Masculine generic pronouns: Investigating the processing of an unintended gender cue

Contains fulltext : 228989.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Grammatically masculine words are often used when talking about people in general. In Dutch you would say that everyone was eating his lunch (‘iedereen was zijn lunch aan het eten’), even if the group consisted of men as well as women. This use of masculine words for generic reference was at the core of this dissertation. A series of experiments tested if Dutch masculine pronouns such as zijn ‘his’ and hij ‘he’ lead to a male bias during reading, even though they are intended to be interpreted generically. In other words, do we think of the group of people eating their lunch as predominantly male? Three eye-tracking experiments and one sentence evaluation experiment tested if the possessive pronoun zijn ‘his’ lead to a male bias. The results showed that men often experience a male bias, but women do not. A self-paced reading experiment testing generically-intended hij ‘he’ revealed a male bias for both women and men. These five experiments taken together show that the generic or “gender-neutral” use of masculine pronouns often makes only men visible and excludes others. A sixth experiment sheds light on a different context in which zijn ‘his’ is used to refer to women. The pronoun can be used to refer to women beyond generic contexts in the Limburgian dialect spoken in the Netherlands. For example, a sentence such as Mary is eating his lunch can mean that Mary is eating her own lunch in Limburgian. An acceptability judgement task showed that this interpretation is indeed possible in Limburgian, but not in Dutch.Radboud University, 21 januari 2021Promotor : Hoop, H. de Co-promotores : Swart, P.J.F. de, Frank, S.L.241 p

Diachrony of differential argument marking

While there are languages that code a particular grammatical role (e.g. subject or direct object) in one and the same way across the board, many more languages code the same grammatical roles differentially. The variables which condition the differential argument marking (or DAM) pertain to various properties of the NP (such as animacy or definiteness) or to event semantics or various properties of the clause. While the main line of current research on DAM is mainly synchronic the volume tackles the diachronic perspective. The tenet is that the emergence and the development of differential marking systems provide a different kind of evidence for the understanding of the phenomenon. The present volume consists of 18 chapters and primarily brings together diachronic case studies on particular languages or language groups including e.g. Finno-Ugric, Sino-Tibetan and Japonic languages. The volume also includes a position paper, which provides an overview of the typology of different subtypes of DAM systems, a chapter on computer simulation of the emergence of DAM and a chapter devoted to the cross-linguistic effects of referential hierarchies on DAM

The diachronic typology of differential argument marking

Finnish existential clauses are known for the case marking of their S arguments, whichalternates between the nominative and the partitive. Existential S arguments introduce adiscourse-new referent, and, if headed by a mass noun or a plural form, are marked with thepartitive case that indicates non-exhaustive quantification (as in ‘There is some coffee in thecup’). In the literature it has often been observed that the partitive is occasionally used evenin transitive clauses to mark the A argument. In this work I analyze a hand-picked set ofexamples to explore this partitive A. I argue that the partitive A phrase often has an animatereferent; that it is most felicitous in low-transitivity expressions where the O argumentis likewise in the partitive (to indicate non-culminating aspect); that a partitive A phrasetypically follows the verb, is in the plural and is typically modified by a quantifier (‘many’, ‘alot of’). I then argue that the pervasiveness of quantifying expressions in partitive A phrasesreflects a structural analogy with (pseudo)partitive constructions where a nominative headis followed by a partitive modifier (e.g. ‘a group of students’). Such analogies may be relevantin permitting the A function to be fulfilled by many kinds of quantifier + partitive NPs.</p

Diachrony of differential argument marking

While there are languages that code a particular grammatical role (e.g. subject or direct object) in one and the same way across the board, many more languages code the same grammatical roles differentially. The variables which condition the differential argument marking (or DAM) pertain to various properties of the NP (such as animacy or definiteness) or to event semantics or various properties of the clause. While the main line of current research on DAM is mainly synchronic the volume tackles the diachronic perspective. The tenet is that the emergence and the development of differential marking systems provide a different kind of evidence for the understanding of the phenomenon. The present volume consists of 18 chapters and primarily brings together diachronic case studies on particular languages or language groups including e.g. Finno-Ugric, Sino-Tibetan and Japonic languages. The volume also includes a position paper, which provides an overview of the typology of different subtypes of DAM systems, a chapter on computer simulation of the emergence of DAM and a chapter devoted to the cross-linguistic effects of referential hierarchies on DAM