neutering neuter – grammatical gender and the dehumanisation of women in German

Grammatical gender in German has traditionally been described as a rather arbitrary system (Helbig and Buscha 1988). This is not the case in regard to terms of person reference, where natural gender assignment is the norm: Masculine and feminine grammatical gender largely correlate with the extralinguistic assignment of male and female gender. Neuter gender predominantly denotes inanimate entities (Köpcke and Zubin 1996, 2009). The use of neutral gender in reference to women nevertheless has a long history in German, usually with pejorative connotations (Köpcke and Zubin 1996, 2009). Historically, this can be illustrated in relation to nouns, pronouns and articles: 1 By neuter nouns denoting ‘socially incomplete’ women, e.g. das Weib ‘woman (archaic), hag, n.’, das Luder ‘hussy, n.’ and in the increased use of neuter eliciting diminutives in reference to female individuals, e.g. das Mädchen ‘girl, n.’, das Fräulein ‘miss, n.’ (Nübling 2017). 2 Through the use of neuter pronouns and neuter articles in combination with female names in a number of German dialects, e.g. das Emma, es ‘the (n.) Emma, it’ (Busley and Fritzinger 2018). In contemporary standard German, the use of neuter articles and pronouns instead of feminine ones seems to be used as a discursive tool to denigrate and dehumanise women whose gender performance does not conform with hegemonic concepts of femininity. This paper focuses on the intentional manipulation of grammatical gender in reference to women as a tool of degradation and dehumanisation and outlines the historical development of neuter forms of reference in contexts where feminine would be expected.

A Psycholinguistic Investigation into Diminutive Strategies in the East Franconian NP: Little Schnitzels Stay Big, but Little Crooks Become Nicer

Upper German dialects make heavy use of diminutive strategies, but little is known about the actual conceptual effects of those devices. This paper is the first to present two large-scale psycholinguistic experiments that investigate this issue in East Franconian, a dialect spoken in Bavaria. Franconian uses both the diminutive suffix -la and the quantifying construction a weng a lit. ‘a little bit a’ to modify noun phrases. Our first experiment shows that diminutization has no effect on conceptualization of magnitude: People do not think of a smaller/weaker/shorter etc. referent when the NP is modified by the morphological diminutive, the quantifying construction, or their combination. The second experiment involves gradable NPs and shows that, again, the morphological diminutive has no effect on how people conceptualize the degree to which a gradable nominal predicate holds; in contrast, a weng a reduces it significantly. These experiments suggest that diminutization does not have uniform effects across semantic domains, and our results act as a successful example of extending the avenue of cognitive psychology into dialectology with the active participation of a speaker community.*

Präteritumschwund im Deutschen

The loss of the preterite form in German dialects is still a disputed and unresolved matter. The article summarizes the results of a new study that analyzes several dialectological documentations (e. g. dialect grammars, dialect atlases) and recognizes the areal distribution of the loss of the preterite as a threefold scale (number of preterite building verbs, frequency of forms, hierarchy in loss of forms). On this basis the article reconstructs the historical process of the loss of the preterite and suggests an integrative explanation of the described process as the result of the semantic and functional expansion of the German present perfect.

Code-switching and loan translation in German-American

This squib applies and extends insights from (Diasystematic) Construction Grammar to the code-switching and loan-translation of English verbs (and verbal constructions) in US-German dialects. After presenting recent findings about the nature and interaction of language contact phenomena, I introduce the constructional principles guiding the analysis and the data sources. I then present a wide array of data and formulate hypotheses regarding the processes and motivations underlying each type, appealing to a constructional and usage-based view of the bilingual’s mental lexicon.

Two palatovelar fricatives?! the case of the ich-Laut in German

This study concentrates on the alternation between two dorsal fricatives: [x] and [ç] in Modern Standard German. The primary source of data for the analysis include both native German words and loanwords. Moreover, the discussion encompasses some strictly related processes such as g-spirantization [g] > [x]/[ç], e.g. Ber[ç] ‘mountain’ and Ta[x] ‘day’, and coronalization [ç] > [ʃ], e.g. mi[ʃ] ‘me’ found in various German dialects and colloquial variants. Finally, since it is responsible for the appearance of both alternants in an identical context, e.g. Frau[ç]en ‘woman, dim’ and rau[x]en ‘to smoke’, a brief look is taken at the historical development of the diminutive suffix chen. It is argued here that in contemporary German there are two palatovelar fricatives [ç] which differ in their internal organization of the melodic content. In loanwords and in the diminutive suffix -chen, [ç] is lexically specified for palatality, while after front vowels and coronal sonorants the same fricative shares the palatality element with the preceding segment. The analysis is couched in a recent version of Element Theory and it proceeds on two assumptions: a) front vowels and coronal sonorants [l ʁ n] in German are defined by the resonance element |I| and b) [ç] is a complex segment containing two resonants |I| and |U|.

