Beyond Default Masculine: Semantic Influence on English Loanword Gender in Contemporary Spoken Italian

Aims and objectives: This study addresses fundamental questions about how grammatical gender systems accommodate foreign lexical items by examining English loanwords in contemporary Italian. I investigate whether gender assignment operates through active cross-linguistic semantic networks or default mechanisms, and test the hypothesis that marked (feminine) assignments exhibit stronger semantic motivation than unmarked forms. Methodology: Employing corpus-based quantitative analysis, I observe loanword gender patterns using naturalistic spoken data in the domain of Italian workplace discourse. To investigate whether semantic constraints significantly influence gender assignment, I analysed 779 tokens of 112 unassimilated English loanwords from the KIParla corpus (2017–2021), comprising 560 speakers and over 150 hr of recorded speech. Each loanword was systematically coded for (1) assigned gender, (2) availability of native semantic equivalents, and (3) gender alignment with these equivalents. Data analysis: Statistical analysis employed Fisher’s exact test and chi-square test to examine semantic gender correspondence patterns. Findings: Results reveal significant gender correspondence between loanwords and their Italian associates ( p < .05, Cramer’s V = 0.28). Among loanwords with identifiable semantic equivalents, 82.1% exhibit semantic gender correspondence, suggesting active cross-linguistic influence in assignment patterns. Notably, feminine assignments show perfect alignment (100%), while masculine assignments show more variation (75.8%). Originality: To my knowledge, this is the first corpus-based study of loanword gender assignment in contemporary Standard Italian using naturalistic spoken data. In particular, this research proposes the semantic accessibility constraint , suggesting that feminine assignment requires clear semantic activation, whereas masculine assignment relies on both semantic and default mechanisms. Significance: Results suggest that contemporary unassimilated loanword integration operates primarily through active cross-linguistic semantic networks rather than surface-level processing. In particular, the semantic accessibility constraint offers novel insights into theories of feminine as a marked gender requiring specific semantic justification.