Grammatical gender universalities underlying uniform mental representations of the world: Myth or reality?

The subject of grammatical gender and cognition has been continuously examined in psycholinguistics, wherein findings show essential support for gender congruency effects, suggesting that grammar lends matrices for speakers' mental representations. Based on these psycholinguistic data, this study offers an innovative vista of investigation that combines typological and cognitive linguistic approaches. Its purpose lies in determining whether grammatical gender patterns sanction cross-linguistic universality in conceptualising entities as male or female, and whether grammatical gender universalities have semantic motivation. This research reveals universal tendencies in grammatical gender affiliation of the analysed nouns in 32 two and three gender languages belonging to different groups of the Indo-European, Indo-Iranian and Afro-Asiatic language families. From a cognitive perspective, these findings testify to the identical mental images of the entities denoting artefacts, natural phenomena and abstract concepts in speakers of the languages under consideration. Furthermore, grammatical gender universalities manifest certain semantic dimensions involving the motives associated with masculine or feminine and symbolic suggestions of the Woman archetype. As per the data from cognitive poetics, grammatical gender universalities become objects of special stylistic choices emerging as personified images of symbolic relevance in gender and non-gender languages.