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image of Russian culture (rather than grammatical gender) influences artistic personifications
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Abstract

Abstract

Can Russian grammatical gender influence an artist’s decisions in personification or conceptualization of abstract entities? This article aims to contribute to the scholarly literature on linguistic relativity, and re-examines the relationship between grammatical gender and patterns in thought and culture in the specific domain of art. The results presented in this paper support the notion that culture might have a tremendous effect that could entirely override any possible effect of language. Specifically, they show immediate androcentric bias — i.e., a strong effect for a male depiction (= a strong correspondence between personification in visual art and grammatical gender in Russian), but not for a female depiction.

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2025-08-18
2026-04-16

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Russian culture (rather than grammatical gender) influences artistic personifications
John Benjamins ; https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00066.poz
/content/journals/10.1075/ijolc.00066.poz
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keywords: linguistic relativity ; visual art ; Russian grammatical gender ; metaphor and metonymy ; personification

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