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CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE

The Morphological Gender Assignment for English Personal Names

A graduate project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of Master of Arts in Linguistics, General.

Mohammad H. Ali

May 2019

The graduate project of Mohammad H. Ali is approved:

______Dr. Kenneth V. Luna Date

______Dr. Christina G Scholten Date

______Dr. David J Medeiros (chair) Date

California State University, Northridge

Table of Contents

Signature Page ii

Abstract iv

Introduction 1

Grammatical gender and morphological productivity 7

Potential words 9

The degree of productivity 10

Phonological Constraints 11

Morphological constraints 12

Blocking 13

Survey Experiment 14

Method 14

Results 17

Conclusion 21

References 23

iii

Abstract

The Morphological Gender Assignment for English Personal Names

Mohammad H. Ali

Master of Arts in Linguistics, General.

The word formation process for English has been the center of much study. However, one area has received less attention than the rest, specifically the word formation process of English personal names. This paper seeks to investigate whether the English feminine personal names ending with “a” i.e. Amanda, Bertha, Hilda etc., are morphologically derived or not. There is evidence that suggests gender assignment for these names is not arbitrary nor a mere convention.

Rather, gender assignment follows a predictable pattern in these cases. As one argument for this, in order to change a personal name like “Robert” from a masculine into a feminine, we would simply add “a” as suffix as in “Roberta”. This shift in the gender association seems to be the result of derivational morphology. By the same token, native speakers are expected to apply the same morpheme when presented by nonsense names such as “Amin” to “Amina”. Here, results

iv from a survey study are presented which bear out this hypothesis with both native and foreign names, that latter of which are likely treated as nounce-names by subjects. Given these results, we can make the claim that -a is an English morpheme that assigns feminine gender. Further, some of the constraints on the application of -a are discussed. This study provides linguists with useful insights into some of the history behind the personal names in English, as well as shedding light on the phonological and morphological rules that govern them.

Keywords: grammatical gender, masculine, feminine, morphological productivity

Introduction

The five most popular US girls’ baby names in 2018 are Emma, Olivia, Ava,

Isabella, and Sophia; as for boys, the names are James, Noah, Oliver, Lucas, and Mason1.

At first glance, we don’t see anything out of the ordinary, yet after a closer look, we will see there is a clear distinction between the gender in these names (i.e. a native speaker takes it for granted that ‘Emma’ is a feminine name whereas ‘Mason’ is masculine). We take this distinction for granted, or as self-evident, and never consider how these names got their gender affiliation in the first place. Interestingly, aside from a few unisex names or ‘androgynous’ names in the list for the most popular names in 2018, there is no overlap between boys’ and girls’ names. The lack of overlap and the clear distinction can be attributed to social and linguistic factors; though we will address both, we will focus primarily on the latter.

A study by Lieberson & Mikelson (2000) showed that even ‘androgynous’ names are becoming more associated with a particular gender, thus fueling the already existing distinction between genders. The results of the study showed that ‘androgynous’ names account only for less than 2% percent of all the names in the state of Illinois from 1916 to

1995. Over time, they seem to lose the unisex characteristic in favor of one gender over the other, and usually, they became feminine names such as Jodi and Casey. Lieberson &

Mikelson (2000) explained this phenomenon as follows:

“there are issues of contamination such that the advantaged have a greater

incentive to avoid having their status confused with the disadvantaged. … There

is more to be lost for the advantaged and more to be gained by the disadvantaged

when customary markers disappear.”

In other words, for a long-time, women have suffered from gender inequality, whether in political participation, sex discrimination at work place and in employment, or even in education. This kind of inequality created a group of advantaged (men) and disadvantaged (women) people. Within this context, having a personal name which can be associated with the disadvantaged group will result in negative social implications for the name holder.

In addition, historically, men are considered as carriers of the family’s legacy.

