Gender in Dutch/Portuguesecodeswitching

Abstract

This study focuses on unveiling the strategies involved in gender assignment in codeswitching between two gendered languages: Dutch (common/neuter gender) and Portuguese (masculine/feminine gender). We draw on naturalistic speech (n = 32 speakers), elicited production (n = 35) as well as intuitional data (n = 57) from Dutch/Portuguese bilinguals stemming from three communities in Paraná, Southern Brazil, aiming to disentangle the relative roles of linguistic and extralinguistic factors on gender assignment. In unilingual Dutch, we find that Dutch/Portuguese bilinguals overgeneralize common determiners and adjectives to neuter nouns, similarly to other Dutch bilinguals outside the Netherlands (Clyne 1977; Clyne and Pauwels 2013; Folmer 1991; Giesbers 1997). In codeswitched constructions, however, speakers assign common and masculine gender as defaults, in line with the prediction that speakers of language pairs with no gender values in common prefer gender defaulting in mixed constructions (Klassen 2016). While extralinguistic factors such as age and relative use of the languages shaped unilingual Dutch production, the patterns during codeswitching were conventionalized across the speaker sample.