Culture or cognition?

Abstract

Gender languages assign nouns to a category, such as masculine, feminine, neuter or common. Gender assignment is complicated and difficult to learn, as languages do not have specific rules for assigning a noun to one or the other gender. This study looks at gender assignment from the perspective of semantics and lexical semantic evolution, exemplified on the Indo-European family. Gender assignment has a semantic core, in which animate nouns are more likely to be masculine, inanimate nouns feminine and neuter, nature nouns masculine, and culture nouns feminine or neuter. To investigate how these patterns emerge, we study the evolutionary dynamics of these semantic properties on a gender-coded lexical data set for Indo-European. We find that masculine is a stable gender that remains in its semantic category and does not change. Feminine is also a stable category which may get lost or transfer to masculine. Neuter and common are unstable categories, which continuously alter or get lost in gender assignment. In sum, our result shows that the semantic core of gender — affected both by cognitive and cultural factors — remains stable and does not vacillate in evolution.