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Title:
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Gender Changes - Investigations into gender and animacy in contemporary German by means of person references and Non-Personal-Agents
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Author:
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Bettina Jobin
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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Stockholm University
, German Department
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Degree Date:
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2004
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Semantics
Sociolinguistics
Syntax
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Subject Language(s):
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German, Standard
Swedish
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Director(s):
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Hans-Olav Enger
Gunnar Magnusson
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Abstract:
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This dissertation investigates the role of animacy in the development of gender systems. It is based on theories of grammaticalization. A model for the development of gender systems of the Indo-european type is developed and it is argued that gender classifications begin as semantic distinctions in the realm of animacy with flexible, contextually based agreement between the gender-marking elements. This is called contextual gender. In the course of time, these classifications will spread down the animacy hierarchy, desemanticize and the agreement relation turns into one of government where the so called inherent gender of the noun governs the gender of agreeing elements. This is called inherent gender. If the original semantic classification is blurred too much, a new cycle of classification will begin in the realm of animacy. For German and Swedish, two such 'life-cycles' are discerned, respectively.
The empirical starting point were diverging tendencies concerning female person references in German and Swedish. Wheras in German, the number of female-specific references, particularly female derivations in -in, so called moved forms, is increasing, in Swedish the number of derivations in -inna and -ska is decreasing.
In a corpus study of comparable newspaper texts it is demonstrated that 95% of all NPs referring to women in German are gender-specific. Although it is often argued that in Swedish gender is neutralizised, still 64% of all NPs referring to women proved to be gender-specific. The lack of moved forms in Swedish is partly compensated by composition and attribution with gender-specific lexemes.
The almost exclusive use of gender-specific forms in German is seen as indicative of a grammaticalization process. It is shown that in contrast to Swedish, where the female suffixes remain derivational, the German development fulfils almost every requirement on a grammaticalization process turning -in from a derivational into an inflecional marker.
A study of pronouns agreeing with non-personal-agents in a parallel corpus shows that other aspects than purely referential or formal ones impinge on the choice of agreement forms. Furthermore non-personal-agents are shown to be one way to spread a linguistic innovation from animate to inanimate contexts via semantic thematic roles of inanimates that share important features with animates proper.
The last study uses different types of monolingual corpora in order to investigate the agreement between female inanimate nouns and predicative agent nouns which potentially can expose agreement by female derivation. The results allow the formulation of the hypothesis that agreement is more likely to occur with nouns for which a metaphorical bridge to stereotypical conceptions of femininity can be constructed and that frequent key colloquations contribute significantly to the spread of the agreement pattern downwards the animacy hierarchy.
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