On the Relationships Between the Grammatical Genders of Inanimate Nouns and Their Co-Occurring Adjectives and Verbs

We use large-scale corpora in six different gendered languages, along with tools from NLP and information theory, to test whether there is a relationship between the grammatical genders of inanimate nouns and the adjectives used to describe those nouns. For all six languages, we find that there is a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2021-01, Vol.9, p.139-159
Main Authors: Williams, Adina, Cotterell, Ryan, Wolf-Sonkin, Lawrence, Blasi, Damián, Wallach, Hanna
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adjectives
Animacy
Cold
Computerized corpora
Gender identity
Grammatical gender
Information theory
Languages
Linguistics
Nouns
Random variables
Stereotypes
Verbs
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Summary:We use large-scale corpora in six different gendered languages, along with tools from NLP and information theory, to test whether there is a relationship between the grammatical genders of inanimate nouns and the adjectives used to describe those nouns. For all six languages, we find that there is a statistically significant relationship. We also find that there are statistically significant relationships between the grammatical genders of inanimate nouns and the verbs that take those nouns as direct objects, as indirect objects, and as subjects. We defer deeper investigation of these relationships for future work.
ISSN:2307-387X
2307-387X
DOI:10.1162/tacl_a_00355