Mishra, Suneeta
(2018)
Grammatical gender in story texts: interaction of linguistic structure, culture and cognition.
Language and Language Teaching, 7 (2).
pp. 4-9.
ISSN 2277-307X
Abstract
This paper is based on textbook analysis to explore the interaction of a specific grammatical
component-grammatical gender-with the socio-cultural notions of gender and
anthropomorphism in children's literature. The language under study is Hindi, which has a
two-gender system. Numerous studies (e.g. Boroditsky, Schmidt and Phillips, 2003; Basetti,
2014) have shown that grammatical gender colors speakers' perception of nouns. For the
present study, Hindi textbooks of classes I-III used in government schools across India were
analysed. The objective was to investigate the tools of personification used for animal
characters, in particular gender assignment via cues related to physical attributes or social
addresses. It was found that despite the logical possibility of representing both sexes for
almost all animal species (using proper names and other means), a significant percentage of
assigned gender correlated with the default grammatical gender of the animals. In one instance,
the teachers' instructions also followed this mapping. Additionally, the ratio of grammatically
masculine to feminine animals was 2:1. Analysis of gender-marking cues other than agreement
indicates that grammatical gender affects the speakers' perceptions of animal characters.
Given the dominant presence of animal characters in children's literature, such an effect,
combined with the skewed representational ratio between the two genders can accentuate the
marginal representation of feminine gender even in imagined constructions such as a story. In
my paper I have tried to present a possible alternative to this.
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