Semantic and gender implications in feminine substantives

the teaching of Portuguese to immigrants who have French as a second language

Abstract

Based on observations made in classes of Portuguese to immigrants, it was possible to identify gender of nouns in the Portuguese language as a difficulty in learning the language. Because of the doubts that emerged during the lessons to immigrants, this work was developed from this guiding question: in the case of morphologically feminine nouns, why is there no perception of inclusion of the masculine gender? It was hypothesized that this difficulty is probably linked to the associations that immigrants make between Portuguese and their second language, French. In order to verify this hypothesis, tests were developed to understand the difficulty of gender differentiation in the acquisition of Portuguese as a Host Language. The tests’ application was structured as follows: firstly, the volunteer participants, 4 (four) Portuguese learners, had to identify the gender of semantically disconnected words, then in a context of simulated use, and finally through online processing, in which students were asked orally about the reasons for their choices in textual questions. From the analysis of the findings, it is possible to verify that the knowledge of other languages, mainly of French in this case, influences a lot in the learning of another language.