On the assignment of natural gender in Lithuanian as a second language

The present study investigates how beginner adult students of Lithuanian as a foreign language assign natural gender to nouns. The grammatical category of gender is a complex phenomenon which belongs to the domains of syntax, morphology and semantics. As far as this paper is concerned, the assignment of grammatical gender is recognised as an academically challenging task to foreign language learners; however, the issue is still under-researched in the studies of Lithuanian as a foreign language. The aim of this study is to examine whether the beginner adult learners of Lithuanian as a foreign language rely on semantic or morphological clues when assigning natural gender, to identify the difficulties they encounter and the reasons for the difficulties. The paper analyses how learners assign natural gender to the nouns when their morphological and semantic clues conform, how they deal with gender conflict and how they assign indefinite gender to nouns...