Lecture: Grammatical gender selection of Norwegian nouns by native speakers of Spanish when code-switching

My thesis explores the assignment of grammatical gender in the context of insertion code-switching of Norwegian nouns into a Spanish sentence. That is, whether Spanish speakers would assign el (masculine article) or la (feminine article) to words in Norwegian, which is a language that has three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), and whether there are linguistic and/or sociodemographic factors that can explain and predict it.
I formulated four hypotheses: (i) masculine as default, (ii) gender of the speaker, (iii) phonological shape of the word and (iv) gender of the translation.
The data was collected by using two online surveys where participants encountered 15 Spanish target sentences which had a Norwegian noun in it preceded by either el or la. Participants were asked to judge the acceptability of the sentences on a 5-point Linkert scale. After that, they were asked questions such as age and gender.
What I found was that speakers judged more favorably those stimuli sentences with masculine grammatical gender assignment, which agrees with previous literature. However, sometimes the gender of the translation played a role favoring the feminine. Also, women in this survey appeared to rate higher the sentences with masculine grammatical gender, whereas men were more accepting of the feminine grammatical gender.

Info

Day: 2022-11-05
Start time: 14:45
Duration: 00:30
Room: Wiwi-Bunker — Room 4044
Track: Sociolinguistics
Language: en

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