Cover not available
Part of
Gender, Language and the Periphery: Grammatical and social gender from the margins
Edited by Julie Abbou and Fabienne H. Baider
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 264] 2016
► pp. 227–256

When She and He become It

The use of grammatical gender in the Greek of the Armenians of Cyprus

This paper is based on empirical data with adult speakers bilingual in Armenian and Cypriot Greek and examines the results of the contact between Armenian and Cypriot Greek (CG) in Cyprus. The focus is on the use of the grammatical gender of CG by the Armenians of Cyprus. The speakers interviewed are divided into two groups: (a) Cypriot-Armenians (CyAs) who were born in or arrived to Cyprus as infants, and (b) non-Cypriot-Armenians (non-CyAs) who arrived to Cyprus as teenagers or young adults. Variables such as age, sex, generation for the CyA group and length of exposure to CG and intensity of contact for the non-CyA group are taken into consideration. The overall results show that the use of grammatical gender is problematic for both groups exhibiting similarities in terms of the location of grammatical deviations in noun phrases, difficulties in gender agreement, and the preference for the use of the neuter gender.
Keywords: Armenian, grammatical gender, Greek-Cypriot, language in contact, multilingualism, second language acquisition
Published online: 16 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.264.09had
References (62)
References
Abbou, Julie, and Fabienne Baider. 2016. “Periphery, gender, language An introduction.” In Gender, Language and the Periphery. Grammatical and social gender from the margins, ed. by Julie Abbou and Fabienne Baider, 1–22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aikhenvald, Alexandra. Y. 1996. “Physical Properties in a Gender System: A Study of Manambu.” Language and linguistics in Melanesia 27: 175–187.Google Scholar
. 2003. Classifiers: A Typology of Noun Categorization Devices. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Aissati, A. El, Louis Boumans, Leonie Cornips, Margreet Dorleijn, and Jacomine Nortier. 2005. “Turks- en Marokkaans Nederlands” [Turkish and Moroccan Dutch]. In Wereldnederlands. Oude en jonge variëteiten van het Nederlands, ed. by Nicoline van der Sijs, 149–183. The Hague: SDU.Google Scholar
Alarcón, Irma V. 2011. “Spanish Gender Agreement under Complete and Incomplete Acquisition: Early and Late Bilinguals’ Linguistic Behavior within the Noun Phrase.” Bilingualism 14(3): 332–350. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Anastasiadi-Symeonidi, Anna. 1994. Neological Borrowing in Modern Greek: Direct Loans from French and Anglo-American – A Morphophonological Analysis. Thessaloniki: self-published.Google Scholar
Audring, Jenny. 2014. “Gender as a Complex Feature.” Language Sciences 43: 5–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bartning, Inge. 2000. “Gender Agreement in L2 French: Pre-Advanced vs Advanced Learners.” Studia Linguistica 54(2): 225–237. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blom, Elma, Daniela Polišenská, and Sharon Unsworth. 2008. “The Acquisition of Grammatical Gender in Dutch.” Second Language Research 24(3): 259–265. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Campbell, Lyle. 2004. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction 2nd edition. Cambridge: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Carroll, John Bissel. 1989. “The Carroll Model: A 25-Year Retrospective and Prospective View.” Educational Researcher 18(1): 26–31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Castellino, Giorgio R. 1975. “Gender in Cushitic.” Hamito-Semitica Proceedings, 333–359.Google Scholar
Clark, Eve. 1985. “The acquisition of Romance, with Special Reference to French.” In The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition vol. 1, ed. by Dan I. Slobin, 687–782. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Corbett, Greville, G., and Mtenje, Alfred, D. 1987. “Gender Agreement in Chichewa.” Studies in African Linguistics 18(1): 1–38.Google Scholar
Cornips, Leonie. 2002. “Ethnisch Nederlands” [Ethnic Dutch]. In Een Buurt in Beweging. Talen en Culturen in het Utrechtse Lombok en Transvaal, ed. by Hans Bennis, Gus Extra, Pieter Muysken, and Jacomine Nortier, 285–302. Amsterdam: Aksant.Google Scholar
. 2004. “Straattaal: Sociale betekenis en morfo-syntactische verschijnselen.” In Taeldeman, man van de taal, schatbewaarder van de taal, ed. by Johan De Caluwe, Georges De Schutter, Magdalena Devos, and Jacques Van Keymeulen, 175–188. Gent: Academia Press.Google Scholar
