Why do we have grammatical gender

This is typical of an animist vision of the world, of a time when rituals and beliefs were strongly attached to the natural elements. The distinction disappeared bit by bit, ceding place to masculine and feminine, just as monotheistic religions were replacing animistic beliefs. Whereas the feminine was strongly associated with notions of force and power in pagan times, monotheistic religions associated them with masculinity.

Arent J. Wensinck and Jean Markale are among the scholars who have put forth this idea, but it remains difficult to prove. Much more evident and retrospectively traceable is the gradual dominance of the male gender. In Greek and Latin, the Rule of Proximity decided grammatical accord. Basically, this says that the verb is governed by the element nearest to it, e. Got it? Never mind.

You'll get strange looks from people if you use the wrong gender because it's ungrammatical—just like if someone said in English "me have many furnitures in me home" for "I have many pieces of furniture in my home. See linguistics. Regarding the WALS article, the languages selected in that article are cherry-picked, and have no validity in inferring anything about statistical patterns for languages in general. Show 4 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer.

Can you please provide a reference for the idea that western European languages come pretty close to having "arbitrary" gender systems? I am not a linguist, but most sources I have encountered so far suggest that even in Western European languages, most nouns have a predictable gender.

I linked beneath this question to the World Atlas of Language Structures chapter on Systems of Gender Assignment ; it says "it has been shown that gender is always largely predictable. I think it comes down to a complete disagreement with Corbett. The referenced book only gives one central European language. Without providing rules for predicting, we can evaluate his claim. Mine is based on experience with French and Germanic.

Just do a search on something like "French gender rules. If you're a native speaker of German, you can identify the gender of nonsense words when told they've been borrowed recently. A lot of gender is redundant; almost everything in language is backed up somewhere else. Redundancy is a design feature of life.

And gender systems, especially elaborate ones like Bantu languages have, basically give one a hashing algorithm for all of life's entities; pretty good for pre-FORTRAN programming. Show 2 more comments. At least in Russian I think there is some correlation. This is masculine: while this is feminine: This is masculine: while this is feminine: This is masculine: while this is feminine:. Anixx Anixx 5, 1 1 gold badge 21 21 silver badges 32 32 bronze badges.

We assumed that performing the task of assigning male or female voices would activate the representation of objects and involve focusing on biological sex. According to the sex and gender hypothesis, grammatical gender effects should be present in case of animals. According to the similarity and gender hypothesis, there should be grammatical gender effects for animals and inanimate objects.

It was therefore expected that both for visual and verbal stimuli, grammatically masculine objects and animals would more often be given male voices, and vice versa — grammatically feminine objects and animals would be given female voices. In the post-experimental survey, none of the respondents declared basing their decisions on grammatical gender. Answers female vs. The consistency ratings could have any value between 0 always inconsistent with grammatical gender and 1 always consistent with gender.

These ratings were compared to random chance of 0. A strong consistency of voice with grammatical gender was present for all conditions. Another analysis was conducted to investigate differences in gender effects across treatments.

It was expected that masculine nouns would be given male voices more often than grammatically feminine nouns. Fractions of male voices assigned by participants to nouns in different treatments are presented in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Proportions of male voices assigned by grammatical gender and stimulus type. This experiment had two main goals. The first was to confirm the role of grammatical gender in conceptual representations in Polish and secondly, to check whether grammatical gender information transfers to non-verbal material.

Images of objects and words were more often assigned a voice consistent with their grammatical gender — male voices were assigned to grammatically masculine objects and female voices to feminine objects. The influence of grammatical gender on the assignment of voice occurred both for animate animals and inanimate nouns objects. Moreover, the effect was present and comparable for verbal and visual stimuli, and for each separate category.

The occurrence of such a strong effect for each category indicates the importance of gender information in conceptual representations. The effect was probably influenced by the nature of the experimental task, which consisted of assigning a female or male voice to individual objects, and thus explicitly referred to the category of biological sex, which could have cognitively activated gender information and facilitated access to it.

