Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1017/S1470542720000094
Lien De Vos, Gert de Sutter, Gunther De Vogelaer
Previous research has shown that Dutch pronominal gender is in a process of resemanticization: Highly individuated nouns are increasingly referred to with masculine and feminine pronouns, and lowly individuated ones with the neuter pronoun het/’t ‘it’, irrespective of the grammatical gender of the noun (Audring 2009). The process is commonly attributed to the loss of adnominal gender agreement, which is increasingly blurring distinctions between masculine and feminine nouns and, therefore, requires speakers to resort to semantic default strategies (De Vogelaer & De Sutter 2011). Several factors have been identified that influence the choice of semantic vis-à-vis lexical agreement, both linguistic and social. This article seeks to weigh the importance of both structural and social factors in pronominal gender agreement in Belgian Dutch, using the Belgian part of the Spoken Dutch Corpus. A multivariate statistical analysis reveals that most effects are structural, including noun semantics and the syntactic function of the antecedent and the pronoun, as well as the pragmatic status of the antecedent. The most important social factor is speech register. We argue that these effects support a psycholinguistic account in which resemanticization is seen as a change from below, caused by hampered lexical access to noun gender.
{"title":"Weighing Psycholinguistic and Social Factors for Semantic Agreement in Dutch Pronouns","authors":"Lien De Vos, Gert de Sutter, Gunther De Vogelaer","doi":"10.1017/S1470542720000094","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1470542720000094","url":null,"abstract":"Previous research has shown that Dutch pronominal gender is in a process of resemanticization: Highly individuated nouns are increasingly referred to with masculine and feminine pronouns, and lowly individuated ones with the neuter pronoun het/’t ‘it’, irrespective of the grammatical gender of the noun (Audring 2009). The process is commonly attributed to the loss of adnominal gender agreement, which is increasingly blurring distinctions between masculine and feminine nouns and, therefore, requires speakers to resort to semantic default strategies (De Vogelaer & De Sutter 2011). Several factors have been identified that influence the choice of semantic vis-à-vis lexical agreement, both linguistic and social. This article seeks to weigh the importance of both structural and social factors in pronominal gender agreement in Belgian Dutch, using the Belgian part of the Spoken Dutch Corpus. A multivariate statistical analysis reveals that most effects are structural, including noun semantics and the syntactic function of the antecedent and the pronoun, as well as the pragmatic status of the antecedent. The most important social factor is speech register. We argue that these effects support a psycholinguistic account in which resemanticization is seen as a change from below, caused by hampered lexical access to noun gender.","PeriodicalId":42927,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Germanic Linguistics","volume":"33 1","pages":"30 - 66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1470542720000094","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44412289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1017/S1470542720000082
P. Auer, V. Siegel
While major restructurings and simplifications have been reported for gender systems of other Germanic languages in multiethnolectal speech, this article demonstrates that the three-way gender distinction of German is relatively stable among young speakers from an immigrant background. We investigate gender in a German multiethnolect based on a corpus of approximately 17 hours of spontaneous speech produced by 28 young speakers in Stuttgart (mainly from Turkish and Balkan background). German is not their second language, but (one of) their first language(s), which they have fully acquired from childhood. We show that the gender system does not show signs of reduction in the direction of a two-gender system, nor of wholesale loss. We also argue that the position of gender in the grammar is weakened by independent innovations, such as the frequent use of bare nouns in grammatical contexts where German requires a determiner. Another phenomenon that weakens the position of gender is the simplification of adjective-noun agreement and the emergence of a generalized gender-neutral suffix for prenominal adjectives (that is, schwa). The disappearance of gender and case marking in the adjective means that the grammatical category of gender is lost in Adj + N phrases (without a determiner).
