Sexual Dimorphism in Language, and the Gender Shift Hypothesis of Homosexuality

Psychological sex differences have been studied scientifically for more than a century, yet linguists still debate about the existence, magnitude, and causes of such differences in language use. Advances in psychology and cognitive neuroscience have shown the importance of sex and sexual orientation for various psychobehavioural traits, but the extent to which such differences manifest in language use is largely unexplored. Using computerised text analysis (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count: LIWC 2015), this study found substantial psycholinguistic sexual dimorphism in a large corpus of English-language novels (n = 304) by heterosexual authors. The psycholinguistic sex differences largely aligned with known psychological sex differences, such as empathising–systemising, people–things orientation, and men’s more pronounced spatial cognitive styles and abilities. Furthermore, consistent with predictions from cognitive neuroscience, novels (n = 158) by lesbian authors showed minor signs of psycholinguistic masculinisation, while novels (n = 167) by homosexual men had a female-typical psycholinguistic pattern, supporting the gender shift hypothesis of homosexuality. The findings on this large corpus of 66.9 million words indicate how psychological group differences based on sex and sexual orientation manifest in language use in two centuries of literary art.

Cosmopolitan Roots in Shanghai

Mahjong had been spreading throughout China’s urban centers for four decades before the rest of the world began playing it. A new elite class of Chinese intermediaries eventually helped introduce mahjong to American businessmen and travelers, for whom it soon served similar purposes of community, entertainment, and posturing as it did for Chinese players. While expatriate male social circles were more visible, the growing numbers of both American women and Western-educated Chinese women helped create new patterns and places of interaction. The seeds of the gender shift from predominately male to female mahjong players originated in the expat world. Mahjong’s path through American social circles highlights the dynamics of leisure and domestic labor that underwrote the patterns of foreign life in semi-colonial China.

Primi appunti sulla manipolazione dell’assegnazione del genere in sanvalentinese

"Preliminary Notes on Gender Assignment Manipulation in Sanvalentinese. This contribution draws attention on a peculiar feature of the Italo-Romance dialect spoken in San Valentino in Abruzzo Citeriore, where a subgroup of feminine nouns displays both feminine and masculine plural options. Gender shift to masculine in the plural seems to be exploited to obtain semantic differences related to countability and evaluation, namely to refer respectively to weak differentiation and pejorative meaning. This phenomenon, known as recategorization or gender assignment manipulation, is rather common in African languages of different families, but less pervasive and systematic in Romance. Gender and recategorization in Sanvalentinese are discussed in relation to inflectional classes, of which this contribution provides a sketch. Keywords: gender, number, recategorization, inflectional class, overdifferentiation, collective plural, Romance dialectology, metaphony."

Gender shift in a Norwegian diminutive construction

In this article, we discuss the ei litta construction in Norwegian, a construction that involves the use of feminine morphology combined with non-feminine nouns, and expresses evaluation. Through corpus analyses and an online survey, we investigate the form and function of the construction, synchronically and diachronically. We discuss the emergence of the ei litta construction in the light of a larger restructuring of the Norwegian gender system, possibly allowing for greater flexibility in the assignment of gender. We also describe the ei litta construction as an example of gender shift, a previously unattested morphological strategy in Norwegian to express evaluative meaning.

Diminutives and augmentatives in Beja (North-Cushitic)

The evaluative morphology of Beja consists of four devices: gender shift to feminine on nouns, and sound change (r>l) on nouns, verbs and adjectives form the diminutives. A suffix -loːj on adjectives, and -l on Manner converbs, form the augmentatives. The analysis focuses on the evaluative, emotional and other pragmatic values associated with these morphemes, size, endearment, praise, romantic love, contempt, politeness and eloquence. When relevant, the links to the general mechanism of semantic change, lambda-abstraction-specification proposed by Jurafsky (1996), is discussed. This paper also discusses productivity, cases where the evaluative device has scope over an adjacent noun instead of its host, the distribution of values across semantic domains and genres, and cases of lexicalization. The corpus analysis shows that the proportional frequency of pragmatic expressive connotations compared to the denotational meaning is higher for diminutives than for augmentatives. Further, with diminutives, positive emotional values are more frequent than negative ones, while with augmentatives attested pejorative values are very rare. The analysis is set within a typological framework.

The variant [ʃ] in the Spanish of Ciudad Juárez

A characteristic feature of the Spanish spoken in the Mexican state of Chihuahua is the pronunciation of the standard phoneme /tʃ/ (<ch>) as a non-standard allophone [ʃ] (<sh>). The present study analyzes the social and linguistic factors that influence variation in the Mexico-United States border community of Ciudad Juárez. Direct and indirect elicitations techniques were used to gather tokens of /tʃ/ from a sample of 40 local speakers who varied in age, sex, socioeconomic status, education level, and degree of bilingualism. The data was perceptually and acoustically interpreted and then statistically examined using variable rules analysis. On the linguistic side, the results show that [s], [i], [u] in preceding phonological context favor weakening. On the social side, the most prone participants to produce [ʃ] were: young men from low socioeconomic status, regardless of being Spanish monolinguals or Spanish-English sequential bilinguals. These findings indicate an ongoing gender shift with respect to previous research in the same community.