Abstract

Previous studies generally considered grammatical gender in French as a binary system, consisting of a masculine and a feminine gender, both reflected beyond the nouns themselves on e.g. determiners and adjectives. However, a glance at the French system reveals that the existence of two forms does not provide adequate evidence for the assumption of a bipartite underlying system (Loporcaro 2020) and that there is still evidence for inflectional classes in Frenchas well (Lowenstamm 2012). The present study considers the possibility of a tripartite gendersystem in French by taking into consideration the results of two psycholinguistic experiments.The first experiment indicates that French native speakers process feminine nouns faster and more accurately than masculine nouns. Since this result is surprising, former Latin neuter nounswere selected from the masculine nouns of the first experiment and considered as a separategroup in a second experiment. This group of nouns is processed significantly longer and lessaccurately than feminine nouns and the remaining masculine nouns. The results of these experiments allow the discussion of which form should be considered marked in the French systemand of why the tripartite gender system of Latin survived in nowadays French. Moreover, thenotion of default as well as the role of a default gender in language processing are discussed.Considering the French tripartite gender system as proposed in Lowenstamm (2008) in the framework of the epigenetic model by Biberauer, Holmberg, Roberts and Sheehan (2014), aparametric description of language change is proposed. The results of the current study allow anew perspective on the French gender system and provide insights into the role of the grammatical gender and inflectional class features in French.