Article published In: Current Perspectives on Codeswitching:
Edited by Emma Vanden Wyngaerd, Renata Enghels, Mena B. Lafkioui and Marie Steffens
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 35] 2021
► pp. 131–182
Gender in Dutch/Portuguese codeswitching
A multimethodological approach
Published online: 15 February 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00067.gre
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00067.gre
Abstract
This study focuses on unveiling the strategies involved in gender assignment in codeswitching between two
gendered languages: Dutch (common/neuter gender) and Portuguese (masculine/feminine gender). We draw on naturalistic speech
(n = 32 speakers), elicited production (n = 35) as well as intuitional data
(n = 57) from Dutch/Portuguese bilinguals stemming from three communities in Paraná, Southern Brazil, aiming
to disentangle the relative roles of linguistic and extralinguistic factors on gender assignment. In unilingual Dutch, we find
that Dutch/Portuguese bilinguals overgeneralize common determiners and adjectives to neuter nouns, similarly to other Dutch
bilinguals outside the Netherlands (Clyne 1977; Clyne, Michael, and Anne Pauwels. 2013. “The
Dutch Language in Australia”. In Language and Space. An International
Handbook on Linguistic Variation. Vol. 3: Dutch, ed. by Frans Hinskens, and Johan Taeldeman. 858–879. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. ; Folmer, Jetske. 1991. “Taalverschuiving en taalverlies bij drie generaties Nederlanders in Nieuw-Zeeland. Een ‘case
study’. [Language Shift and Language Loss in Three Generations of Dutch
Speakers in New Zealand: A Case Study].” In Artikelen van de Eerste
Sociolinguïstische Conferentie, ed. by Roeland Van Hout, and Erica Huls. 151–167. Delft: Eburon.; Giesbers, Herman. 1997. “Dutch
in Indonesia: Language Attrition or Language Contact.” In Dutch
Overseas. Studies in Maintenance, Shift and Loss of Dutch as an Immigrant Language, ed.
by Jetske Klatter-Folmer, and Sjaak Kroon. 191–212. Tilburg: Tilburg University Press.). In codeswitched
constructions, however, speakers assign common and masculine gender as defaults, in line with the prediction that speakers of
language pairs with no gender values in common prefer gender defaulting in mixed constructions (Klassen, Rachel. 2016. “Asymmetric
Grammatical Gender Systems in the Bilingual Mental Lexicon.” PhD
dissertation, University of Ottawa. ). While extralinguistic factors such as age and relative use of the languages shaped
unilingual Dutch production, the patterns during codeswitching were conventionalized across the speaker sample.
Keywords: codeswitching, gender, bilingualism, Dutch, Portuguese
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Linguistic and extralinguistic factors
- 1.2Language pairs with one gender system
- 1.3Language pairs with two gender systems
- 1.4Dutch gender
- 1.5Portuguese gender
- 1.6Dutch/Portuguese bilingual communities
- 2.The present study
- 3.Methods
- 3.1Participants
- 3.2Conversational data
- Procedure
- 3.3Unilingual determiner selection task
- Materials
- Procedure
- 3.4Bilingual elicited production task
- Materials
- Procedure
- 3.5Acceptability judgement task
- Materials
- Procedure
- 3.6Data coding
- Conversational and bilingual elicited production data
- Acceptability judgement data
- Participant and extralinguistic factors
- 3.7Data analysis
- 4.Results
- Conversational data
- Bilingual elicited production data
- Acceptability judgement data
- 5.Discussion and conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
References
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