The Assignment of Grammatical and Inherent Gender to English Loan Words in Lithuanian Discourse

The aim of this study was to analyse the gender assignment patterns and processes to English loan nouns that were inserted into Lithuanian language during the process of natural speech. Construction Morphology and the Morpheme-based Model were fused for the purpose of the analysis creating the Integrated Construction Morphology Model which allowed the detailed analysis of phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic procedures. The main focus of this research is the change that occurs in the word level while inserting an L2 item into L1 discourse. The findings revealed that masculine gender was assigned as a default gender regardless of stem vowel classification for inanimate nouns. Biological sex determined the gender of English nouns that are animate. Furthermore, a complex process of suffix merging from English and Lithuanian languages was observed, regarding the combined suffixes as one item. This research contributed to greater understanding of the morphological processes that occur when words are borrowed into the Lithuanian language.