Therefore, boys are often named after a relative making the name less susceptible to change, unlike girls’ names which can gain or lose popularity rapidly. For example, the name William is still popular as first name ranking 18th among the most popular names in 2018 (Babycenter, 2018), with the slight variant, Williams, being the 3rd as the most common last name in 2010 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2016). On the other hand, girls’ names are often chosen as part of a social trend. For example, the name Aria (which also was the name of a fictional character from the TV show Game of Thrones) had a sudden spike in popularity as it moved from # 353 in 2010 (a year before the TV show was premiered) to

# 11 in 2018 (Babycenter, 2018). This notion of change further illustrates the differentiation between personal names and their associated gender.

Another example is the name Jennifer. If we look at the Social Security

Administration database for the name Jennifer, we will see the name ranked #26 among the most popular names in the US by 2000, just a year after the famous singer Jennifer

Lopez launched her first album. However, in 2017 the name is ranked #310 (The United

States Social Security Administration, 2018). By contrast if we look the name Chris, we will see that the name ranked #392 in 2000 then ranked #347 in 2008, the year when the name Chris was most popular, and in 2017 it ranked #595. After further examination, we will see the sudden spike in the name popularity may have been influenced by the fact that 2008 is a year after the famous singer Chris Brown album debuted at number four on the US Billboard 200 chart. This supports the argument we stated earlier, that even though both male and female names’ popularity are susceptible to social trends, the female names tend to have a heaver influence from these trends. When it comes to linguistic features, several trends relating to the gender distinction are observable under analysis. First, boys’ names tend to be shorter than girls’ names. This claim can be supported by examining the top 20 names of most popular names in 2018 for both boys and girls, which are listed in Figure 1. We will find that seven of the top 20 names for girls have more than two syllables; while in the top 20 for boys, there are five

(Babycenter, 2018)2.

Furthermore, by the virtue of the first observation, we can say that girls’ names contain more orthographic vowels, as these often correspond to syllable count. In addition, vowels (both orthographic and in pronunciation) differ between the gendered names in terms of position, such that girl’s names have far more vowels in both initial and final position. These trends are illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1

This figure shows the ratio of vowel-to-consonant with respect to their position in the name, for both boys and girls. It is evident that girls’ names have a higher vowel-to- consonant ratio than boys’ names. Out of the top 20 girls’ names, 55% had a vowel as initial sound while for boys it was only 30%. Moreover, if we look at vowels in the final position, we will find that girls’ names have 80%, while boys’ names had only 10%.

In addition, the list also shows that girls names are more likely to have a front vowel in general. Seven out the 20 girls’ names have the front vowel /i:/. While for boys’ names, there is more variation as the vowels tend to be lower and backer, as in Noah and

Lucas. On a similar note, it seems girls’ names have preference for vowel ending. It is quite common for girls’ names to end in the [i] sound as in Avery and Emily.

Nonetheless, that is not the only common ending, if we look back at the top 20 list, we will find that 11 out of the 20 girls’ names end with an unstressed syllable (the unstressed vowel schwa), that is represented as -a, which the primary focus of this study.

Though it is not clear what the cause is for these patterns, the notion of symbolism is one possibility. Ramachandran (2001) held an experiment where he asked the participants to name two different shapes either ‘kiki’ or ‘bouba’. The first shape was spiky, while the other one was curvy. The results were 95% of English-speaking adults matched 'bouba' to a curvy shaped object and 'kiki' for the spiky one. By the same token, perhaps there is a relation between the frequency of front vowels for feminine names and back vowels for masculine names, or it could be a form of contrast where certain sets of sounds are more common in masculine names and vice versa.

While the notion of symbolism could be part of the explanation, this is not fully satisfactory. It leaves much open for interpretation, and neglects a very important element, which is the language history. Quite a significant number of English personal names were borrowed from languages that had a grammatical gender marker such as

Latin and other Romance languages. These languages use the suffix -a to derive feminine nouns from masculine ones. In addition to the Latin suffix, English seems to have borrowed the French -ee /i/ suffix as well (Algeo, J., & Butcher, C. A. 2013). This might explain why some names with Latin origin such as ‘Emil’ have two different feminine variants ‘Emilia’ and ‘Emilie’.

