GRAMMATICAL GENDER AND LINGUISTIC LOANING: FEMININE GENDER ASSIGNMENT IN ITALIAN ANGLICISMS

The paper deals with the problem of gender assignment of loan words from predominantly isolating languages (such as English) in languages with (partly) flexible morphology (such as Italian). The English as a donor language does not have grammatical gender, whereas in recipient language (Italian) it is obligatory. How to assign the gender to English loans in Italian if the loan word does not indicate a living being scilicet does not have the natural gender? The aim of this paper is to determine the rules for assigning feminine gender to English nouns in Italian because the nouns become feminine only on the basis of the rule (otherwise, in cases where no rule can be used, the noun would be, by default, of the masculine gender). The research is conducted on word corpus consisting of examples taken from Italian dictionaries and newspapers as well as from Google.