Grammatical Gender and Classifiers as Windows to Cognitive Processing

Many Indo-European languages, including French, Spanish, Dutch, and German, have grammatical gender. In German, for instance, nouns either have masculine, feminine, or neuter gender, and that has important repercussions on grammatical agreement in phrases such as “silberner Löffel” (silverMAS spoonMAS), “silberne Gabel” (silverFEM forkFEM), or “silbernes Messer” (silverNEU knifeNEU). However, why is spoon masculine (MAS) in German (“der Löffel”), while fork is feminine (FEM) (“die Gabel”), and knife is neuter (NEU) (“das Messer”)? The answer is probably that the human cognitive system developed grammatical gender in German to subcategorize its nominal system to facilitate lexical access and to bring some structure to the German mental lexicon. The psychological reality of the grammatical feature ‘gender’ has been demonstrated, e.g., in the form of the gender congruency effect. However, many languages do not have grammatical gender, such as Mandarin Chinese, but make use of classifiers. In this talk, I will show that grammatical gender and classifiers fulfill very similar functions in language processing. This supports claims that have been made by theoretical linguists arguing that gender and classifiers are functioning on the same spectrum. From a cognitive perspective, the interesting issue is how human cognition has been able to develop at least two different ways, i.e., gender and classifiers, to achieve similar functions in language processing, i.e., subcategorizing the nominal system of language.