Moreover, English had its fair share of borrowed names from the Bible in which most of the given names have a Semitic origin. Hebrew shares a similar characteristic to

Latin which is the use the suffix -a to drive a feminine form. This can be seen in names like ‘Aaron’ to ‘Arona’. Nonetheless, not all feminine names that have -a endings are borrowed from other languages. In the Old English, we find names like ‘Albert’ and

‘Edward’ have feminine variants which are ‘Alberta’ and ‘Edwarda’. This suggests an

5 element of morphological productivity, even though the source of the ending itself may be related to the influence from Romance or other languages. This can also be seen in

Shakespeare’s own work as well. He used his linguistic knowledge to come up with names such as Olivia which has no connection to Latin language or any of its descendants (Behindthename, 2018).

Another study by Lieberson & Mikelson (1995) highlighted the associations between feminine names and the -a ending. In this study Lieberson, & Mikelson investigated how an ethnically-mixed group of people would guess the gender of 16 unique African American children’s names, such as Maleka and Timitra. At the time of the study, only one child held a birth certificate with each of these names, according to data from the Illinois Department of Public Health. The researchers went to a mall then asked people to guess the gender for these names. 95 percent of the participants guessed that correctly that Maleka and Timitra are girls’ names. Interestingly, 89 percent guessed incorrectly that Chanti is a girl name while it was actually given to a boy. By contrast, names that ended with consonants where correctly affiliated with male; 89 percent for

Husan and 86 Oukayod. This reflects strong associations between names ending and gender, and even suggests certain phonetic associations among gender and naming might be deeply rooted in our linguistic competence. Nonetheless, this competence seems to be heavily affected by the pre-existing conventions, which can define what phonetic patterns are considered as a gender marker. Having established a link between name endings and gender, I examine below whether this knowledge is productive for English speakers.

Based on a personal study, I found out a striking degree of productivity for -a as we will see in the result section.

Grammatical gender and morphological productivity

If we want to investigate the nature of the -a ending, we have to be careful not to over generalize. Not all cases of -a endings reflect morphological processes, though I contend that some are. Prior to analyzing the names in detail, some of the central concepts relating to grammatical gender and morphological productivity should be discussed. According to Ibrahim (1973) grammatical gender is a system in which noun classes agree with other aspects of the language, such as verbs, pronouns, articles, etc.

However, not all languages have the same divisions for gender. Some languages have what is called a “formal system” (Corbett,1991). In this system, the most influential factor in determining the gender is inflectional morphology. This can be seen in languages such as Spanish where the word “gato” refers to a male cat while the word

“gata” refers to a female cat (Mackenzie, 2004). Though English might seem a gender- neutral language, at least in case of inflectional morphology and subject-verb agreement, that does not mean English does not have gender specific derivational morphemes such as the suffix ‘ess’ as in ‘actress’ and ‘goddess’. If we know who Aphrodite is, then we would say Aphrodite is the goddess of love. Based on the given context we had to assign a different value to the word god by adding a derivational suffix ‘ess’ to make the distinction in the gender assignment. It is worth mentioning, the current trend is that the mescaline form of ‘actor’ and ‘god’ can be used to refer to feminine, thus becoming unmarked. However, the same can’t be said about the feminine form of ‘actress’ and

‘goddess’. For example, Aphrodite can be referred to as the ‘god’ or ‘goddess’ of love, but Ares can only be referred to as the ‘god’ and not the ‘goddess’ of war. Similarly,

Jennifer Lopez can be labelled as an ‘actress’ or ‘actor,’ but Tom Cruise can only be an

‘actor’ but not an ‘actress’. Note that this pattern of usage likely relates to the discussion about social categories in androgynous names above.

This bring us to the second concept, morphological productivity. There are different definitions for what morphological productivity means, but we will use the one suggested by Lieber (2015), because it addresses a crucial point in this study. She defined it as the following: “as a native speaker of a language, you have intuitive knowledge of how to form new words, and every day you recognize and understand new words that you have never heard before” (Lieber, 2015). Two key ideas in this definition include word formation and intuitive knowledge. Take for example, the word “McCarthy;” the word is a simple English personal noun, yet people formed a new word by adding the suffix

“ism”, which means according to Oxford Dictionary “A distinctive practice, system, or philosophy, typically a political ideology”, and created a new word which is

“McCarthyism”. If we stop and think for a second, we will realize that our intuitive knowledge has led to the formation of a word which never existed before in the English language.

Perhaps stronger evidence of morphological productivity is the interaction between morphological rules and irregular forms. This can be seen in child speech as children tend to overgeneralize morphological rules and apply them to irregulars as in

(run/runned). Nonetheless, morphological productivity is not limited to the irregulars, it also can be seen in borrowed or alien words to English, such as in the famous ’wug’ test

(Berko, 1958).

In addition, Bauer (2001) observed that morphological productivity may be understood in relative terms, in particular that “to say that a given morphological pattern

8 is more productive than another is to say that there is a higher probability of potential word in the first pattern being accepted in the language than there is of a potential word in the second pattern.” This notion of relative degrees of productivity will be crucial later in this paper. Based on this, Lieber (2015) made the claim that an English speaker, when introduced to novel words such as argaz and smick, would most likely mark words with plural ‘s’ as in argazes and smickes, instead of argazim, the Hebrew plural form, or any other alternative for smick. These patterns can be observed and analyzed, if we acknowledge the fact that humans tend to capitalize on their linguistic competence in the manner discussed by Chomsky (1965). It is in this context that I consider the concept of potential words.

Potential words

Potential words refer to words which could be incorporated into the everyday language but have not yet. For example, ‘unlightening,’ which means learning something that makes the person less intelligent. Another example is the word ‘errorist’, which means a person who repeatedly makes mistakes or always wrong. On the other hand, some potential words do get incorporated and become actual words. For example, the word ‘hater,’ which according to Cambridge dictionary means “a person who says or writes unpleasant things about someone or criticizes their achievements, especially on the internet”. These terms are relatively new, from around the mid-2000s; however, the process through which they are created is not. These examples stand as testament of morphological productivity. In each example, the speaker of the language has found a way to utilize their linguistic competence (knowledge of the language that the speakers and hearers have of their language) and use it to accurately convey an intended meaning.

This notion will play an important role in analyzing the data for this study as we will see how native speakers deals with novel names.

The degree of productivity

Lieber (2015) and Bauer (2001) both suggested that morphological productivity is not something can be identified with a clear distinction. For them, morphological processes can’t be classified as productive or unproductive. Rather, they can be considered a point in a wide scale that range from the least possible to the most possible, or as Lieber put it, “some are more possible than others”.

Lieber’s principles state the following:

a. Though many things are possible in morphology, some are more possible than

others.

b. Though there are infinitely many potential words in a language, some are

more likely to become actual words than others.

According to Lieber (2015) “there are a number of constraints that limit productivity and that contribute to or even determine to what degree a particular formulation is productive”. Moreover, these two principles can explain why it is possible to form a feminine version of the masculine name Christian /ˈkrɪsʧən/ through more than one morphological process. The name has two prominent variations which are Christina

/krɪsˈtinə/ and Christeen / krɪsˈti:n/. Though both names are viable, based on the

Babycenter site, the name Christina is ranked # 456 among the most popular names in

2017 while the name Christeen is ranked # 8,816. This huge difference in the popularity suggests that there is a preference in using ‘a’ over ‘een’ in terms of Lieber’s principle

(a). Later on, in the study, we will see a further proof of Lieber’s principle demonstrated in the results.

Phonological constraints

Bauer (2002) suggested three different phonological constraints that limit the productivity of morphology. The first constraint is related to the segmental make-up of the base. If we look into the names that permit the addition of the suffix ‘a’, it has a specific segmental make-up; it has to end with unstressed vowel (primarily a schwa) followed by liquids and then stops. For example, the word Adrian /ˈeɪdriən/ has unstressed vowel followed by a stop (nasal stop); if we want to assign a feminine gender value to it, we would say Adriana /eɪdriˈænə/. On the other hand, names that don’t have this specific segmental make-up such as Mathew or Thomas- do not permit the addition of ‘a’ as in ‘*Mathewa’ or ‘*Thomasa”.

