Grammatical Categories and Cognition across Five Languages

329 Pages·2015·6.23 MB·English

by  Roland Landor

Grammatical Categories and
Cognition across Five Languages:
The Case of Grammatical Gender and
its Potential Effects on the
Conceptualisation of Objects

Roland Viktor Landor
BLAL (Hons.)

School of Languages and Linguistics
Arts, Education & Law Group
Griffith University

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

October 2013
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ABSTRACT
The aim of this study was to investigate the potential relationship between
grammatical categories and cognition by examining whether grammatical
gender affects the conceptualisation of objects. Though several studies have
set out to investigate the potential relationship between grammatical gender
and cognition, the results to date seem inconclusive and somewhat
contradictory. It seems of particular interest to undertake further studies in
the area, and one of the aims of this project is to establish the groundwork for
targeted research into the key issues surrounding the potential relationship
between grammatical gender and the gender-related conceptualisation of
objects. In order to address the research question guiding this investigation, a
three-phase experiment was designed to uncover and represent any potential
differences and/or similarities in the ways in which the speakers of five
different languages, with differing grammatical gender systems,
conceptualise objects. The five selected languages represent three language
families: Indo-European (Germanic and Romance), Uralic-Altaic (Finno-
Ugric) and Afro-Asiatic (Semitic). These languages provide the most
comprehensive coverage to date of a gender loading scale that classifies
languages according to the extent to which they oblige their speakers to be
mindful of gender. Comparison of the possible effects of a grammatical
category, such as grammatical gender, in these five languages was expected
to unveil how linguistic categories may interact with cognition.
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The formal analysis of the data was based on a random effects logistic
regression generalised linear mixed model. The goal of this model was to
assess the propensity of the stimuli to generate adjectives that elicit responses
systematically favouring a conceptualisation suggestive of an association with
a particular gender. This study found no evidence of a positive correlation
between grammatical gender and the conceptualisation of objects. In fact, the
results suggest that grammatical gender may have a ‘clouding’ effect on
gender-related conceptualisation, which appears to suppress the confidence
with which participants ascribe gendered characteristics to objects.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
During the years that it took to complete this thesis, a great number of people
have accompanied and supported me and they all deserve my heartfelt
gratitude. My deepest thanks go to my two incredible supervisors: Dr Andrea
Schalley and Dr Susana Eisenchlas, both from the School of Languages and
Linguistics at Griffith University. I am greatly indebted to them for their
continuous support through the good and bad times alike, for their invaluable
comments and constructive criticisms, for the many hours they both spent
helping me and keeping me ‘on course’, as well as for always making
themselves available when I needed advice. Andrea, Susana, I am forever
grateful to you for giving me this opportunity and for being my exceptional
teachers and friends. Thank you for often having more faith in me than I had
in myself!

I also owe gratitude to Dr Bill Venables, from the Mathematics, Informatics
and Statistics division of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial
Research Organisation (CSIRO), for volunteering countless hours of his time,
for sharing his vast knowledge of statistics and for his enormous contribution
to the data analysis, which made possible the most interesting findings of this
project. Closer to home, I would also like to thank my partner, Peter, for
encouraging me in the first place to pursue my dreams and for his ongoing
support through the years that it took to complete this thesis.
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I would also like to thank the over 1300 people from around the world who
took the time to complete my surveys and thus made this study possible.
Special thanks go to the numerous people who used their various contacts to
help me disseminate these surveys to such a great number of participants.
While these people are too many to name individually, I would especially like
to thank my two supervisors, Andrea and Susana, for recruiting a great
number of German, Spanish and Hebrew speaking participants. I would also
like to thank Carlos Alperin for disseminating the surveys among Hebrew
speakers, Belén Rojas for recruiting a great number of participants from
Spain, my sister in law, Veronika Madár, for using her star power to entice
more than a hundred Hungarian speakers to participate in the study and the
many other friends and family around the world who contributed their time
and contacts to ensure that my ambitious targets for such a great number of
participants could be met. Also, I thank Ronel Adani for his invaluable help
with the Hebrew translations and for the many hours he spent helping me
organise the Hebrew data sets.

Naturally, there were many others who helped me with advice,
encouragement, and recruiting participants. To all of you, I say thank you.
Thank you for making this project possible!

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Statement of originality

This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any
university. To the best of my knowledge and belief, this thesis contains no material
previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made
in the thesis itself.

_____________________________

Roland Landor

Ethical clearance
This project received ethical clearance from the Griffith University Human
Research Ethic Committee under protocol number LAL/11/10/HREC.

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Table of contents

1 – INTRODUCTION 1

2 – LITERATURE REVIEW 9
2.1. Introduction and overview 9
2.2. Conceptualisation of objects 14
2.3. Notions of gender 28
2.3.1. Natural gender 28
2.3.2. Grammatical gender 29
2.3.3. Metaphorical gender 33
2.3.4. Gender loading 35
2.4. Grammatical gender across five languages 36
2.4.1. Hungarian 38
2.4.2. English 41
2.4.3. Spanish 44
2.4.4. German 46
2.4.5. Hebrew 47
2.5. Earlier studies 49
2.5.1. Degrees of gender loading in languages: The Guiora Scale 52
2.5.2. The Michigan Gender Identity Test 54
2.5.3. Grammatical gender and gender assignment to asexual objects 59
2.5.4. Conclusion 64
2.6. Recent studies 65
2.6.1. Sex, syntax, and semantics 66
2.6.2. ‘Soupative’ and ‘oosative’ 72
2.6.3. ‘Creepy’ grammatical gender 75
2.6.4. Linguistic versus conceptual processing of grammatical gender 80

2.7. Rationale and research question 84

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3 – METHODOLOGY 87
3.1. Overview 87
3.1.1. Design 94
3.1.2. Pilots 96
3.2. Phase 1: Free adjective description task 98
3.2.1. Participants 99
3.2.2. Stimuli 104
3.2.3. Procedure 107
3.3. Phase 2: Adjective rating 111
3.3.1. Participants 112
3.3.2. Materials 115
3.3.3. Procedure 118
3.4. Phase 3: Establishing gender load scores for the stimuli 120
3.4.1. Data summaries 121
3.4.2. Formal analysis 123
3.4.2.1. An adjective-stimulus association measure 124
3.4.2.2. A logistic regression model 125
3.4.2.3. Model outputs 129

4 – RESULTS 131
4.1. Overview 131
4.2. Analyses of selected examples 132
4.2.1. Control stimuli 135
4.2.2. Test stimuli: Opposite grammatical gender in German and Spanish 143
4.2.3. Test stimuli: Opposite grammatical gender in German and Hebrew 149
4.2.4. Test stimuli: Opposite grammatical gender in Spanish and Hebrew 154
4.2.5. Test stimuli: Same grammatical gender in German, Spanish and Hebrew 159
4.3. Assessing the effect of grammatical gender 163
4.3.1. A formal analysis 166
4.3.2. Analysis of magnitudes 170
4.3.3. Analysis of indecision 172

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