{"title":"Grammatical Gender in the German Multiethnolect","authors":"P. Auer, V. Siegel","doi":"10.1017/S1470542720000082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1470542720000082","url":null,"abstract":"While major restructurings and simplifications have been reported for gender systems of other Germanic languages in multiethnolectal speech, this article demonstrates that the three-way gender distinction of German is relatively stable among young speakers from an immigrant background. We investigate gender in a German multiethnolect based on a corpus of approximately 17 hours of spontaneous speech produced by 28 young speakers in Stuttgart (mainly from Turkish and Balkan background). German is not their second language, but (one of) their first language(s), which they have fully acquired from childhood. We show that the gender system does not show signs of reduction in the direction of a two-gender system, nor of wholesale loss. We also argue that the position of gender in the grammar is weakened by independent innovations, such as the frequent use of bare nouns in grammatical contexts where German requires a determiner. Another phenomenon that weakens the position of gender is the simplification of adjective-noun agreement and the emergence of a generalized gender-neutral suffix for prenominal adjectives (that is, schwa). The disappearance of gender and case marking in the adjective means that the grammatical category of gender is lost in Adj + N phrases (without a determiner).","PeriodicalId":42927,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Germanic Linguistics","volume":"33 1","pages":"5 - 29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1470542720000082","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44056333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1017/S1470542720000069
Karoline Kühl, Jan Heegård Petersen
This paper investigates the expression of grammatical gender in Heritage Argentine Danish. We examine a subset of the Corpus of South American Danish of approximately 20,500 tokens of gender marking produced by 90 speakers. The results show that Argentine Danish gender marking in general complies with the Standard Denmark Danish rules. However, there is also systematic variation: While there is hardly any difference compared to Standard Denmark Danish with respect to the definite suffix, gender marking on prenominal determiners differs from that in Standard Danish. More specifically, the less frequent neuter gender is more vulnerable, and common gender tends to be overgeneralized. Further, complex NPs with attributive adjectives show more variation in gender marking on prenominal determiners than simple NPs. As to sociolinguistic variation, the analysis shows that tokens produced by older speakers and speakers from settlements with a higher degree of language maintenance are consistent to a higher degree with Standard Danish gender marking. The paper compares these results with the results of studies of gender marking variation in other Germanic heritage languages. We conclude that the overall stability of grammatical gender in the Germanic heritage languages is a general pattern that only partly relates to social or societal factors.*
{"title":"Argentine Danish Grammatical Gender: Stability with Strongly Patterned Variation","authors":"Karoline Kühl, Jan Heegård Petersen","doi":"10.1017/S1470542720000069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1470542720000069","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates the expression of grammatical gender in Heritage Argentine Danish. We examine a subset of the Corpus of South American Danish of approximately 20,500 tokens of gender marking produced by 90 speakers. The results show that Argentine Danish gender marking in general complies with the Standard Denmark Danish rules. However, there is also systematic variation: While there is hardly any difference compared to Standard Denmark Danish with respect to the definite suffix, gender marking on prenominal determiners differs from that in Standard Danish. More specifically, the less frequent neuter gender is more vulnerable, and common gender tends to be overgeneralized. Further, complex NPs with attributive adjectives show more variation in gender marking on prenominal determiners than simple NPs. As to sociolinguistic variation, the analysis shows that tokens produced by older speakers and speakers from settlements with a higher degree of language maintenance are consistent to a higher degree with Standard Danish gender marking. The paper compares these results with the results of studies of gender marking variation in other Germanic heritage languages. We conclude that the overall stability of grammatical gender in the Germanic heritage languages is a general pattern that only partly relates to social or societal factors.*","PeriodicalId":42927,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Germanic Linguistics","volume":"33 1","pages":"67 - 94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1470542720000069","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41578950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-02-10DOI: 10.1017/S1470542720000124
L. Cornips, F. Gregersen
Grammatical gender is known to be prone to language variation and change. The papers in this special issue account for gender variation and change in modern Germanic languages, in particular Danish, German, Norwegian, and Southern Dutch. With the exception of Danish (common, neuter), all other languages can be characterized as having a three-way gender distinction (feminine, masculine, and neuter). The special issue covers most of what has been discussed in the literature on gender in Germanic (for a recent overview see Kürschner 2020). The most important issues are as follows: simplification, resemanticization, the relationship between gender and other nominal categories, and the pragmatics of gender. With respect to simplification, Lohndal & Westergaard discuss Norwegian dialects in which three-way gender systems develop into twoway gender systems. Kühl & Heegård Petersen demonstrate a tendency for the neuter gender in Danish to be supplanted by the common gender. In contrast to Lohndal & Westergaard and Kühl & Heegård Petersen, Auer & Siegel demonstrate that the three-way gender distinction in German among multiethnic speakers is stable. However, they show that those multiethnic speakers simplify DPs in two ways. First, they use bare nouns and hence omit the (required) article as an item that agrees in gender value with its noun. Second, they use a generalized suffix for prenominal adjectives (that is, schwa) that expresses neither gender nor case, as in standard German. RESEMANTICIZATION is the process by which highly individuated nouns are increasingly referred to with masculine and feminine pronouns, and lowly individuated ones with the neuter pronoun, regardless of the grammatical gender of the noun. In a multivariate analysis, De Vos et al. show that the most important factor of resemanticization of the pronominal system of Southern Dutch is speech register in informal settings. The tendency for grammatical gender to correspond to natural gender is