The second constraint is related to the supra-segmental make-up of the base.

These names have to end with an unstressed vowel (primarily a schwa) followed by both liquids and stops (in this order, first liquid then stops). For example, the name Robert

/ˈrɑbərt/ which can be changed to Roberta /rəˈbɜrtə/. Though fricatives are also part of the hypothesis, as in luis /luˈis/ to luisa /luˈizə/, 13 out the 200 names had a fricative as ending. This means if we rank the phonological constraints in order according to their frequency of occurrence, stops would be at the highest level as a potential target for -a suffixation, followed by liquids and then fricatives.

The final constraint is related to the number of syllabus in the name. Evidence suggests multisyllabic names are considered more optimal than monosyllabic ones.

Though some monosyllabic names allow -a suffixation as in Sean /ʃɔn/ to Shawna /ˈʃɔnə/,

11 there are other names that block it such as Jack/ ʤæk /. In the data, four participants changed Jack to Jackline /ˈʤæklɪn/, while the other four change it to Jackie /ˈʤæki/. One explanation is that the suffixation of -a for monosyllabic names is arbitrary or at best they have a preference toward diminutive suffixes. Another explanation is that they follow certain truncation rules, in the manner discussed by Avram (2014).

Morphological constraints

Lieber (2015) stated that morphological constraints can play an important role in limiting morphological productivity. In other words, certain ‘base’ structures may be a prerequisite for a specific morphological process. Some morphemes may only occur if the ‘base’ has no other affixes attached to it, while others may be more lenient in this regard. It seems that the -a suffix falls under the first category. For example, in names that ends with “son” such as Grayson, Jaxson and Hudson, there seems to be a morphological constraint on -a, which means that despite meeting the conditions of having a name ending with an unstressed vowel (primarily a schwa) followed by stops, we can’t say *Graysona. A possible explanation is that these names are originally compound nouns. For example, name Grayson is ‘Son of The Grey’. We also see something similar with names that ends with “stone” like ‘Kingstone’ which means

King’s Town. Apparently, the morphological component for these names have been lost to time, since few people nowadays make the connection between ‘Gray’ and ‘Son’ as two different words. Rather, they are treated as one single word. However, despite having two words merge into one, these names retain some parts of their original masculine marker.

Blocking

The last kind of constraint is blocking. It can be of two kinds, potential and actual blocking (Lieber, 2015). However, in this study, we were more concerned by the Potential blocking. It refers to the situation where a morphological process could be applicable, but it is blocked because there is another expression, possibly formed by an alternative process, already expressing the potential meaning. For example, it would follow English grammatical principles to add ‘s’ to nouns such as man (mans) and person (persons); however, these nouns already have a plural form which are men and people, thus blocking the morphological process. Therefore, the existence of irregular forms blocks the application of regular forms (Lieber, 2015). For example, if we look at the personal name Logan /ˈloʊgən /, it was a masculine name that became an ‘androgynous’ name

(National Institute for Genealogical Studies, 2012). Since Logan became an androgynous name, we no longer need to apply the default rule that assign gender. However, this does not explain why another androgynous name Jordan /ʤɔrˈdæn / permits ‘a’ as in Jordana

/ʤɔrˈdænə /. Further study is needed to investigate the scope of this claim.

Survey Experiment

If English speakers can consistently distinguish productivity, we expect that the

Arabic personal name Jamil will be changed to ‘Jamila’ more often than ‘Jamily’ (ee) or

‘Jamileen’. This may tell us something about the extent to which productivity of the -a rule is an individual or social phenomenon and the extent to which productivity holds for particular personal names. Moreover, we suspect that likelihood of this rule increases significantly when one of the following conditions are met:

1) The name must consist of two or more syllables.

2) The final sound is either a liquid or a stop (including nasal stops) or a cluster

including both (a liquid followed by stop). In very few cases, the final sound could

be fricative [s].

