The grammatical and conceptual gender of animals in second language users

Abstract

The issue of interest here is the relationship between the morphosyntactic feature of grammatical gender and the masculinity and femininity of nouns’ referents. In GG languages, besides the semantic core of nouns that refer to male and female beings, all other nouns (the semantic residue) are also assigned a gender, which is semantically arbitrary. Referents of feminine nouns include not only female referents (e.g. Italian moglie, ‘wife’, and gallina, ‘hen’), but also male referents (guardia, ‘guard’), asexual referents (finestra, ‘window’), and referents of either sex (aquila, ‘eagle’, used for both male and female eagles), as well as referents with feminine connotations (e.g., gonna, ‘skirt’), and referents with masculine connotations (e.g., cravatta, ‘tie’). The same applies to the masculine gender. The semantic arbitrariness of most assignment rules in GG languages is evident from crosslinguistic comparisons: Although it is possible to identify some semantic rules for assignment

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