Leiden University Student Repository

Fiumarelli, Aurelia (2018)

The concept of Grammatical Gender from a Chinese perspective

Master thesis | Asian Studies (120 EC) (MA)

Grammatical gender is one of the ways in which many languages classify nouns. It is not a universal category: for instance, it is absent in Chinese Mandarin, as well as in many other Asian languages. The aim of this research, focusing in particular on Chinese speakers, is to investigate to which extent speakers of genderless languages grasp the concept of grammatical gender. If they were asked to associate a noun with a gender, which strategies would they use? This thesis illustrates the results of the nominal classification made by Chinese respondents who were asked to select genders for forty nouns and to motivate their choice. The findings of this study may be helpful in two ways. On the one hand, they may provide information on how the human mind classifies nouns. On the other hand, they may give a new perspective for future studies on second language (L2) acquisition.

Linguistics

Grammatical Gender

Noun Classes

Classifiers

Chinese

Second Language (L2) acquisition

Author

Fiumarelli, Aurelia

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Chinese Studies

Supervisors

Sybesma, Rint

ECTS Credits

15

Language

en