How much meaning influences gender assignment across languages is an active
area of research in modern linguistics and cognitive science. We can view
current approaches as aiming to determine where gender assignment falls on a
spectrum, from being fully arbitrarily determined to being largely semantically
determined. For the latter case, there is a formulation of the neo-Whorfian
hypothesis, which claims that even inanimate noun gender influences how people
conceive of and talk about objects (using the choice of adjective used to
modify inanimate nouns as a proxy for meaning). We offer a novel, causal
graphical model that jointly represents the interactions between a noun's
grammatical gender, its meaning, and adjective choice. In accordance with past
results, we find a relationship between the gender of nouns and the adjectives
which modify them. However, when we control for the meaning of the noun, we
find that grammatical gender has a near-zero effect on adjective choice,
thereby calling the neo-Whorfian hypothesis into question.

语义对于语言中的性别确定有多大影响是现代语言学和认知科学中一个研究热点领域。本研究提出了一个新的因果图模型，共同表示名词的语法性别、意义和形容词选择之间的相互作用。研究结果表明，虽然名词的性别会影响修饰它们的形容词，但在控制名词的意义后，语法性别对形容词选择几乎没有影响，从而质疑了新沃尔夫假说。