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What's in a Name? in Some Languages, Grammatical Gender

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What's in a Name? in Some Languages, Grammatical Gender What's in a name? In some languages, grammatical gender Vivi Nastase Marius Popescu EML Research gGmbH Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Heidelberg, Germany University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania [email protected] [email protected] Abstract within a single language family: travel – mascu- line in Spanish (el viage) and Italian (il viaggio), This paper presents an investigation of the but feminine in Portuguese (a viagem). relation between words and their gender in Grammatical gender groups nouns in a lan- two gendered languages: German and Ro- guage into distinct classes. There are languages manian. Gender is an issue that has long whose nouns are grouped into more or less than preoccupied linguists and baffled language three classes. English for example has none, and learners. We verify the hypothesis that makes no distinction based on gender, although gender is dictated by the general sound Old English did have three genders and some patterns of a language, and that it goes traces remain (e.g. blonde, blond). beyond suffixes or word endings. Exper- Linguists assume several sources for gender: (i) imental results on German and Romanian a first set of nouns which have natural gender and nouns show strong support for this hypoth- which have associated matching grammatical gen- esis, as gender prediction can be done with der; (ii) nouns that resemble (somehow) the nouns high accuracy based on the form of the in the first set, and acquire their grammatical gen- words. der through this resemblance. Italian and Roma- nian, for example, have strong and reliable phono- 1 Introduction logical correlates (Vigliocco et al., 2004b, for Ital- For speakers of a language whose nouns have no ian). (Doca, 2000, for Romanian). In Romanian gender (such as modern English), making the leap the majority of feminine nouns end in a˘ or e. Some to a language that does (such as German), does rules exists for German as well (Schumann, 2006), not come easy. With no or few rules or heuris- for example nouns ending in -tat,¨ -ung, -e, -enz, tics to guide him, the language learner will try to -ur, -keit, -in tend to be feminine. Also, when draw on the “obvious” parallel between grammat- specific morphological processes apply, there are ical and natural gender, and will be immediately rules that dictate the gender of the newly formed baffled to learn that girl – Madchen¨ – is neuter in word. This process explains why Frau (woman) is German. Furthermore, one may refer to the same feminine in German, while Fraulein¨ (little woman, object using words with different gender: car can miss) is neuter – Fraulein¨ = Frau + lein. The ex- be called (das) Auto (neuter) or (der) Wagen (mas- isting rules have exceptions, and there are numer- culine). Imagine that after hard work, the speaker ous nouns in the language which are not derived, has mastered gender in German, and now wishes and such suffixes do not apply. to proceed with a Romance language, for example Words are names used to refer to concepts. The Italian or Spanish. He is now confronted with the fact that the same concept can be referred to using task of relearning to assign gender in these new names that have different gender – as is the case languages, made more complex by the fact that for car in German – indicates that at least in some gender does not match across languages: e.g. sun cases, grammatical gender is in the name and not – feminine in German (die Sonne), but masculine the concept. We test this hypothesis – that the gen- in Spanish (el sol), Italian (il sole) and French (le der of a noun is in its word form, and that this goes soleil); moon – masculine in German (der Mond), beyond word endings – using noun gender data but feminine in Spanish (la luna), Italian (la luna) for German and Romanian. Both Romanian and and French (la lune). Gender doesn’t even match German have 3 genders: masculine, feminine and 1368 Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1368–1377, Singapore, 6-7 August 2009. c 2009 ACL and AFNLP neuter. The models built using machine learning larski (2007) presents a more detailed overview algorithms classify test nouns into gender classes of currents and ideas about the origin of gender. based on their form with high accuracy. These re- Unterbeck (1999) contains a collection of papers sults support the hypothesis that in gendered lan- that investigate grammatical gender in several lan- guages, the word form is a strong clue for gender. guages, aspects of gender acquisition and its rela- This supplements the situation when some con- tion with grammatical number and agreement. cepts have natural gender that matches their gram- There may be several reasons for the polemic matical gender: it allows for an explanation where between these two sides. One may come from the there is no such match, either directly