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The Determinants of Diachronic Stability
Edited by Anne Breitbarth, Miriam Bouzouita, Lieven Danckaert and Melissa Farasyn
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 254] 2019
► pp. 11–38

Chapter 2
Gender stability, gender loss

What didn’t happen to German

ORCID logo | University of Cambridge

This paper investigates the factors which have led to the diachronic stability of gender as a three-way category in German. Old High German and Old English are contrasted to show how phonological, morphological and semantic changes contribute to a reinforcement of gender as a grammatical category in German, while in English it suffers attrition and loss. The early restructuring of the pronominal declension through analogical pattern generalization is shown to combine gender and case marking in ways which allow the three-way distinction to become more salient over time. The resulting cohesion within noun phrases and gender marking on targets, particularly through the interaction of gender and case marking in the high-frequency nominative and accusative cases, gives gender marking a role in communication. As a result the cognitive effort of acquiring gender pays off and the three-way distinction remains stable.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Gender assignment and its distribution in OE and OHG
    • 2.1Methodological issues
    • 2.2Frequency distribution
    • 2.3Word formation and gender assignment in OHG
  • 3.Nominal inflection
  • 4.Gender targets
    • 4.1Demonstrative pronouns > definite articles
    • 4.2Adjectives
    • 4.3Relativizers
  • 5.Case and gender interactions
  • 6.Case and gender in acquisition
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpora and dictionaries
  • References
Published online: 20 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.254.02wat
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