Publications

Publication details [#68121]

Abdel-Raheem, Ahmed and Mouna Goubaa. 2021. Language and cultural cognition: The case of grammatical gender in Arabic and personified gender in cartoons. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 19 (1) : 111–141.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Journal DOI
10.1075/rcl

Annotation

In this paper, a large-scale corpus of Arab cartoons is analysed to measure the correspondence between grammatical gender in Arabic and personified gender in images. The results show that the effect is very strong for males (a near-perfect relationship between the two, grammatical and visual depiction), but the reverse is the case for females (the grammatical description is almost the opposite in perceived meaning of the graphical depiction). It can be a substantive cartoon effect. That is, there is more ambiguity in images depicting females due to some implicit cultural effect (i.e., males/gendered maleness dominates even in the text in ‘male-centric’ cultures). The study looks at the implications of this androcentric behavior to understand the complex set of relationships linking language, thought, and culture. Such research will aid both gender studies and cognition scholarship based on multimodal stimuli.