{"title":"Guest Editors’ Preface","authors":"L. Cornips, F. Gregersen","doi":"10.1017/S1470542720000124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1470542720000124","url":null,"abstract":"Grammatical gender is known to be prone to language variation and change. The papers in this special issue account for gender variation and change in modern Germanic languages, in particular Danish, German, Norwegian, and Southern Dutch. With the exception of Danish (common, neuter), all other languages can be characterized as having a three-way gender distinction (feminine, masculine, and neuter). The special issue covers most of what has been discussed in the literature on gender in Germanic (for a recent overview see Kürschner 2020). The most important issues are as follows: simplification, resemanticization, the relationship between gender and other nominal categories, and the pragmatics of gender. With respect to simplification, Lohndal & Westergaard discuss Norwegian dialects in which three-way gender systems develop into twoway gender systems. Kühl & Heegård Petersen demonstrate a tendency for the neuter gender in Danish to be supplanted by the common gender. In contrast to Lohndal & Westergaard and Kühl & Heegård Petersen, Auer & Siegel demonstrate that the three-way gender distinction in German among multiethnic speakers is stable. However, they show that those multiethnic speakers simplify DPs in two ways. First, they use bare nouns and hence omit the (required) article as an item that agrees in gender value with its noun. Second, they use a generalized suffix for prenominal adjectives (that is, schwa) that expresses neither gender nor case, as in standard German. RESEMANTICIZATION is the process by which highly individuated nouns are increasingly referred to with masculine and feminine pronouns, and lowly individuated ones with the neuter pronoun, regardless of the grammatical gender of the noun. In a multivariate analysis, De Vos et al. show that the most important factor of resemanticization of the pronominal system of Southern Dutch is speech register in informal settings. The tendency for grammatical gender to correspond to natural gender is","PeriodicalId":42927,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Germanic Linguistics","volume":"33 1","pages":"1 - 4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1470542720000124","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43769334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1017/S1470542719000205
Bjarne Ørsnes
In German, past participles not only occur in root position with a directive force, as in Stillgestanden! ‘Stop!’ lit. ‘stood still(ptcp)’, but also as performatives in responses: A: Du sagst also nichts zu Papi. ‘So you won’t tell dad.’ B: Versprochen! ‘I promise!’ lit. ‘promised(ptcp)’. Here B performs the speech act denoted by the verb by saying that it has been performed. The propositional argument of the participle (what is promised) is resolved contextually, and the agent and the recipient arguments are restricted to the speaker and the hearer, respectively. This article presents a syntactic analysis of this rarely studied phenomenon, arguing that the construction with a performative participle is not ellipsis but an IP with a participial head and null pronominal complements. The syntactic analysis is formalized within Lexical-Functional Grammar. A pragmatic analysis is proposed arguing that the performative participle in its core use alternates with Yes! to express agreement with an assertion or compliance with a request, that is, to express consent to the effect that a proposition p may safely be added to the Common Ground. This analysis is cast within the dialogue framework of Farkas & Bruce (2010) and extended to response performative participles in monological uses.*
{"title":"On the Performative Use of the Past Participle in German","authors":"Bjarne Ørsnes","doi":"10.1017/S1470542719000205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1470542719000205","url":null,"abstract":"In German, past participles not only occur in root position with a directive force, as in Stillgestanden! ‘Stop!’ lit. ‘stood still(ptcp)’, but also as performatives in responses: A: Du sagst also nichts zu Papi. ‘So you won’t tell dad.’ B: Versprochen! ‘I promise!’ lit. ‘promised(ptcp)’. Here B performs the speech act denoted by the verb by saying that it has been performed. The propositional argument of the participle (what is promised) is resolved contextually, and the agent and the recipient arguments are restricted to the speaker and the hearer, respectively. This article presents a syntactic analysis of this rarely studied phenomenon, arguing that the construction with a performative participle is not ellipsis but an IP with a participial head and null pronominal complements. The syntactic analysis is formalized within Lexical-Functional Grammar. A pragmatic analysis is proposed arguing that the performative participle in its core use alternates with Yes! to express agreement with an assertion or compliance with a request, that is, to express consent to the effect that a proposition p may safely be added to the Common Ground. This analysis is cast within the dialogue framework of Farkas & Bruce (2010) and extended to response performative participles in monological uses.*","PeriodicalId":42927,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Germanic Linguistics","volume":"32 1","pages":"335 - 419"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1470542719000205","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42403078","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1017/S1470542720000045
B. Mees
Early runic inscriptions are the best evidence for the oldest historical development of North Germanic. Yet among the many unexpected features of the inscriptions as they are usually presented is the apparent presence of vowels before glides that seem to occur contrary to Sievers’ Law. These include perhaps most prominently the sequence usually read as on the Skåäng stone where the Vimose comb preserves the expected form . Rather than assume that a Neogrammarian sound law is violated in a runic text, a more profitable approach is usually to assume that it is the interpretation that is at fault. Many of the instances where Sievers’ Law vocalizations seem to occur in an aberrant manner are texts that are better explained in manners other than have traditionally been accepted.
{"title":"Sievers’ Law and the Skåäng Stone","authors":"B. Mees","doi":"10.1017/S1470542720000045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1470542720000045","url":null,"abstract":"Early runic inscriptions are the best evidence for the oldest historical development of North Germanic. Yet among the many unexpected features of the inscriptions as they are usually presented is the apparent presence of vowels before glides that seem to occur contrary to Sievers’ Law. These include perhaps most prominently the sequence usually read as on the Skåäng stone where the Vimose comb preserves the expected form . Rather than assume that a Neogrammarian sound law is violated in a runic text, a more profitable approach is usually to assume that it is the interpretation that is at fault. Many of the instances where Sievers’ Law vocalizations seem to occur in an aberrant manner are texts that are better explained in manners other than have traditionally been accepted.","PeriodicalId":42927,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Germanic Linguistics","volume":"32 1","pages":"315 - 334"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1470542720000045","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43653638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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