Constructions Grammar and Linguistic Relativism: the case of grammatical gender
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/1984-8412.2023.e79494Keywords:
Gender, Thematic Vowel, Constructions, RelativismAbstract
This paper aims to discuss the nature of gender marks in Portuguese, their relationship with thematic vowels and their functions. We believe that the distinction between the concepts of gender endings and thematic vowel is psychologically unreal. In addition, we hypothesize that the function of the gender constructions (as they are called here) is closely related to the categories of social gender. Thus, even when combined with inanimate referent nouns, they convey such meaning, which forces speakers to assign characteristics commonly related to social genders, and therefore to humans, to inanimate referents. In this sense, we defend, in this work, that language affects the way we think in some way, approaching Linguistic Relativism. Such statements were corroborated by results obtained through the linguistic experiment reported here.
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