Gender Assignment to Anglicisms in German in the Field of Science: New English Nouns on their Way on Becoming Lexicalized

Abstract

When lexemes are borrowed from a foreign language they go through different phases of integration, typically divided into four types: phonetic, orthographic, morphological, and semantic. The question of which gender to assign to a loanword and which gender assignment criteria to apply is still ambiguous in linguistics. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to determine the regularities of gender assignment to lexicalized and non-lexicalized anglicisms in German within linguistics and glottodidactics. In addition, the present study also investigates the question of whether deviations in gender assignment, in the case of lexicalized anglicisms from our corpus, can be explained by their semantic differences. The corpus for our research is composed of a total of 194 scientific articles, containing a wide range of linguistic topics and issues in the field of glottodidactics. The analysis showed that different criteria are used to assign different genders. Thus, in the case of feminine and neutral nouns, the suffixal analogy prevails, while in the case of masculine nouns, semantic analogy and monosyllabicity play a greater role.