Categorization in Languages with and without Grammatical Gender: Evidence from Russian and Chinese

• Main Authors: Tuyana Dugarova, 圖雅娜
• Other Authors: Jenny Yichun Kuo Ph. D.
• Format: Others
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/9fxvn7

碩士 === 國立嘉義大學 === 外國語言學系研究所 === 102 === There are many studies indicating that grammatical gender does affect meaning (Jakobson, 1966; Sera et al., 1994 &; 2002; Boroditsky &; Schmidt, 2000; Boroditsky et al., 2003). So far, Indo-European languages were the only languages considered. The goal of this study is to find out how Chinese speakers whose language only provides the natural gender category decide whether an inanimate object can be male or female. Moreover, in contrast to the previous studies on Russian, not only feminine and masculine, but also neuter gender was considered. In Experiment 1, 20 Chinese and 20 Russian adults described inanimate nouns with three adjectives, which were then rated with gender by another group of participants. They were asked to mark each adjective as feminine, more feminine than masculine, more masculine than feminine, or masculine. In Experiment 2, the participants needed to decide which of the objects have male or female voice if they were cartoon characters. The results of the study indicated the following: 1) in general, there is no correspondence between perceived gender and Russian gender when it comes to manlike and womanlike adjectives; 2) there is no language effect on the adjective gender assignment; 3) participants often assigned male voice to artificialthings and female voice to natural beings; 4) there is language effect in voice assignment; 5) differences and similarities between Chinese and Russian speakers in neuter nouns voice assignment are based on special features of participants’ cultures and languages.