a mistake in asking about gender assignment : academic answers needed URGENT PLZ !!!

[Jason F. Siegel]

Hi Mostari,

 

I don't think there's any evidence to support a claim that "astuce" sounds
more masculine. There is a study by Tucker et al. (1970) (reference below)
that said /s/ is more likely to indicate feminine gender to speakers.
Moreover, the /la/ sequence in the beginning is also more likely to prime
the feminine gender given its homophony with the feminine article /la/.

 

I think a more intuitive explanation is that the masculine gender is the
default gender of nonce borrowing in Arabic. This would have to be
corroborated by some sort of outside evidence, of course. It seems from
Najat Benchiba's article "Phonologic and Semantic Considerations of
Grammatical Gender in Moroccan Arabic and English Code-Switching. A
Levelling Phenomenon" that this is basically correct for Moroccan
Arabic-English code-switching, but that phonological and semantic factors
may make a difference. The default gender is what surfaces when the gender
of the item can't be retrieved for whatever reason. Here it seems that the
speaker just might not know the gender at all (since he or she also does not
recognize that /l/ is not part of the lexeme), so s/he just guesses
masculine by default.

 

 

--Jason

 



 

 

Jason F. Siegel

Ph.D. Student, Linguistics & French Linguistics

Department of French & Italian

Ballantine Hall 642

1020 East Kirkwood Avenue

Indiana University

Bloomington, IN 47405-7103

USA

siegeljf at indiana.edu

 

 

 

 

 

 

From: owner-lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu
[mailto:owner-lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu] On Behalf Of mostari hind
Sent: Sunday, May 17, 2009 1:59 PM
To: lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu
Subject: a mistake in asking about gender assignement : academic answers
needed URGENT PLZ !!!

 



dear all , 
I am awfully sorry because I  wrote the contrary of what I  meant:   the
speaker states :
dak l'astuce instead of dik l'astuce because astuce is a feminine word but
for the speaker it sounds more masculine and here we cannot speak of
translation, so what do you think so ? 
can we really speak about  phonological sonority , ie , using the speaker's
feeling of what  words sounds like ? 
all the best 
Mostari 
 

 

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