3) The preceding vowel is an unstressed vowel (primarily a schwa)

Once these conditions have been met, we will notice a stress shift to the penultimate syllable.

Method

This study is premised on a descriptive design whereby personal names of both

English and Arabic were described and analyzed. Most of the stimuli involved was collected from the United States Social Security Administration through the application of critical observation and interviews of college level students. Basically, the work relied on a purposive sampling technique in which personal names that exhibit one of the three following conditions, i) consisting of two or more syllables, ii) the final sound is either liquids or stops (including nasal stops) or both (a liquid first then a stop) or, in very few

14 cases, fricative [s], iii) the preceding vowel is unstressed vowel (primarily a schwa), were chosen.

The names in the stimuli were morphologically and phonetically analyzed before and after their suffixation in order to observe any changes to the original stems. The experiment was conducted on 8 English native speakers. The participants were tested individually. Each participant was given a paper with a list that had 30 different personal names, 15 of which are English personal names, while the other 15 are Arabic personal names. The participants were given the proper pronunciation for all the names before they were allowed to answer. The names had mixed phonetic compositions in their endings, yet within the general parameters of the conditions stated earlier. The Arabic names were used for two reasons. First, Arabic is a Semitic language, like Hebrew, which has the -a ending sound for the feminine gender assignment. Therefore, making it possible to verify the gender of the name based on the morphological change. Second,

English native speakers are more likely to treat the Arabic names as nounce words/names than say Spanish. These reasons make Arabic an ideal language to use in this study. The

English names have been chosen from the most popular names on US Social Security database from 2010 to 2016 (Social Security Administration, 2017). We examined the top

200 male names and picked 15 names that meet the criteria stated earlier. The names were mixed up, in order to prevent the participants from recognizing and predicting the pattern that the researcher is trying to investigate. The participants were explicitly asked to assume that all the names were designated as masculine and they should change it to a feminine with minimum changes to the original stem. In addition, they were not allowed to make any changes to the names once they had finished writing them down. Finally,

15 they were asked to read them carefully, in order to verify the phonetic pronunciation for each name.

Results

English names Percentage of the participants who Percentage of the participants who changed the last sound to a vowel applied the rule

1. Angel 100% 87.5%

2. Michael 100% 87.5%

3. Albert 75% 62.5%

4. Carl 75% 62.5%

5. Gabriel 100% 100%

6. Bryan 87.5% 87.5%

7. Juan 100% 62.5%

8. Alexander 100% 87.5%

9. Daniel 87.5% 62.5%

10. Evan 75% 62.5%

11. Jack 50% 0%

12. Justin 75% 50%

13. Paul 75% 75%

14. Johnny 87.5% 37.5%

15. Eric 100% 100%

Table 1

English names Percentage of the participants who changed Percentage of the participants who applied the last sound to a vowel the rule 1. Noor 100% 50%

2. Rashid 87.5% 87.5%

3. Zain 62.5% 50%

4. Samir 100% 87.5%

5. Amin 87.5% 87.5%

6. Amir 87.5% 87.5%

7. Abbas 100% 25%

8. Jamil 100% 100%

9. Sultan 100% 75%

10. Fayez 100% 50%

11. Feisal 87.5% 62.5%

12. Karim 75% 50%

13. Jamal 100% 87.5%

14. Dawud 87.5% 62.5%

15. Idris 75% 37.5%

Table 2

The data in the first column indicted the percent of the participants who changed the last sound for the given names on the list to a vowel. As we can see in both table 1 and 2 the percentage is over 62.5% (100% being the entire 8 participants). Thus, the data shows that there is a strong preference for adding vowels at the end of the masculine names to assign feminine gender. The participants used different types of vowels to assign gender. One set of vowels was /iə/ -ia as in changing Abbas / əˈbɑs / to Abbasia /

əˈbɑsiə /. Another type of vowel that was used /i/ -y. It was used as diminutive maker for names such as Abbas / əˈbɑs / to abby /ˈæbi/, and Carl /kɑrl/ to Carly /ˈkɑrli/. In few cases, the participants used /in/ -een to assign gender as in Johnny /ˈʤɑni/ to Johneen /

ʤɑˈnin/.

