Gender copy in comparative perspective

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas Stolz
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 451922097

The project raises the issue whether the behaviour of grammatical gender in language-contact situations yields recurrent patterns so that it is possible to put forward generalizations and hypotheses. The subject matter is of interest to both the theory of language-contact studies and the typologically-oriented research program dedicated to the category of grammatical gender in general. In contrast to the majority of the previous investigations of grammatical gender under the conditions of language contact, the project approaches the phenomena according to the principles of language comparison, i.e. several binary language-contact situations and their effects on grammatical gender are compared to each other in order to identify similarities and dissimilarities across the sample. To determine whether the rules of the replica language or those of the donor language are decisive for the integration of loan words into the gender system of the former, thirty asymmetrical coterritorial long-term language-contact scenarios are compared which involve a prestigious major language (English, French, German, Italian, Russian) and a subordinated minor language (several Celtic languages, several Romani languages, Polabian, Curonian, Alsatian, Ket, Moldavian, North West Caucasian languages, North East Caucasian languages, Albanian, Greek, and Slavic varieties spoken in Italy). Both source languages and replica languages have (differently organized) gender systems. The leading question is to what extent these contact scenarios give evidence of gender copy. To check whether the findings are typical of asymmetrical contact situations, the integration of Indo-European loanwords into the binary gender system of Modern Hebrew is inquired into, too. Interesting questions connected to the project are: Does the different number of gender values in the donor language and the replica language play a role in the selection of a given gender for loan-word integration? Does it make a difference whether the systems in contact follow different principles of organization (i.e. purely semantic vs. mixed semantic-formal)? Is it of any relevance for loan-word integration if donor language and replica language differ on the parameter of the base of their gender systems (i.e. sex-based vs. non-sex-based)? The above case studies are complemented by a cross-linguistic stocktaking of mentions of grammatical gender in the process of loanword integration in the extant descriptive linguistic literature. The methodology is predominantly qualitative. The perspective is mixed synchronic and diachronic. All empirical findings will be made freely accessible to the interested public in an online database. The project is the first of its kind. The results are interesting to scholars who work on grammatical gender, language contact, language change, loan-word typology, and related topics.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants