Neutrales Rufnamengenus zwischen Grammatik und Pragmatik

Busley, Simone; Fritzinger, Julia

doi:10.13092/lo.107.7690

Cited by 3 publications

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“…With regard to sociopragmatic gender, it can be concluded that it has developed into a full grammatical category with functional load and paradigmatic variability (cf. Busley & Fritzinger 2021). Things become even more complicated if not only nominal but also pronominal gender is considered.…”

Section: Sociopragmatic Gendermentioning

confidence: 99%

Referring to women using feminine and neuter gender

Busley

Nübling

2021

NOSO

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In German, gender is a strongly grammaticalized category and has the function of indicating grammatical agreement between syntactic units. Usually, each noun is assigned one of three grammatical genders. In standard German, nouns denoting women are typically feminine. However, Luxembourgish and some German dialects show a peculiarity: here, the gender of female first names and other parts of speech (e.g. pronouns) referring to women can be both feminine and neuter, depending on the nature of the interpersonal relationship between the speaker and the female referred to. In these varieties, gender assignment is governed by sociopragmatic factors. Sociopragmatic gender assignment is a result of de-grammaticalization, which is reflected in both syntagmatic and paradigmatic gender variability. The study shows that there is considerable diatopic variation in the use and function of gender in references to women. In some dialects, the neuter has become the default gender of female first names; this is a case of re-grammaticalization.

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Section: Sociopragmatic Gendermentioning

confidence: 99%

Referring to women using feminine and neuter gender

Busley

Nübling

2021

NOSO

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The Agreement Hierarchy and (generalized) semantic agreement

Corbett

2023

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Therefore typology requires a means for generalizing over them. Instances like plural have are frequently termed "semantic agreement" (vs. "syntactic agreement" for singular has), but this notion has proved difficult. The challenge is to encompass the full typological range of alternative agreements. These include the core instances: (i) hybrid nouns like family; and (ii) constructional mismatches, such as conjoined nominal phrases, but also less obvious phenomena: (iii) split hybrids where neither alternative is straightforwardly semantic, both appear related to form, and (iv) examples like Scandinavian "pancake sentences", which stretch semantic agreement towards pragmatics. These different types are comparable in that (i) the alternatives are realized by the normal agreement forms; and (ii) they are subject to the Agreement Hierarchy. Hence they demand a common treatment. To achieve this, I first unpack the Agreement Hierarchy constraint into the agreement target positions and the directionality implied by "semantic agreement". I show how the latter arises from mismatches between the agreement information available from different sources. Typically, in the core instances, the information from one source is more evidently semantic than from the second. But in other instances, this is less clear. I argue that it is more parsimonious to treat these less obvious phenomena as falling under the constraint of the Agreement Hierarchy. They are seen as part of the pattern of a Hierarchy of Agreement Sources, which gives different degrees of "generalized semantic agreement". This reworking offers a more robust underpinning to the Agreement Hierarchy, and fits into a current trend: a typology that works is no longer sufficient, rather we examine and justify the defining criteria, and relate them to the underlying attributes of the domain.

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The Agreement Hierarchy revisited: The typology of controllers

Corbett

2022

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The Agreement Hierarchy consists of four principal target positions: attributive, predicate, relative pronoun and anaphoric personal pronoun. It constrains the distribution of alternative agreements, in that the likelihood of agreement with greater semantic justification increases monotonically as we move rightwards along the hierarchy. The Agreement Hierarchy covers a wide range of disparate data, and continues to figure regularly in work on theoretical syntax. Since the hierarchy was first proposed, typology has moved on. This means that to remain fit for the purposes for which it is currently used, the hierarchy needs an overhaul. The typology of agreement controllers is the area where the need is most urgent; this is therefore our focus. The canonical typology of controllers is shown to have two dimensions: lexeme to phrase, and local to extraneous (the latter involving honorific agreement, associative agreement, back agreement and “pancake sentences”). These two dimensions are amply illustrated. Finally, interactions between the different types of agreement controller are investigated, since these prove revealing for the typology. Besides making progress on the typology of agreement, the paper contributes to typology more generally, in incorporating insights from other typological disciplines.

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Neutrales Rufnamengenus zwischen Grammatik und Pragmatik

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Referring to women using feminine and neuter gender

Referring to women using feminine and neuter gender

The Agreement Hierarchy and (generalized) semantic agreement

The Agreement Hierarchy revisited: The typology of controllers

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