The fact that there were no significant differences in the results between words and pictures may be associated with the tendency to quietly verbalize the names of objects when recognizing them in the pictures.

As demonstrated by Cubelli et al. Assigning male and female voices to animals and inanimate objects according to the grammatical gender of their names shows that the grammatical gender effects in Polish may be present at the conceptual level, when gender is an explicit part of the decision task.

It is worth noting that while Experiments 1 and 2 were aimed at investigating implicit cognition under time pressure, they lacked ecological validity. In contrast, Experiment 3 uses a procedure which resembles a real-life decision of choosing what voice to give to an animated character in an upcoming movie.

The procedure was akin to eliciting preferences in a survey. Results of all three experiments are therefore more generalizable to other tasks. Grammatical gender is an important syntactic phenomenon which can affect the semantic level of processing and various cognitive processes. However, research on the scope and factors of this impact delivers inconsistent results. It is assumed see Sera et al. The purpose of our work was to investigate the extent of grammatical gender effects in Polish.

The specificity of the Polish language 5 grammatical genders which obscure the correspondence between genders of nouns and sex of their referents, but on the other hand, a large number of grammatical gender markers prompted us to test the similarity and gender hypothesis and the sex and gender hypothesis in this language. We were also interested in whether gender effects could appear both at the lexicosemantic level and at the conceptual level.

The presented research improves upon existing studies of grammatical gender effects in Polish and in general in the following ways: In Experiment 1, we investigated the influence of grammatical gender on categorization within triads of nouns, using not only animals and inanimate objects, but also abstract nouns as stimuli. Most of existing studies use either inanimate objects or animals, and not abstract ideas.

Neither inanimate objects nor abstract ideas generated the expected grammatical gender effect in our study, with the effect for abstract nouns reversed. Experiment 2 was conducted using a method based on the IAT Greenwald et al. The main merit of IAT is that it is based on implicit cognition. Since grammatical gender effects were present in Experiment 2, we can conclude that grammatical gender influences cognition in an implicit manner, and not just due to overt classification strategies.

We modified the experiment by including both visual stimuli images and verbal stimuli names of the relevant objects allowing a direct comparison between the stimuli types. Grammatical gender effects occurred for both animate impersonal nouns animals and inanimate nouns objects.

Moreover, the influence of grammatical gender turned out to be similar for verbal and visual stimuli. Our research adds to the existing data showing that the grammatical gender effects are influenced by interlingual differences in the grammatical structure of the gender system. Results seem to contradict the notion that the number of grammatical genders two vs. While research in German suggested that gender systems including more than two grammatical genders may not generate grammatical gender effects, these effects are present in Polish, a language with three singular and two more plural grammatical genders.

This in turn may suggest that the number of grammatical genders is of lesser importance than the linguistic context at a syntactic level, and the multitude of gender markers. The obtained results primarily support the similarity and gender hypothesis, which assumes that it is easier to assign similar meanings to words which have similar syntactic and morphological properties.

Polish is characterized by a large number of grammatical gender markers. It seems that both the sex and gender and the similarity and gender hypotheses can be used to explain grammatical gender effects in various tasks.

If the experimental design explicitly activates thinking in categories of biological sex e. This would explain the variability of results in our research and would mean that the sex and gender and similarity and gender hypotheses are complementary. Further research may focus on investigating the mechanisms and language aspects which cause interlingual differences in grammatical gender effects. Another interesting path for future research may use plural forms, which at least in Polish also have different grammatical genders.

An interesting issue for future research involves investigating whether grammatical gender effects change along the length of the experiments, i.

Unfortunately in the presented study, the data was automatically coded item-wise, not taking into account the changes in item order in various counterbalancing sets, hence making such post hoc analyses impossible. The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author.

This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the Jagiellonian University Institute of Applied Psychology ethics commitee, with written informed consent from all subjects. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol was approved by the Jagiellonian University Institute of Applied Psychology ethics commitee.