That being said, there was an overwhelming level of agreement on using /ə/ -a as a suffix to assign gender for both English and Arabic names. Most of names had more than 50% use of -a. In a matter of fact, the only names that seemed to resist adding /ə/ were Jack /ʤæk/, Johnny /ˈʤɑni/, Abbas /əˈbɑs/ and Idris/ Idris/ which had 37.5% or less. For the time being, we will set aside the results from ‘Jack,’ focusing on the rest of the data set. It seems we can’t add -a to johnny because it already has a vowel in the final position. As for Abbas and Idris, they both end with a fricative sound. Though, they don’t totally block -a ending as in Jack, they sure seem to be less optimal for applying -a rule.

Finally, it seems names with three or more syllables, as shown in table 1, are most optimal for this hypothesis such as Michael, Gabriel, and Daniel. These names had almost total agreement among the participants. The same applies for Arabic names in table 2 such as Rashid, Sultan, and Dawud. The same can’t be said about monosyllabic

19 names. We have suspicion that these names such as Jack/ ʤæk / and Noor /nur/ tend to follow a different suffixation rule, or at least they are less optimal for this rule. More study is needed to verify such claim.

It is worth mentioning that the name Angel and Juan might be understood as foreign to at least some English speakers. Regardless of their status as borrowed names, these can still be used as evidence for the morphological productivity of -a.

Conclusion

This paper has indicated that native speakers of English have a strong preference toward adding a vowel at the end of personal names, corroborating what Lieberson &

Mikelson (1995) had already established in their study about the association between feminine names and the -a ending. Their finding fit with one of the two parts of Lieber’s

(2015) understanding of morphological productivity, which is the recognition and understanding of new words. In light of the findings presented here and in the preceding sections, it seems appropriate to claim that our findings fit the second aspect of morphological productivity, by proving that English native speakers capitalize on their intuitive knowledge of the language, as Lieber put it, and use it productively to form new words that reflects such association. This holds true whether they are dealing with

English names or novel names as we have seen with names such as ‘Albert’ to ‘Alberta’ and ‘Sultan’ to ‘Sultana’.

From the evidence presented in this study, it is clear that the participants obeyed a rule-governed process to a certain extent, which leads us to the concept of degrees of productivity. Going back to the observation made earlier regarding the names Christina and Christeen, we discussed how different morphemes can be used to fulfill a given grammatical role, yet as Lieber (2015) stated, some morphemes are more possible than others, or rather have a higher frequency of occurrence. Based on that we can say, applying the -a rule is almost always possible, but in some contexts such as i) the name consisting of two or more syllables, ii) the final sound is either liquids or stops (including nasal stops) or a cluster including both (a liquid followed by stop) or, in very few cases, the final sound could be fricative [s], it is more possible than in others. This can be seen

21 when adding -a to names like ‘Jamil’ and change it to ‘Jamila’ more often than ‘Jamily’

(ee) or ‘Jamileen’.

Based on that findings presented in this study and following techniques of linguistic analysis, we can confidently claim that adding -a to English proper names does indeed assign a feminine gender marker to these names. In other words, the switch in meaning from masculine to feminine is not merely conventionalized lexically, but rather has the hallmarks of a productive pattern. While our findings apply to only a subset of proper names, we hope that by demonstrating the existence of a morphologically productive pattern, we will encourage further research along the lines, in order to develop a better understanding of morphological productivity, and how it interacts with other linguistic elements.

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______Footnotes 1 These names have been gathered based on a website called Baby center which gets it data from the United States Social Security Administration database. 2 several of the longer male names have obvious and conventional nicknames, e.g. Alexander>Alex, Sebastian>Seb, Jackson>Jack, Elijah>Eli, Jacob>Jake, Benjamin>Ben, ichael>Mike,William>Will/Bill. Fewer of the female names have such obvious nicknames, though there are some: Isabella>Issy, Sophia>Sophie (one less syllable), Abigail>Abby.