sameness while meaning creates difference, form and meaning must then be distinguishable and independent of each other.
Preliminary findings were presented at the Deseret Language and Linguistics Society Conference in February 1997 at Brigham Young University and were published in the proceedings of that conference. The completed research was presented in an honors thesis submitted to the BYU Honors Department in July 1997. A revised version of the thesis has been submitted for publication in Lingua, an international linguistics journal.