. 2008. “Loosing Grammatical Gender in Dutch: The Result of Bilingual Acquisition and/or an Act of Identity?” International Journal of Bilingualism 12(1/2): 105–124. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cornips, Leonie, and de Rooij, Vincent. 2003. “Kijk, Levi’s is een goeie merk: Maar toch hadden ze ‘m gedist van je schoenen doen ‘m niet. Jongerenvariëteit heft de toekmost.” In Het Nederlands van Nu en Straks. Waar gaat het Nederlands naar toe?, ed. by Jan Stroop, 131–142. Amsterdam: Prometheus.Google Scholar
Delisle, Helga, H. 1985. “The Acquisition of Gender by American Students of German.” The Modern Language Journal 69: 55–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dewaele, Jean Marc, and Véronique, Daniel. 2001. “Gender Assignment and Gender Agreement in Advanced French Interlanguage: A Cross-Sectional Study.” Bilingualism: Language and cognition 4(3): 275–297. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Finnemann, Michael, D. 1994. “Learning Agreement in the Noun Phrase: The Strategies of Three First-year Spanish Students.” IRAL 30(2): 122–136.Google Scholar
Franceschina, Florencia. 2001. “Grammatical Gender in Native and Non-native Spanish Grammars.” In Essex Graduate Student Papers in Language and Linguistics vol. 3, ed. by Doug Arnold, Florencia Franceschina, and Emma Thomas, 1–18. Essex: University of Essex.Google Scholar
. 2003. The Nature of Grammatical Representations in Mature L2 Grammars: The case of Spanish Grammatical Gender. PhD dissertation. Essex: University of Essex.Google Scholar
Georgalidou, Marianthi, Vassilios Spyropoulos, Hasan Kaili, and Anthi Revithiadou. 2005. “Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Aspects of a Rhodian Greek variety.” The 6th International Linguistics Conference of the Organisation for the Propagation of the Greek Language “The Dialectal Varieties of Greek from the Ancient Era until Today”, ed. by Coriliano Otranto, 6–8. Available online: [URL]
Grüter, Theres, Casey Lew-Williams, and Anne Fernald. 2012. “Grammatical Gender in L2: A Production or a Real-time Processing Problem?” Second Language Research 28(2), 191–215. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Guellouz, Mariem. 2016. “Gender marking and the feminine imaginary in Arabic.” In Gender, Language and the Periphery. Grammatical and social gender from the margins, ed. by Julie Abbou and Fabienne Baider, 47–63. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Guthrie, Malcolm. 1948. “Gender, Number and Person in Bantu Languages.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 12(3/4): 847–856. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hadjidemetriou, Chryso. 2001. Self-Initiated Self-Repairs and Syntax-for-Interaction: Evidence from Greek Conversation. MA dissertation. Essex, U.K.: University of Essex.Google Scholar
. 2009. The Consequences of Language Contact: Armenian and Maronite Arabic in Contact with Cypriot Greek. PhD dissertation. Essex, U.K.: University of EssexGoogle Scholar
Holton, David, Peter Mackridge, and Irene Philippaki-Warburton. 2004. Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language. London; New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Janse, Mark, Brian D. Joseph, and Gunther De Vogelaer. 2011. “Changing Gender Systems: A Multidisciplinary Approach.” Folia Linguistica 45(2): 237–244. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jaworski, Adam. 1989. “On Gender and Sex in Polish.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 78: 83–92.Google Scholar
Joseph, Brian D., and Irene Philippaki-Warburton. 1987. Modern Greek. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Koehn, Caroline. 1994. “The Acquisition of Gender and Number Morphology within NP.” In Bilingual First Language Acquisition: French and German Grammatical Development, ed. by Jürgen M. Meisel, 29–51. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kormos, Judit. 1999. “Monitoring and Self-repair in L2.” Language Learning 49(2): 303–342. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mastropavlou, Maria. 2006. The Role of Phonological Salience and Feature Interpretability in the Grammar of Typically Developing and Language Impaired Children. PhD dissertation. Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.Google Scholar
Montrul, Silvina. 2013. “How “Native” are Heritage Speakers?” Heritage Language Journal 10(2): 153–177.Google Scholar
