# On the Relationships Between the Grammatical Genders of Inanimate Nouns and Their Co-Occurring Adjectives and Verbs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.01204 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01204/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

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- [The Causal Influence of Grammatical Gender on Distributional Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18567/) (2023)
- [Are Female Carpenters like Blue Bananas? A Corpus Investigation of Occupation Gender Typicality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02948/) (2024)
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## Abstract (arXiv)

We use large-scale corpora in six different gendered languages, along with tools from NLP and information theory, to test whether there is a relationship between the grammatical genders of inanimate nouns and the adjectives used to describe those nouns. For all six languages, we find that there is a statistically significant relationship. We also find that there are statistically significant relationships between the grammatical genders of inanimate nouns and the verbs that take those nouns as direct objects, as indirect objects, and as subjects. We defer a deeper investigation of these relationships for future work.
