Gender, meaning and arbitrariness

Evidence from Norwegian (and Swedish)

Authors

• Hans-Olav Enger Universitetet i Oslo

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.61197/fjl.146830

Keywords:

gender, arbitrariness, agreement, animacy, homonyms, Norwegian, Swedish

Abstract

Despite some claims in the literature, even NP-internal agreement can be meaningful in Norwegian and Swedish, and the arbitrariness of lexical gender (also known as ‘formal gender’ or ‘syntactic gender’) in these two languages has been overstated. This shows up also in homonyms of different genders, which pattern in a way linked to animacy. Furthermore, not all pronominal gender agreement in these languages is meaningful, either. Although there are differences between pronominal gender agreement and other kinds of agreement, this is a difference in degree, not in kind, so we should not draw a sharp distinction between pronominal gender agreement and other kinds of gender agreement. The paper also contributes to the long-standing discussion on the redundancy and usefulness of gender: gender is not as outlandish and different from other grammatical categories (such as tense and number) as it may seem, since no grammatical category correlates directly with conceptual distinctions.

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