This seminar will consist of two talks given in English by two MA students to prepare for presenting at ConSOLE.
Margareta will present the research she carried out in her BA thesis, where she explored the attitudes towards and use of gender-neutral pronouns. She also explored how speakers of Norwegian feel about the insertion of a gender-neutral pronoun in the language. In this talk, she discusses her findings, which had a great diversity, though there were more positive attitudes than expected. Speakers of Norwegian were generally accepting to the insertion of hen ‘they (singular)’ and thought it would have a positive effect on our society.
Elena will talk about her BA thesis as well. She looked into grammatical gender selection (masculine or feminine) of Norwegian nouns by native speakers of Spanish when code-switching. The results agreed with previous literature that argues for masculine gender to be the default. However, there are other factors at play, as the phonological shape of the word and the gender of the translation equivalent seem to also affect the gender selection.