Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2007, Page 98

96
GENDER IN LANGUAGE CONTACT: EVIDENCE
l'ROM FAROESE-DANISH AND CATALAN-SPANISH
acquire a complex system like gender
pretty effortlessly.
As gender is so crucial for the morpho-
logy of a language - requiring agreement -
the speaker and the child acquiring the
gender system apply one main principle:
Preserve gender, which would explain the
very few gender changes between Old
Norse and Faroese or Icelandic, and also
why the gender of a borrowed word usually
is preserved - if the speaker is more or less
a balanced bilingual'. An interesting exam-
ple is that where the speaker, a woman from
the elder generation (70+), first uses com-
mon gender, corresponding to the Faroese
masculine noun sandur (‘sand, beach’);
then she immediately corrects herself and
uses the correct Danish gender, which is
neuter:
(1) og vi endte nede pá sanden, sandct der...
and we ended up down on the beach-m./
beach-n. there
‘And we ended up down on the bcach over
there’
(W02V).
The rule with regard to Danish borrowings
in Faroese is that Danish neuter nouns are
neuter in Faroese, common gender nouns in
Danish end up as either masculine or femi-
nine, cf. also opus, which is neuter in Polish
(and Latin), even though a word with a final
consonant should be masculine (Kryk-
Kastovsky, 2000: 734). Example (1) shows
that the gender systems of a bilingual
speaker are autonomous (Costa et al.,
2003); this would indeed be expected in
asymmetrical gender systems like Faroese
and Danish.
The function of gender as a reference
point for declensional classes is decisive for
having two independent systems, and when
the systems change they do so in certain
steps, for example in Norwegian, where the
change first was from neuter plural collec-
tive nouns to feminine singular collective,
then masculine became used for nomen
agentis, neuter as nomen actiones; mascu-
line became also used to denote abstracta,
neuter to denote concreta, ultimately ending
up with common gender and neuter, Beito
(1986).
In a parallel way to (1), bilingual spea-
kers in Catalan and Spanish show confusion
not with borrowings, but with cognates that
differ in gender in one language and the
other. For example, the Catalan word for
road sign is senyal-m. whereas it is senal-f.
in Spanish. It has been observed that bilin-
gual speakers display confusion in gender
assignment when they speak Catalan, and
some display the confusion in their Spanish
production too. The study presented in sec-
tion 4 focuses on the Catalan production of
cognates displaying such a mismatch.
In this study we will observe the choices
as regards to gender when Catalan speakers
use a set of cognate words that differ in gen-
der in Catalan and Spanish. In this sense,
Costa et al. (2003)’s study on the gender
systems of bilingual speakers is relevant.
They try to find evidence for or against the
autonomy of the systems of both languages;
the pairs of languages considered have
structurally identical gender systems (i.e.,
Catalan-Spanish and French-Italian, with
two genders in each of the languages of the
language pair) and another pair is asym-