Imagine that you have received a research grant to conduct a linguistic study of your target language and culture. How would you get started, and what would you investigate? How would different structural components presented in class appear in your work?
If I received a research grant to conduct a linguistic study of Portuguese, I would investigate the impacts of the gendering of nouns on Brazilians’ perceptions of random objects. My approach would be through literature review and on the ground research. Through literature review, I would be able to see what other studies have been completed about these topics. I would also be interested in what studies have been completed about the origins of Portuguese and how its roots relate to why it is a gendered language currently. The Western Iberian Latin roots of the language are largely the reason. However, I would be interested to study the ethnogenesis of Portuguese branched off from this language by researching language trees and comparing the similarity of certain key word roots using word trees. However, new words are also constantly being created. I would be interested in how genders are assigned to new words as well. I know that a majority of gender assignments are based on what a word’s suffix is, such as -o indicates a masculine noun. However, I am interested in how exceptions to these common rules are decided.
Additionally, I am also interested in how these grammatical rules related to gender play a role in people’s perception of the world, in other words, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I would be interested in finding ways to test how gendered nouns affect people’s perceptions of those objects. One way that I’ve found this was done in a similar study is asking people to assign voices to animals, being able to classify animals as certain genders, and testing people’s perceived similarities between objects.
Comments
This is something super interesting! I would imagine this is a relatively new dilemma now that society is more accepting of all genders. I know that in spanish they also have the a ending for feminine and o ending for masculine, but if the gender is undetermined the word will end in "@". This could be something to look into and see if they have this symbol in Portuguese!