The Causal Influence of Grammatical Gender on Distributional Semantics

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether grammatical gender influences the meaning and adjective choice in language, using a causal model to disentangle the effects of gender and meaning, and finds that gender's influence is negligible when controlling for meaning.

Contribution

It introduces a novel causal graphical model to analyze the relationship between grammatical gender, noun meaning, and adjective choice, clarifying the influence of gender.

Findings

Significant relationship between noun gender and adjectives in raw data.

Controlling for noun meaning, the gender-adjective relationship becomes insignificant.

Supports the view that grammatical gender's influence on meaning is limited.

Abstract

How much meaning influences gender assignment across languages is an active area of research in linguistics and cognitive science. We can view current approaches as aiming to determine where gender assignment falls on a spectrum, from being fully arbitrarily determined to being largely semantically determined. For the latter case, there is a formulation of the neo-Whorfian hypothesis, which claims that even inanimate noun gender influences how people conceive of and talk about objects (using the choice of adjective used to modify inanimate nouns as a proxy for meaning). We offer a novel, causal graphical model that jointly represents the interactions between a noun's grammatical gender, its meaning, and adjective choice. In accordance with past results, we find a significant relationship between the gender of nouns and the adjectives that modify them. However, when we control for the meaning of the noun, the relationship between grammatical gender and adjective choice is near zero and insignificant.