Grammatical Gender Assignment to English Loanwords in Urdu
| dc.contributor.author | Shahzad Ahmad | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-06-10T13:54:51Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2014-06-10T13:54:51Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2013 | |
| dc.description.abstract | This study investigates the phenomenon of gender assignment in Urdu with reference to borrowed English nouns which have become a part of the Urdu lexicon. These nominal referents are no longer foreign. They are frequently used in the Urdu language, and they behave the same way in the linguistic system of Urdu as the native words do. Urdu speakers assign gendered roles to these inanimate nouns which belong to neuter gender in English gender system and are referred to by anaphoric pronoun it. But in Urdu, the same nouns are assigned either masculine or feminine gender, as there are only two genders in Urdu: masculine and feminine. For a speaker of Urdu, bakery, diary, coffee, shirt, and car are feminine whereas clinic, bag, truck, juice, and pen are masculine. The present study is primarily based on a qualitative paradigm, supported by quantitative data as well. It encompasses comparative analysis of gender assignment systems across the two languages. There are three main criteria that prove to be very effective in the discussion: semantic gender assignment and formal gender assignment systems. Formal gender assignment systems further incorporate phonological and morphological systems Corbett (1999). English has tripartite, natural, semantic gender system, with no room for grammatical gender; whereas Urdu gender system is based on semantic, as well as grammatical gender. The study attempts to find the answers to questions, such as, how native speakers of Urdu assign gender to borrowed English nominal, inanimate referents, and also to what linguistic processes (semantic, phonological and morphological) are at work for such gender assignment in Urdu. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://escholar.umt.edu.pk/handle/123456789/1143 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.publisher | University of Management and Technology | en_US |
| dc.title | Grammatical Gender Assignment to English Loanwords in Urdu | en_US |
| dc.title | Grammatical gender assignment to english loanwords in urdu | en_us |
| dc.type | Thesis | en_US |