Ohne dieses und jenes bedürfte der Genitiv keines –s: eine psycholinguistische Perspektive

Abstract

Abstract A few decades ago, some researchers have suggested that the functioning of the human cognitive system should be taken as framework to investigate language structures if the causal relationship between the latter and the way human cognition functions is to be understood. The present work is an attempt to investigate this causal relationship with respect to the –s at the end of masculine and neuter nouns in German when the genitive case is used. Two experiments have been carried out, with experiment 1 involving 109 and experiment 2 184 participants. Through the online assessment tool LimeSurvey, the experiment 1 participants were administered a sentence completion task and the experiment 2 participants a timed self-paced reading comprehension task. The results suggest that the case ambiguity of the determiners dieses, jenes, jedes, welches and so forth and the relative flexibility of the German syntax are the origin of the German masculine and neuter nouns necessitating an –s in the genitive case. Theoretical and pedagogical implications are discussed.