Neutral gender assignment with female given names and other referential options im riograndese hunsrik

Abstract

This paper focuses on the grammatical category gender. Subject of the discussion is the usage of neutral gender in reference to women (hereinafter referred to as „femineuters“) in a West Middle German-based „abroad variety“ of the German language, the so-called „(Riograndese) Hunsrik“, which is spoken to the present in the southern part of Brazil resp. in neighboring regions. Three genus carrying structures were considered: the definite article before given names, the personal pronoun and the possessive pronoun. The theoretic-empirical examination is grounded on questions affected from different fields of study: variationist linguistics, (socio)pragmatics, semantics, and contact linguistics, areal linguistics, as well as system linguistics. The results are based on a wide set of dialect data, recently collected in an indirect inquiry through a questionnaire (using assessment tasks backed by pictures and context histories). It is assumed, that not only (language) geographic-areal factors (such as areal-administrative demarcation, city-country-distinction, and continuous language contact constellation (dialectal) German: (Brasilian) Portuguese) have an influence on the choice of genus when referring to a female person, using the grammar structures mentioned above. Also, the sociopragmatic aspects (such as age, familiarity, function/status in public, or place of origin/residence) seem to play an important role.