Gender assignment to nouns codeswitched into French: Observations and explanations

Abstract

This article investigates the assignment of grammatical gender to foreign nouns codeswitched into French, where gender assignment is required. Contrary to other studies, this study is based on a questionnaire of 75 words filled by both monolingual French speakers and native speakers of French bilingual in English. The results are analyzed in the light of criteria for gender assignment that are established both for borrowed words (from previous studies on borrowings in French as well as Spanish and German) and for native French words (from studies in French morphology). Comparisons between the groups show that there is little agreement between monolinguals and bilinguals as well as among monolinguals, showing that the meaning of a word is of primary importance in assigning grammatical gender. Results also show that the majority of words are assigned to the masculine gender. The analysis of factors influencing gender assignment reveals that bilingual participants rely on semantic criteria (biological sex and semantic analogy) and/or formal (morphological endings, phonetics, and orthographical factors) criteria to assign gender to the words in the questionnaire.

Keywords

codeswtiching criteria for choice grammatical gender assignment

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