Gender related practices in person reference: Discourse, grammar, cognition

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Evelyn C. Ferstl; Professorin Dr. Helga Kotthoff; Professorin Dr. Damaris Nübling
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 456835372

Gender-sensitive language has been a hotly debated topic in regard to person reference in the German speaking countries. While the traditional view holds that masculine person references are to be understood as referring to persons of all sexes/genders, feminist linguists have rallied for the use of gender-fair forms, such as explicitly using both masculine and feminine gender. This debate is fueled by ideologies with only some arguments rooted in sound research. While a number of studies confirms that masculine person references predominantly induce associations of the male sex, the gradedness of this (binary) gender assignment has not yet been acknowledged. The proportion of female associations has not been the focus of feminist linguistics, and the influence of grammatical categories (e.g. number, syntactic position) has not yet been addressed. Recently, Gender and Queer Studies have criticized the goal of feminizing language to strengthen gender dichotomies, and demanded the explicit representation of non-binary or diverse genders. While novel forms of gender-fair language (e.g. asterisk) have already been included in guidelines, there is little knowledge about their readability, and it has not been shown whether they lead to the mental inclusion of gender diverse people. Furthermore, discourses on gendered person references include arguments concerning style (dis)preferences (e.g. infrequency of use, bureaucratic jargon) on all sides.Three separate subprojects closely interact with each other and combine psycholinguistic, syntax analytic and discourse analytic methods. Subproject 1, “Enregisterment, communicative style and textstylistic heterogeneity” (Kotthoff), targets the usage of different gender-related reference styles. It attempts to unveil arguments for various person referencing styles as they are put forward in media discussions and guidelines. Semi-structured interviews and analyses of public debates shall help to reconstruct their social indexicality. Subproject 2, “Gender associations elicited by masculine person-denoting nouns and indefinite pronouns” (Nübling), investigates these (pro)nouns in a grammatically differentiated way. The focus lies on studying the influence of morphological, syntactic and semantic variables (e.g. number, semantic role) on induced gender associations. Subproject 3, “Non-binary person-denoting words: Readability and gender associations” (Ferstl), uses psycholinguistic methods to study how recently introduced gender-fair forms (e.g. Binnen-I: LehrerInnen, asterisk) influence lexical access and of the resulting representations.The goal of this interdisciplinary research is a) to contribute to a more objective and scientifically grounded discourse about gender-fair language; b) to provide information about the practicability and efficacy of new gender-fair styles; and c) to conduct basic research in order to better understand the linguistics of person-denoting nouns in German.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants