Abstract:
Linguists and non-linguists alike have long considered grammatical gender to be arbitrary. For the most part, only some very general tendencies governing grammatical gender assignment have been suggested in the face of the prevalent anomalist approaches to gender theory. However, these anomalist views of grammatical gender assignment offer no explanation for very basic questions about this aspect of language. First, how do native speaking children of languages with grammatical genders learn a system with little or no trouble that via pure memorization would take years of concerted study to master? Second, how can native speakers almost unanimously agree on gender assignment for new loan words coming into the language?The answer to these questions is that there must be some underlying system by which grammatical gender is assigned to nouns in a given language. The present paper uses two principles, gender eclipsis and gender tally, to postulate rules for the assignment of grammatical gender in Modern Swedish. The purpose of the research is to display the systematicity found in the gender system of Swedish and to argue further against the anomalist theory of gender assignment in all languages.1.0 An overview of grammatical sender theory and researchGrammatical gender has long been a topic of great speculation in most fields of linguistic studies. As it is found in many IndoEuropean languages, grammatical gender has confused foreign language learners and, up to quite recently, has confounded attempts at all but the most basic analyses. Perhaps the most famous, and also the most representative, of comments concerning grammatical gender (from here on simply "gender," but not to be confused with anatomical gender or sex, which will play only a minor role in the present analysis) in Indo-European languages is the following by Bloomfield (1933:271, 280):