JM: idea and conceptualization, literature survey, preparation of the method, manuscript preparation and editing, and project leader. MP: conceptualization, literature survey, statistical analyses, manuscript preparation and editing, and corresponding author.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Boroditsky, L. Alterman and D. Google Scholar. Advances in the Study of Language and Thought , eds D.

Gentner, and S. Boutonnet, B. Unconscious effects of grammatical gender during object categorisation. Brain Res. Brugman, K. Clarke, M. Gender perception in Arabic and English. Cubelli, R. The effect of grammatical gender on object categorization.

Deutscher, G. New York, NY: Metropolitan. Fodor, I. The origin of grammatical gender. Lingua 8, 1— Greenwald, A. Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: the implicit association test. Does grammatical gender influence perception? A study of polish and french speakers. Jakobson, R. Konishi, T.

The semantics of grammatical gender: a cross-cultural study. Kousta, S. Investigating linguistic relativity through bilingualism: the case of grammatical gender.

Lucy, J. Montefinese, M. No grammatical gender effect on affective ratings: evidence from Italian and German languages. Prewitt-Freilino, J. The gendering of language: a comparison of gender equality in countries with gendered, neutral gender, and genderless languages. Sex Roles 66, — Zjednoczeni w mowie. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar. Ramos, S. What constrains grammatical gender effects on semantic judgements? Evidence from portuguese. Segel, E. Grammar in art. Sera, M.

When language affects cognition and when it does not: an analysis of grammatical gender and classification. Grammatical and conceptual forces in the attribution of gender by english and Spanish speakers.

Speed, L. Papafragou, D. Grodner, D. Mirman, and J. Vigliocco, G. Grammatical gender effects on cognition: implications for language learning and language use. History, not language is the key here: for the past hundred years the two great political, economic and military superpowers have both been English-speaking.

Had circumstances been different, French or Spanish or German or Chinese could just as easily been the global language indeed, French and Spanish were once in far more widespread use globally than English. Interesting article. Actually, I find quite odd a gender-neutral language like English, Turkish, Finnish, etc…because it is strange thinking about something without attributing a gender to it. I am Brazilian and every time I think about something I end up giving a gender to it.

The interesting thing is to figure it out how genders vary among languages. For instance, some things so delicate like flower and butterfly are feminine in both Spanish and Portuguese but flower is masculine in Italian and butterfly is masculine in German.

In English, despite being a nongendered language, I have seen in movies people referring to a boat as She. It just happens to me that it is feminine and if I were to say o mesa or o mesa branco it would just sound weird and not match my language. I think gendered languages are nonsensical and counterproductive to clear communication.

Time to get rid of it. I agree that gender should be eliminated because there is no reason for it. Wow grammatical gender is copping a lot of flak here.

If anything, we need to rid all languages of the subjunctive mood. Just kidding, I both love it and hate it for its seeming complexity and its utility. Also know a little Portuguese, but definitely far from fluent! It just is. It is pretty automatic to me now. If I make a mistake using a word for the first time, who cares? Or will you just change the definite article to one of the genders?

It would never catch on. In language learning there are just a lot of things you have to let go of needing an answer for why it is the way it is. Like stop being bitter about it, just be better lol. Words carry emotion, colour, light, shade, culture, texture, etc. Anyway TL;DR gendered nouns are one those features that many many languages have as part of their grammar so just get over it, no offence.

Another story for another day. Thank you for this. I hope that you will continue doing this type of content. I have been searching for the answer to this for a long time. This is another article that explains how gender is used, but does not explain why it is used. My best understanding is that languages are often controlled by elites. Elites have often made languages more complex than is needed for communication.

They have done that so that it is easy to distinguish the educated people from the others. English dropped gender during a period after the Norman invasion of , when the elites moved their focus to French. The ordinary people took their opportunity to drop gender. I think similar ideas have led to simpler conjugation of verbs.

And simple conjugation made phrasal verbs more effective. And those advantages built on themselves.