GENDER ASSIGNMENT TO ENGLISH BORROWINGS IN ROMANIANEVIDENCE FROM THE ECONOMIC DISCOURSE
GENDER ASSIGNMENT TO ENGLISH BORROWINGS IN ROMANIANEVIDENCE FROM THE ECONOMIC DISCOURSE

Summary/Abstract: The assignment of gender to borrowed nouns is one of the most interesting aspects of their morphological integration into the recipient language, as it results from the influence of several factors showing a lot of variability across languages. The factors generally discussed in the literature as influencing the assignment of gender to nouns borrowed from one language into another are: the physiological sex of the (animate) referent, the phonological shape of the borrowed noun and its association with a phonological shape in the host language requiring a certain gender, association with a synonym or semantic equivalent in the host language (usually referred to as analogical gender), and association with a homophone or suffix in the host language. Based on these theoretical considerations, the present paper investigates gender assignment to English borrowings (both single words and phrases) in a corpus of Romanian journalistic prose, and compares the results of the analysis to those of previous studies in the literature in an attempt to discover any relevant developments in this process. The criterion of physiological sex seems to have an overarching role in assigning gender to borrowed words, i.e. gender is almost always allocated according to the semantic features of animateness and sex when these are present. From a phonological point of view, nominal borrowings largely follow the same rules governing native material. Thus, with very few exceptions consonant-ending nouns receive masculine or neuter gender, while vowel ending nouns are assigned feminine gender. Both analogical gender and the association with a Romanian homophone seem to be only peripherally important in the studied corpus, being clearly overridden by semantic and formal factors. Finally, there is a tendency to include borrowed words into the ‘unmarked’ gender class of the recipient language, in our case the neuter class. Another conclusion of the paper is that no single factor can be regarded as having a categorical influence on gender assignment, this grammatical category being most often determined by the complex interplay of several of the factors discussed in the literature.

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