Gender Assignment in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian: A Comparison of the Status of Assignment Criteria

Abstract

The paper deals with gender assignment of English loanwords in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. The following assignment criteria have been analysed: semantic (animate, mass), phonological (number of syllables, homonymy), and morphological (inflection, suffixation, deverbal monosyllables, compounds). Common gender in Danish and Swedish and masculine in Norwegian are overrepresented in comparison with the native lexicon. This is confirmed by discriminant function analysis, which shows that neuter nouns in the three languages and feminine nouns in Norwegian show fewer characteristic features. This analysis has also been used to measure the degree of regularity based on the postulated criteria: the percentage of correctly classified cases (from 67% in Swedish to 68% in Norwegian and 72% in Danish) suggests only a partial regularity in gender assignment. The stronger pull of common or masculine gender is reflected in the contribution of selected assignment rules, particularly in the assignment of animates, where common or masculine nouns constitute 96% of assigned nouns. As regards phonological rules, monosyllables show a slightly better correlation with neuter gender, particularly in Danish. Homonymy is significant for nouns of both genders in Danish, while in Swedish and Norwegian nouns with a native neuter or feminine homonym are more likely to be assigned common or masculine gender. Likewise, most inflectional and derivational assignment rules contribute to the assignment of common or masculine genders, with the exception of zero plurals, Swedish n-plurals, suffixes such as -ment, -ery, deverbal monosyllables in Danish and Norwegian, and compounds whose base appears in the corpus with n. gender. Discriminant function analysis shows that plural inflection has the greatest discriminant power among the postulated criteria. Finally, it is suggested that these tendencies may indicate an ongoing expansion of common and masculine genders in the three Scandinavian languages.