perceived, categorization process, the other from the relation or induced through literary devices. between word form and its meaning. Let us take The present research has both theoretical and them each in turn, and see how they influenced practical benefits. From a theoretical point of gender. view, it contributes to research on phonology and Grammatical gender separates the nouns in a gender, in particular in going a step further in un- language into disjoint classes. As such, it is a cat- derstating the link between the two. From a practi- egorization process. The traditional – classical – cal perspective, such a connection between gender theory of categorization and concepts viewed cat- and sounds could be exploited in advertising, in egories and concepts as defined in terms of a set particular in product naming, to build names that of common properties that all its members should fit a product, and which are appealing to the de- share. Recent theories of concepts have changed, sired customers. Studies have shown that espe- and view concepts (and categories) not necessar- cially in the absence of meaning, the form of a ily as “monolithic” and defined through rules, but word can be used to generate specific associations rather as clusters of members that may resemble and stimulate the imagination of prospective cus- each other along different dimensions (Margolis tomers (Sells and Gonzales, 2003; Bedgley, 2002; and Laurence, 1999). Botton et al., 2002). In most linguistic circles, the principle of ar- bitrariness of the association between form and 2 Gender meaning, formalized by de Saussure (1916) has What is the origin of grammatical gender and how been largely taken for granted. It seems however, does it relate to natural gender? Opinions are split. that it is hard to accept such an arbitrary relation, Historically, there were two main, opposite, views: as there have always been contestants of this prin- (i) there is a semantic explanation, and natural ciple, some more categorical than others (Jakob- gender motivated the category (ii) the relationship son, 1937; Jespersen, 1922; Firth, 1951). It is pos- between natural and grammatical gender is arbi- sible that the correlation we perceive between the trary. word form and the meaning is something that has Grimm (1890) considered that grammatical arisen after the word was coined in a language, be- gender is an extension of natural gender brought ing the result of what Firth called “phonetic habit” on by imagination. Each gender is associated through “an attunement of the nervous system”, with particular adjectives or other attributes, and in and that we have come to prefer, or select, cer- some cases (such as for sun and moon) the assign- tain word forms as more appropriate to the con- ment of gender is based on personification. Brug- cept they name – “There is no denying that there mann (1889) and Bloomfield (1933) took the po- are words which we feel instinctively to be ade- sition that the mapping of nouns into genders is quate to express the ideas they stand for. ... Sound arbitrary, and other phenomena – such as deriva- symbolism, we may say, makes some words more tions, personification – are secondary to the estab- fit to survive” (Jespersen, 1922). lished agreement. Support for this second view These two principles relate to the discussion comes also from language acquisition: children on gender in the following manner: First of all, who learn a gendered language do not have a nat- the categories determined by grammatical gen- ural gender attribute that they try to match onto der need not be homogeneous, and their mem- the newly acquired words, but learn these in a sep- bers need not all respect the same member- arate process. Any match or mapping between ship criterion. This frees us from imposing a natural and grammatical gender is done after the matching between natural and grammatical gen- natural gender “feature” is acquired itself. Ki- der where no such relation is obvious or pos- 1369 sible through literary devices (personification, (2004b) test cognitive aspects of grammatical gen- metaphor, metonymy). Nouns belonging to the der of Italian nouns referring to animals. same gender category may resemble each other Cucerzan and Yarowsky (2003) present a boot- because of semantic considerations, lexical deriva- strapping process to predict gender for nouns in tions, internal structure, perceived associations context. They show that context gives accurate and so on. Second, the fact that we allow for the clues to gender (in particular through determiners, possibility that the surface form of a word may quantifiers, adjectives), but when the context is not encode certain word characteristics or attributes, useful, the algorithm can fall back successfully on allows us to hypothesize that there is a surface, the word form. Cucerzan and Yarowsky model phonological, similarity between words grouped the word form for predicting gender using suffix within the same gender category, that can supple- trie models.
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