Montrul, Silvina, Rebecca Foote, and Silvia Perpiñán. 2008. “Gender Agreement in Adult Second Language Learners and Spanish Heritage Speakers: The Effects of Age and Context of Acquisition.” Language Learning 58(3): 503–553. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Muchnik, Malka. 2016. “Trying to change a gender-marked language Classical vs. Modern Hebrew.” In Gender, Language and the Periphery. Grammatical and social gender from the margins, ed. by Julie Abbou and Fabienne Baider, 25–46. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Müller, Natascha. 1990. “Developing two Gender Assignment Systems Simultaneously.” Two first languages: Early Grammatical Development in Bilingual Children, ed. by Jürgen M. Meisel, 193–234. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.Google Scholar
. 1994. “Gender and Number Agreement with DP.” In Bilingual First Language Acquisition: French and German Grammatical Development, ed. by Jürgen M. Meisel, 53–82. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Newton, Brian. 1972. Cypriot Greek: Its phonology and inflections. The Hague: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
O’Connor, Nadine. 1988. “Repairs as Indicative of Interlanguage Variation and Change.” In Georgetown round table in languages and Linguistics 1988: Synchronic and Diachronic Approaches to Linguistic and Variation and Change, ed. by Thomas J. Walsh, 251–259. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Oliphant, Katrina. 1997. Acquisition of Grammatical Gender in Italian as a Foreign Language. PhD dissertation. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center. [URL]Google Scholar
Paul-Pattie, Susan. 1997. Faith in History: Armenians rebuilding Community. Washington; London: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Pérez-Pereira, Miguel. 1991. “The Acquisition of Gender: What Spanish Children tell us.” Journal of Child Language 18: 571–590. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana, Alicia Pousada, and David Sankoff. 1982. “Competing Influences on Gender Assingment: Variable Process, Stable Outcome.” Lingua 57: 1–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ralli, Angeliki. 2002. “The Role of Morphology in Gender Determination: Evidence from Modern Greek.” Linguistics 40(3): 519–551. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Roca, Iggy. 1989. “The Organisation of Grammatical Gender.” Transactions of the Philological Society 7(1): 1–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2000. “On the Meaning of Gender.” Hispanic Research Journal 1(2): 113–128. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sakayan, Dora. 2000. Modern Western Armenian for the English-speaking World: A Contrastive Approach. Montreal: Arod Books.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A., Gail Jefferson, and Harvey Sacks. 1977. “The Preference for Self-Correction in the Organization of Repair in Conversation.” Language 53(2): 361–382. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seaman, David P. 1972. Modern Greek and American English in Contact. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Stephany, Ursula. 1997. “The Acquisition of Greek.” In The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition vol. 4, ed. by Dan I. Slobin, 183–333. Mahwah; London: Lawrence Erlbaum Ass.Google Scholar
Towell, Richard. 1987. “Approaches to the Analysis of the Oral Language Development of the Advanced Learner.” In The Advanced Language Learner, ed. by James A. Coleman, and Richard Towell. London: CILTR.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. 2002. Sociolinguistic Variation and Change. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Tsimpli, Ianthi M. 2003. “I kataktisi tou genous stin elliniki os defteri glossa” [The acquisition of gender in Greek as a second language]. In Genos [Gender], ed. by Anna Anastasiadi-Simeonidi, Angeliki Ralli, and Despina Chila-Markopoulou, 168–189. Athens: Publications Pataki.Google Scholar
Tsimpli, Ianthi M., and Aafke Hulk. 2013. “Grammatical Gender and the Notion of Default: Insights from Language Acquisition.” Lingua 137: 128–144. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tsokalidou, Petroula. 1996. Το φύλο της γλώσσας. Οδηγός μη σεξιστικής γλώσσας για τον δημόσιο ελληνικό λόγο [Gender in language. Guide for non-sexist Language in Greek Public Language]. Athens: Syndesmos Ellinidon Epistimonon.Google Scholar
Unsworth, Sharon. 2008. “Age and Input in the Acquisition of Grammatical Gender in Dutch.” Second Language Research 24(3): 365–395. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Unsworth, Sharon, Froso Argyri, Leonie Cornips, Aafke Hulk, Antonella Sorace, and Ianthi M. Tsimpli. 2014. “The Role of Age of Onset and Input in Early Child Bilingualism in Greek and Dutch.” Applied Psycholinguistics 35(4): 765–805. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Valiouli, Maria. 1997. “Grammatical Gender Clash: Slip of the Tongue or Shift of Perspective?” Linguistics 35: 89–110. DOI logoGoogle Scholar