Genuszuweisungsstrategien im DaF-Unterricht

Abstract This paper focuses on the phonetic, morphological and semantic principles determining the grammatical gender of nouns in German. Based on the experiments we established the main trends in determining the gender of the German equivalents and interlingual homonyms and the role of the interlingual and intralingual interference in this process. The results of two experiments show that Ukrainian students take into consideration suffixes of German nouns when choosing the correct gender. Phonetic or semantic gender allocation rules play a subordinate role. The interlingual interference determinates the gender choice in the target language: the gender of the mother tongue lemma interferes the selection of the gender in the foreign language equivalent. This effect appears more frequently in interlingual homonyms than in translation equivalents. A plausible interpretation of these results could be: the lemmas of two similar nouns or translation equivalents share the same concepts, the relationship between them is rather close, and the competition between the two lemmas and their genus nodes is strong and influences language production. This conclusion supports the hypothesis that both languages, the mother tongue and the foreign one, can be activated during language producing.