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Russian culture (rather than grammatical gender) influences artistic personifications

ORCiD logo with link | Independent Researcher
ORCiD logo with link | HSE UniversityPerm
ORCiD logo with link | HSE UniversityPerm
Published online: 18 August 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00066.poz
Abstract
Can Russian grammatical gender influence an artist’s decisions in personification or conceptualization of abstract entities? This article aims to contribute to the scholarly literature on linguistic relativity, and re-examines the relationship between grammatical gender and patterns in thought and culture in the specific domain of art. The results presented in this paper support the notion that culture might have a tremendous effect that could entirely override any possible effect of language. Specifically, they show immediate androcentric bias — i.e., a strong effect for a male depiction (= a strong correspondence between personification in visual art and grammatical gender in Russian), but not for a female depiction.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Grammatical gender in Russian
  • 3.Corpus and methodology
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Results
    • 4.2Discussion
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
References (85)
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