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Part of
Historical Linguistics 2015: Selected papers from the 22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Naples, 27-31 July 2015
Edited by Michela Cennamo and Claudia Fabrizio
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 348] 2019
► pp. 115–132

Chapter 6
The development of gender and countability effects in German ung- and English ing-nominals

Although German ung- and English ing-nouns developed from a common Germanic origin, the two nominalization types exhibit surprisingly different aspectual and countability properties in present-day German and present-day English. Diachronically, one of the most prominent differences between the two languages is the loss of grammatical gender as a marker of countability in English versus its re-grammaticalization in the form of derivational suffixes in German. In this paper, we show how this particular difference explains the unexpected development of ing, which, instead of specializing for result-oriented countable readings of the deverbal nominal, like ung did, came to specialize for process-oriented uncountable/mass denotations of events. The paper discusses the influence of gender on ung/ing-nominals, its particular morphosyntactic consequences, and its implications for present-day differences between the two languages.
Keywords: gender, gender decrease, countability, nominalization, derivation, suffixation, history of English, history of German
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A comparison of ung and ing in present-day German and English
  • 3.The semantics of gender and the role of ing/ung
    • 3.1Suffixes as gender-markers in German
    • 3.2English gender decrease in nominalizations
  • 4.Conclusions and outlook
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 September 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.348.06wer
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