LINGUIST List 15.1752

Wed Jun 9 2004

Diss: Historical Ling: Jobin: 'Gender Changes...'

Editor for this issue: Takako Matsui <takolinguistlist.org>

Directory

  • bettina.jobin, Gender Changes Investigations into Gender and Animacy...

    Message 1: Gender Changes Investigations into Gender and Animacy...

     Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2004 06:52:57 -0400 (EDT)
    From: bettina.jobin <bettina.jobintelia.com>
    Subject: Gender Changes Investigations into Gender and Animacy...


    Institution: Stockholm University Program: German department Dissertation Status: Completed Degree Date: 2004

    Author: Bettina Jobin

    Dissertation Title: Gender Changes - Investigations into Gender and Animacy in Contemporary German by means of Person References and Non-Personal-Agents

    Dissertation URL: http://www.diva-portal.se

    Linguistic Field: Historical Linguistics, Morphology, Semantics, Sociolinguistics, Syntax, Text/Corpus Linguistics, Typology, Translation, History of Linguistics

    Subject Language: German, Standard (code: GER) Swedish (code: SWD)

    Dissertation Director 1: Gunnar Magnusson Dissertation Director 2: Hans-Olav Enger

    Dissertation Abstract:

    Genus im Wandel - Studien zu Genus und Animatizit�t anhand von Personenbezeichnungen im heutigen Deutsch mit Kontrastierungen zum Schwedischen

    Gender Changes:Contrastive Investigations into Gender and Animacy by means of contemporary German and Swedish Person References and Non-Personal-Agents

    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 elemey"ts. 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.