How much meaning influences gender assignment across languages is an active area of research in modern linguistics and cognitive science. We can view current approaches as aiming to determine where gender assignment falls on a spectrum, from being fully arbitrarily determined to being largely semantically determined. For the latter case, there is a formulation of the neo-Whorfian hypothesis, which claims that even inanimate noun gender influences how people conceive of and talk about objects (using the choice of adjective used to modify inanimate nouns as a proxy for meaning). We offer a novel, causal graphical model that jointly represents the interactions between a noun's grammatical gender, its meaning, and adjective choice. In accordance with past results, we find a relationship between the gender of nouns and the adjectives which modify them. However, when we control for the meaning of the noun, we find that grammatical gender has a near-zero effect on adjective choice, thereby calling the neo-Whorfian hypothesis into question.

inanimate objects are frequently referred to by gendered pronouns, and, conversely, there exist nouns referring to people having a grammatical gender A system of grammatical gender, by means of which all noun classes required an explicitly masculine, feminine, or neuter inflection or agreement, existed in Old English, but fell out of use during the Middle English period. Thus, Modern English largely does not have grammatical gender in this sense. However, it does retain features relating to natural gender, with particular nouns and pronouns (su Old English had a system of grammatical gender similar to that of modern German, with three genders: masculine, feminine, neuter. Determiners and attributive adjectives showed gender inflection in agreement with the noun they modified. Also the nouns themselves followed different declension patterns depending on their gender. Moreover, the third-person personal pronouns, as well as interrogative and relative pronouns, were chosen according to the grammatical gender of their antecedent. Old English grammatical gender was, as in other Germanic languages, remarkably opaque: that is, one often could not know the gender of a noun by its meaning or by the form of the word; this was especially true for nouns referencing inanimate objects. Learners would have had to simply memorize which word has which gender. Although nouns referring to human males were generally masculine and for the most part words for human females were feminine, as Charles Jones noted, "it is with those nouns which show explicit female reference that the sex specifying function of the gender classification… Old English had multiple generic nouns for "woman" stretching across all three genders: for example, in addition to the neuter wif and the masculine wifmann listed above, there was also the feminine frowe. For the gender-neutral nouns for "child", there was the neuter bearn and the neuter cild (compare English child). And even with nouns referring to persons, one could not always determine gender by meaning or form: for example, with two words ending in -mæg, there was the female-specific neuter noun wynmæg, meaning "winsome maid" or attractive woman; as well as the gender-neutral noun meaning "paternal kindred" or member of father's side of the family, but which was grammatically feminine: fædernmæg. In short, inanimate objects are frequently referred to by gendered pronouns, and, conversely, there exist nouns referring to people having a grammatical gender that does not match their natural gender. Nonetheless, in Old English, pronouns may follow natural gender rather than grammatical gender in some cases. For details of the declension patterns and pronoun systems, see Old English grammar. Exampl…

Grammatical gender is a central grammatical feature of nouns in many languages. While English exhibits a limited system of grammatical gender that primarily reflects the biological sex of the noun referent, the grammatical gender systems of Slovene and German rely on a tripartite division into masculine, feminine, and neuter gender which is determined by both the form and meaning of a noun. The present thesis examines the grammatical gender systems of English, German, and Slovene from a contrastive perspective. To this end, we first define the category of grammatical gender based on an overview of grammatical gender systems across world languages, and describe factors influencing the formation of noun classes and grammatical gender assignment, as well as the functions of grammatical gender. We briefly outline the development of grammatical gender in Proto-Indo-European and highlight agreement as the key characteristic of gendered languages. In the second part of the thesis, we compare the grammatical gender systems of English, German, and Slovene, focusing first on their diachronic development and then studying them from a synchronic perspective. Grammatical gender is then examined through the lens of linguistic relativity, often referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which posits that language, including grammatical gender, influences human cognition. Gender-sensitive language use is also addressed. We provide an overview of empirical research that studies the influence