Abstract
Although most present-day scholars claim that grammatical gender has no meaning correlates, anecdotal evidence dating back to the Greeks suggests that grammatical gender carries connotative meanings of femininity and masculinity. In the present study native German speakers (tested in Germany) and native Spanish speakers (tested in Mexico) judged 54 high-frequency translation equivalents on semantic differential scales chosen to reflect dimensions of evaluation, potency, and activity. Half the words were of feminine gender in German but of masculine gender in Spanish (Type I words), and half were of masculine gender in German and of feminine gender in Spanish (Type II words). As predicted, German speakers judged Type II words higher in potency than Type I words, whereas Spanish speakers judged Type I words higher in potency than Type II words. The conclusion was that grammatical gender does affect meaning.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
References
Bakan, D. (1966).The diversity of human existence. Chicago: Rand McNally.
Bergman, P. M. (1968).The concise dictionary of 26 languages. New York: Bergman Publishers.
Bock, J. K. (1982). Toward a cognitive psychology of syntax: Information processing contributions to sentence formulation.Psychological Review, 89(1), 1–47.
Clark, E. V. (1985). The acquisition of Romance, with special reference to French. In D. I. Slobin (Ed.),The cross-linguistic study of language acquisition: Vol. 1. The data, (pp. 687–782). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Clarke, M. A., Losoff, A., McCracken, M. D., & Still, J. A. (1981). Gender perception in Arabic and English.Language Learning, 31(1), 159–169.
Dixon, R. M. W. (1982).Where have all the adjectives gone? and other essays in syntax and semantics (pp. 159–183). Berlin: Mouton.
Erades, P. A. (1956). Contributions to modern English syntax.Moderna Sprak, 15, 2–11.
Ervin, S. M. (1962). The connotations of gender.WORD, 18(3), 249–261.
Fodor, I. (1959). The origin of grammatical gender.Lingua, 8, 1–41, 186–214.
Gill, W. S., & Hogan, C. A. (1970). The effect of language upon gender shaping.International Journal of Symbology, 2(1), 9–12.
Guiora, A. Z., & Sagi, A. (1978). A cross-cultural study of symbolic meaning—developmental aspects.Language Learning, 28(2), 381–386.
Hamilton, M. C. (1985). Linguistic relativity and sex bias in language: Effects of the masculine “generic” on the imagery of the writer and the perceptual discrimination of the reader.Dissertation Abstracts International, 46, 1381B. (University Micro-films No. 8513117).
Heise, D. R. (1971).Evaluation, potency, and activity scores for 1551 words: A merging of three published lists. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Henley, N. M. (1989). Molehill or mountain? What we know and don't know about sex bias in language. In M. Crawford & M. Gentry (Eds.),Gender and thought: Psychological perspectives (pp. 57–78). New York: Springer-Verlag.
Hofstäter, P. R. (1963). Über sprachliche Bestimmungsleistungen: Das Problem des grammatikalischen Geschlects von Sonne und Mond.Zeitschrift für experimentelle und angewandte Psychologie, 10, 91–108.
Hoijer, H. (1954). The Spair-Whorf hypothesis. In H. Hoijer (Ed.),Language in culture: Conference on the inter-relations of language and other aspects of culture (pp. 92–105). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Ibrahim, M. H. (1973).Grammatical gender: Its origin and development. The Hague: Mouton.
Jakobson, R. (1966). On linguistic aspects of translation. In R. A. Brower (Ed.),On translation (pp. 232–239). New York: Oxford University Press.
Jespersen, O. (1965).The philosophy of grammar. London: George Allen & Unwin. (Originally published 1924)
Konishi, T. (1991). Language and thought: A cross-cultural study on the connotations of gender (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991).Dissertation Abstracts International, 52/03B, 1756.
Konishi, T. (in press). The connotations of gender: A semantic differential study of German and Spanish.WORD.
Köpcke, K.-M., & Zubin, D. A. (1984). Sechs Principien für die Genuszuweisung im Deutschen: Ein Beitrag zur natürlichen Klassifikation.Linguistische Berichte, 93, 26–51.
Ludwig, D., & Moore, M. (1968). Language and gender shaping.International Journal of Symbology, 1, 25–27.
Lyons, J. (1968).Introduction to theoretical linguistics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
MacKay, D. G. (1980). Language, thought, and social attitudes. In H. Giles, W. P. Robinson, & P. M. Smith (Eds.),Language: Social psychological perspectives (pp. 89–96). Oxford, England: Pergamon Press.
MacKay, D. G. (1986). Protypicality among metaphors: On the relative frequency of personification and spatial metaphors in literature written for children versus adults.Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 1(2), 87–107.
MacKay, D. G., & Fulkerson, D. C. (1979). On the comprehension and production of pronouns.Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 661–673.
MacKay, D. G., & Konishi, T. (1980). Personification and the pronoun problem.Women's Studies International Quarterly, 3, 149–163.
MacKay, D. G., & Konishi, T. (in press a). The selection of pronouns in spoken language production: An illusion of reference. In F. Burwick & W. Pape (Eds.),Appearances.
MacKay, D. G., & Konishi, T. (in press b). Contraconscious internal theory influences lexical choice during sentence completion.Cognition and Consciousness.
Malkiel, Y. (1954). Lexical polarization in Romance.Language, 27(4), 485–518.
Malkiel, Y. (1957). Diachronic hypercharacterization in Romance.Archivum Linguisticum, 9(2), 79–113.
Malkiel, Y. (1958). Diachronic hypercharacterization in Romance.Archivum Linguisticum, 10(1), 1–36.
Martyna, W. (1978). What does “he” mean? Use of the generic masculine.Journal of Communication, 28(1), 131–138.
Martyna, W. (1980). Beyond the “he/man” approach: The case for nonsexist language.Signs, 5, 482–493.
Mills, A. E. (1986).The acquisition of gender: A study of English and German. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Osgood, C. E., May, W. H., & Miron, M. S. (1975).Cross-cultural universals of affective meaning. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Osgood, C. E., Suci, G. J., & Tannenbaum, P. H. (1975).The measurement of meaning. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. (Originally published 1957)
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1972).A grammar of contemporary English. New York: Seminar Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1962).Thought and language. (E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Zubin, D. A., & Köpcke, K.-M. (1981). Gender: A less than arbitrary grammatical category.Chicago Linguistic Society, 17, 439–449.
Zubin, D. A., & Köpcke, K.-M. (1984). Affect classification in the German gender system.Lingua, 63, 41–96.
Zubin, D. A., & Köpcke, K.-M. (1986). Gender and folk taxonomy: The indexical relation between grammatical and lexical categorization. In C. Craig (Ed.),Noun classes and categorization (pp. 139–180). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
The research reported is based on a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the Ph.D. in psychology at UCLA. I am grateful to Ingrid Hudabiunigg for collecting the German data and to Olga Bustos-Romero for collecting the Spanish data. My sincere thanks to my dissertation committee, Donald MacKay, Nancy Henley, Roger Andersen, Raimo Anttila, Patricia Greenfield, and William McCarthy for their advice and assistance. Donald MacKay and Nancy Henley also provided helpful comments on the present manuscript.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Konishi, T. The semantics of grammatical gender: A cross-cultural study. J Psycholinguist Res 22, 519–534 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01068252
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01068252
Keywords
- Cognitive Psychology
- Anecdotal Evidence
- Spanish Speaker
- German Speaker
- Grammatical Gender