Reduction of Survey Sites in Dialectology: A New Methodology Based on Clustering

Many language change studies aim for a partial revisitation, i.e., selecting survey sites from previous dialect studies. The central issue of survey site reduction, however, has often been addressed only qualitatively. Cluster analysis offers an innovative means of identifying the most representative survey sites among a set of original survey sites. In this paper, we present a general methodology for finding representative sites for an intended study, potentially applicable to any collection of data about dialects or linguistic variation. We elaborate the quantitative steps of the proposed methodology in the context of the “Linguistic Atlas of Japan” (LAJ). Next, we demonstrate the full application of the methodology on the “Linguistic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland” (Germ.: “Sprachatlas der Deutschen Schweiz”—SDS), with the explicit aim of selecting survey sites corresponding to the aims of the current project “Swiss German Dialects Across Time and Space” (SDATS), which revisits SDS 70 years later. We find that depending on the circumstances and requirements of a study, the proposed methodology, introducing cluster analysis into the survey site reduction process, allows for a greater objectivity in comparison to traditional approaches. We suggest, however, that the suitability of any set of candidate survey sites resulting from the proposed methodology be rigorously revised by experts due to potential incongruences, such as the overlap of objectives and variables across the original and intended studies and ongoing dialect change.

Annali, Ruedi, Mami.

Data of the dialect research project “Das Anna und ihr Hund. Weibliche Rufnamen im Neutrum” indicate the important role of diminutive names in terms of the historical develop-ment and consolidation of the onymic neuter gender assignment. The focus in the present arti-cle lies therefore on the forms and the use of diminutive names (e. g. Anneli, Ruedi) in Swiss-German dialects. Based on diachronic evidence from literary works and regional dictionaries, differences in the diminution of male and female names are historically traced and substantiated. It is for prag-matic reasons that female kinship names (e. g. Mami) are crystallized to be the last bastion for the neutral gender assignment which opens up new perspectives on the diachronic emergence of this phenomenon. The consideration of further onymic suffixes in the outlook brings up a debate on the disagreement of gender and sex which is considered to be a possible objective of the suf-fixation itself.

Soziopragmatik von unser bei Rufnamen im Westmitteldeutschen.

Speakers of Western Central German dialects frequently use the first person plural form of the possessive article unser with proper names (e. g. us Dietmar ‘our Dietmar’). But conditions of use are so far totally unclear. This paper focuses on form and use of unser with proper names in Moselle Franconian dialects. The findings are based on interviews. They show that unser is primarily used to refer to blood relatives. However, consanguinity is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for unser. In particular, its use is triggered by social closeness and the assumption of responsibility by the speaker.

Der onymische Artikel im Schweizerdeutschen in seiner Funktion als Genusmarker

In Swiss German dialects first names are commonly used with a preceding article. Historically, the function of these so-called onymic articles was to show the name’s case. They first arose when inflection of first names had been omitted and case was thus no longer expressed in suffixes. The data gathered in 2016 in an online survey for the research project “Das Anna und ihr Hund” indicate that today the function of reflecting the case is hardly relevant. However, it is important to the speakers to emphasize the nameʼs grammatical gender. The three grammatical genders in (Swiss) German are feminine, masculine, and neuter. Typically, the ono­nymic articles’ grammatical gender corresponds to their referents’ biological gender, i. e. feminine articles for women’s names, masculine articles for men’s names. But sometimes neuter articles are used with female or, less often, with male names. Therefore, the same first name can have different grammatical genders that are indicated with an onymic article, e. g. d Anna (f.) or s Anna (n.). The choice of the article depends on the speaker, the situation, the referent, and other factors. Based on these observations, it is argued that marking grammatical gender is the onymic article’s main function and marking case is secondary.