3 5 (#LSA2025) papers to read about noun gender
I'm calling these "noun gender" because I'm combining grammatical gender, gender bias, and semantic gender here. It's a big field!
Gender assignment strategies in Spanish-English mixed noun phrases, Anna Knall. Keywords: code-switching, grammatical gender, mixed noun phrases, analogical gender, bilingualism
French speakers' use of sound symbolic patterns to assign gender to French and English nonce names, Lisa Sullivan and Yoonjun Kang. Keywords: sound symbolism, given names, English, French
Semantic change of female-denoting nouns in diachronic German corpora, Carla Sökefeld and Patrícia Amaral. Keywords: semantic change; gender bias; pejoration; word embeddings; distributional semantics; corpus linguistics
Towards a uniformitarian account of creole similarity: Gender loss in Martinican Creole. Stéphane Térosier. Keywords: creole genesis, uniformitarianism, creole exceptionalism, grammatical gender, feature interpretability
On gender stereotypicality in nouns and adjectives: Comparing humans, large language models and text-to-image generators. Elsi Kaiser and Ashley Adji. Keywords: pronoun production, experimental linguistics, sociolinguistics, large language models, artificial intelligence, role nouns, adjectives, text-to-image generations
I think that these are all sort of grappling with a big question - what is grammatical gender for, how does it interact with real-world gender, and what are the real-world factors that affect grammatical gender? I think I'd read the papers by Knall, Sökefeld & Amaral, and Sullivan & Kang as a trilogy, as they're all definitely related to a similar phenomenon in different contexts. Térosier's paper on the loss of grammatical gender would be super interesting in contrast, and Kaiser & Adji's paper about gender stereotypicality is a cool real-world application of a lot of these concepts.