Om kjønn og adjektiv

Do female and male writers use adjectives differently? This article is a survey of the potentially gendered use of adjectives in Norwegian novels. It is also a tribute to Trond Tosteruds's legendary article on grammatical gender. While our concern here is biological sex of authors and their use of adjectives, the man of the hour was concerned with rule-governed gender on nouns, albeit with a biological accent. Several readers — and listeners at MONS in 1999 — took note of the bold rule that said that oblong objects, not to mention protruding natural formations, are masculine, while natural phenomena such as pits and cavities are feminine (Trosterud 2001).