Failures of Gricean reasoning and the role of stereotypes in the production of gender marking in French

Abstract

We partly replicate von der Malsburg et al. (2020)’s recent experiments investigating the relationship between speaker expectations, gender stereotypes and language use in English on a grammatical gender language: French. The results of our experiment show how the linguistic particularities of the English and French gender marking systems interact with speaker expectations and stereotypes to create different patterns of gender marking production. They also raise a puzzle for current theoretical and computational frameworks that formalize Gricean pragmatics, particularly those in which informativity (Gricean Quantity) is assumed to play a driving role in linguisticproduction.

Keywords

• Language use
• grammatical gender
• French
• Gricean reasoning
• formal pragmatics
• production experiment