Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze the variability of gender assignment to nominal anglicisms in Brazilian Portuguese and to identify how the orthography of English loanwords and their establishment in the language influences such variation. This study also seeks to identify the most important factors that govern such gender assignment. The data were gathered from two Portuguese corpora, one consisting of more formal and edited language (Corpus do Português, News on the Web) and the other consisting of less formal and unaltered language, such as blog posts (Corpus do Português, Web/Dialects). Forty anglicisms were analyzed in order to study the variation in gender assignment based on the anglicisms’ orthography and establishment in the language, as well as to help determine whether the gender of the loanwords’ cognates or calques influences the gender assignment of words borrowed from English into Portuguese. The results of this study indicate that the gender of the anglicisms’ cognates or most frequent calques and the gender found in Portuguese dictionaries equally influence the gender assignment to anglicisms. This research also shows that variability in gender assignment is not significantly affected by an English loanword’s attestation in Portuguese dictionaries nor by the adaptation to Portuguese orthography of English loanwords, though there are trends that indicate a negative correlation between the variability of anglicisms’ genders and their attestation in Portuguese dictionaries.

Degree

College and Department

Humanities; Linguistics and English Language

Rights

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