Italian Grammatical Gender: A Corpus Study from a Second Language Acquisition Perspective

The three objectives of this corpus study are first to describe how the gender of inanimate nouns is morphologically expressed in Italian, then determine the extent and reliability of contextual cues to Italian gender by analyzing 5,038 contextualized determiner phrases (DPs) drawn from 40 current newspaper and magazine articles and finally, consider learnability implications for Anglophone learners of Italian as a second language. A detailed descriptive account of gender morphology characterized by vocalic endings as portmanteau morphemes reveals several idiosyncrasies and complexities while the results of the written corpus showing that 33.4% of ambiguous feminine nouns and 31.0% of ambiguous masculine nouns are not gender-marked at all are argued to present significant difficulties for second language learners particularly for those who have a low tolerance for ambiguity.