Centre for Advanced Study

at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters

MultiGender: A Multilingual Approach to Grammatical Gender

Information

Former 2019/2020 Humanities - Theology

Abstract

Language is one of our most complex cognitive abilities. The MultiGender project will study one linguistic pheno­menon, grammatical gender, from a variety of perspectives, with data from various groups of multilinguals speaking languages with different gender systems. Grammatical gender is a category sorting nouns into different classes. For example, in most Norwegian dialects we may identify three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter: en bil ‘a car’, ei bok ‘a book’, and et hus ‘a house’. Some languages have two genders (e.g. Italian), while others have no grammatical gender (e.g. English). Gender is subject to significant variation across the world’s languages, not only with respect to the number of gender classes, but also transparency of gender assignment and relation to other properties (case, definite­ness), etc.

MultiGender will bring together world-leading experts from several disciplines of language science, including formal linguistics, processing, multilingualism, acquisition/attrition, and historical language change. The project will focus on three different areas: i) how gender varies across dialects, languages, and multi­lingual individuals, ii) how gender is acquired in multilingual contexts, and iii) how gender may change due to reduced input and use. MultiGender will be based on a diverse set of methodologies and investigate whether or not grammatical gender is the same category across multiple languages.

Fellows

  • Alexiadou, Artemis
    Professor Humboldt University of Berlin 2019/2020
  • Anderssen, Merete
    Professor UiT The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) 2019/2020
  • Björnsdóttir, Sigríður
    PhD Candidate UiT The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) 2019/2020
  • Busterud, Guro
    Associate Professor University of Oslo (UiO) 2019/2020
  • Corbett, Greville
    Professor University of Surrey 2019/2020
  • Enger, Hans-Olav
    Professor University of Oslo (UiO) 2019/2020
  • Heiene, Ingrid Marie
    PhD Candidate Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) 2019/2020
  • Hopp, Holger
    Professor University of Braunschweig 2019/2020
  • Johannessen, Janne Bondi
    Professor University of Oslo (UiO) 2019/2020
  • Klassen, Rachel
    Postdoctoral Fellow UiT The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) 2019/2020
  • Kramer, Ruth
    Associate Professor Georgetown University 2019/2020
  • Kupisch, Tanja
    Professor University of Konstanz & UiT The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) 2019/2020
  • Mitrofanova, Natalia
    Postdoctoral Fellow UiT The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) 2019/2020
  • Polinsky, Maria
    Professor University of Maryland 2019/2020
  • Rodina, Yulia
    Associate Professor UiT The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) 2019/2020
  • Rothman, Jason
    Professor UiT The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) 2019/2020
  • Sekerina, Irina
    Professor College of Staten Island of the City University of New York 2019/2020
  • Sorace, Antonella
    Professor University of Edinburgh 2019/2020
  • Åfarli, Tor Anders
    Professor Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) 2019/2020

Previous events

News

Group leader

  • Terje Lohndal

    Title Professor Institution Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) Year at CAS 2019/2020
  • Marit Westergaard

    Title Professor Institution UiT The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) Year at CAS 2019/2020
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