Gender is often cited as a paradigmatic case of arbitrariness in language. Despite a long tradition of anecdotal evidence dating back to the Greeks, most present day scholars claim that grammatical gender has no meaning correlates. The present study consists of three experiments which investigated whether grammatical gender in German and Spanish carries connotative meanings of femininity and masculinity. German and Spanish were used because they have opposite gender for many nouns, a feature of interest in Experiments 2 and 3.; Experiment 1 used semantic differential methodology. Native German speakers and native Spanish speakers judged nonsense words which differed in the gender of the definite article used. Analyses were done using the Short Form Pancultural Scales consisting of 12 language specific scales and using 6 derived scales. As predicted, German speakers rated nonsense words with the masculine article der higher in potency than those with the feminine article die. The results for Spanish speakers were nonsignificant for both scales.; Experiment 2 utilized the same semantic differential task, but tested 54 high frequency translation equivalents in English, German, and Spanish. Half the words were of feminine gender in German and masculine gender in Spanish (Type I words), and half were of masculine gender in German and feminine gender in Spanish (Type II words). As predicted, for the pancultural scales, German speakers judged Type II words higher in potency than Type I words, whereas Spanish speakers judged Type I words higher in potency than Type II words. The results fell short of significance with the derived scales (p {dollar}<{dollar}.07).; Experiment 3 presented stories with referents personified with either stereotypically feminine or masculine traits. Subjects chose the referent which best fit the story from a pair of words of opposite gender and rated the appropriateness of their choice. Few significant results of interest were obtained with this experiment.; Although the study as a whole resulted in mixed findings, the significant result of Experiment 2 is of both theoretical and historical importance. For the first time it was shown that in languages with grammatical gender, high frequency words carry connotations of femininity and masculinity.
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