Neuter Gender Research Articles

Prototypenorientierte Genuszuweisung vom Althochdeutschen zum Neuhochdeutschen und Vorschläge für eine Didaktisierung (mit Exkurs zum Gotischen)

Abstract The system of gender represents one of the greatest problems for learners of German as a foreign language, because it seems to be arbitrary as far as suffixless simple words are concerned. Leiss (1997) showed that the system of gender once was semantically motivated and was available in a complete Indoeuropean paradigm. In Old High German this system is still available in numerous lemmata with double- and triple-gender, but first tendencies of dissolving are recognizable. Following this idea it can be shown that predictability for a certain gender increases, if phonological markers are considered in addition to the semantic ones. The amount of coda consonants and their quality seem to be particularly relevant for fixing the masculine, feminine or neuter gender. In New High German too a huge amount of semantical characteristics exists which allows to predict the gender; but it can be shown that in a lot of cases the rate of predictability increases in a significant way when semantical charactaristics are combined with those phonological marks which are relevant already in Old High German. Nevertheless a small amount of words (especially feminines) remains which is arbitrary. The final didactical proposal for teaching German as a foreign language are based on these results.

Age and input in the acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch

This article investigates the effect of age of first exposure and the quantity and quality of input to which non-native acquirers (L2ers) are exposed in their acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch. Data from 103 English-speaking children, preteens and adults were analysed for gender agreement on definite determiners. It was observed that although most learners regularly overgeneralized the common gender definite determiner de to neuter nouns, there also existed child and adult L2ers who consistently produced the target neuter determiner het with these nouns ( contra Carroll, 1989; Hawkins and Franceschina, 2004; Franceschina, 2005). Participants in all three groups produced het equally frequently with non-derived nouns as with diminutives, one of the few reliable morphophonological cues for neuter gender (compare Carroll, 1999). The present findings are evaluated in light of previous research (Hulk and Cornips, 2006a) suggesting that the quality of input to which L2ers are exposed may significantly affect their ability to proceed beyond the aforementioned stage of overgeneralization. Evidence for frequency effects and the observation that targetlike performance correlated with length of exposure suggests that quantity of input is a significant factor in the acquisition of Dutch gender. This is to be expected if the acquisition of gender is for a large part word-learning (Carroll, 1989; Montrul and Potowski, 2007)

Developmental Theism: From Pure Will to Unbounded Love. By PETER FORREST.

This is an interesting, provocative, and at times fascinating book. Professor Forrest takes a view that reminds one of Marcion, except that instead of two Gods, one merely just and the other loving, he believes, or at least speculates, that there is one God who began as simple, impersonal, and, morally, a consequentialist with no trace of love about it, but developed into the Christian God of love. This God was, like the God of classical theism, all-powerful and all-knowing. Being the latter, it (Forrest is careful always to refer to this ‘Primordial God’ in the neuter gender) was aware of all possible physical universes; being the former, it was able to bring any of them into existence, choosing on the basis of its awareness of the ‘hedonic tone’ (the joy and suffering) in each, and, for the sake of joy, did so. As it is at this stage unaware of the difference between self and other, the joy and suffering that motivate it are both its own and that of possible created beings. It will, incidentally, as a good consequentialist, create a world in which joy outweighs suffering. But joy is to be had in justice and righteousness, so that (shades of Marcion again) it may become ‘the somewhat stern God of the Abrahamic tradition’.

Phonological facilitation of grammatical gender retrieval

In Dutch, the gender of nouns is marked by the definite articles de (common gender) and het (neuter gender). Most models of language production assume that gender information is retrieved via the noun's syntactic representation (or lemma). The authors test Caramazza's (1997) alternative proposal, according to which gender information is retrieved via the noun's phonological word form (or lexeme). In three picture-word experiments, which differed in the tasks to be performed (noun production, article+noun production, article production, and gender decision), clear phonological effects were obtained in tasks involving the retrieval of the noun's gender information. It is argued that traditional models of language production have difficulty in accounting for the occurrence and/or the size of these effects whereas they follow quite naturally from Caramazza's (1997) Independent Network model.

Gender Assignment in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian: A Comparison of the Status of Assignment Criteria

The paper deals with gender assignment of English loanwords in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. The following assignment criteria have been analysed: semantic (animate, mass), phonological (number of syllables, homonymy), and morphological (inflection, suffixation, deverbal monosyllables, compounds). Common gender in Danish and Swedish and masculine in Norwegian are overrepresented in comparison with the native lexicon. This is confirmed by discriminant function analysis, which shows that neuter nouns in the three languages and feminine nouns in Norwegian show fewer characteristic features. This analysis has also been used to measure the degree of regularity based on the postulated criteria: the percentage of correctly classified cases (from 67% in Swedish to 68% in Norwegian and 72% in Danish) suggests only a partial regularity in gender assignment. The stronger pull of common or masculine gender is reflected in the contribution of selected assignment rules, particularly in the assignment of animates, where common or masculine nouns constitute 96% of assigned nouns. As regards phonological rules, monosyllables show a slightly better correlation with neuter gender, particularly in Danish. Homonymy is significant for nouns of both genders in Danish, while in Swedish and Norwegian nouns with a native neuter or feminine homonym are more likely to be assigned common or masculine gender. Likewise, most inflectional and derivational assignment rules contribute to the assignment of common or masculine genders, with the exception of zero plurals, Swedish <em>n</em>-plurals, suffixes such as <em>-ment, -ery</em>, deverbal monosyllables in Danish and Norwegian, and compounds whose base appears in the corpus with n. gender. Discriminant function analysis shows that plural inflection has the greatest discriminant power among the postulated criteria. Finally, it is suggested that these tendencies may indicate an ongoing expansion of common and masculine genders in the three Scandinavian languages.

Bürgerkrieg um Worte. Die russische Literaturkritik der Perestroika by Birgit s> Menzel (review)

530 SEER, 8o, 3, 2002 I999). Zubova is well aware of the metatextual qualities of Russian postmodernism , and points to the intertextualgames of varioustexts. In addition to the more familiarnames, Zubova introducesher audience to lesser known authors, such as Vladimir Strochkov, Ian Satunovskii, and Vladimir Erl'.Unfortunately, Zubova's studydoes not contain any biographical detailsof the authorsshe quotes. Such an appendixwould be a usefultool for assessingthe spreadof linguisticdeviations, from the point of view of age groups, regional variations and the aesthetic preferences of the poets. It is difficultto assess whether some of the deviations from established linguistic norms were intentional, or derive from the contemporary sloppy usage of Russianlanguage that isparticularlynoticeable in post-Soviet Russianmedia. Krivulinand Shvarts,for example, are philologistsby training,and therefore are more inclined to have playful appropriationof some idioms, or absurd examplesof Soviet newspeak. As Zubova's study demonstrates, numerous poetic experiments reflect on the fluid state of the Russian language itself. In this respect, Zubova's discussion of the satirical elements relating to the concept of gender in contemporary Russian poetry is particularlyrewarding. Zubova's examples from Russian poetry reveal, for example, the uncertaintiesrelatingto gender of animals. Thus, some poets use the feminine form of the noun koshka (cat) with the additional note that it is used in their poem as a noun of masculine gender. Such examples are both amusing and obscure. Zubova suggeststhat contemporary Russian poets are struggling to revive the use of the neuter gender that otherwise has been steadily disappearing from the standard language (p. 301). Many poems quoted by Zubova use Church Slavonic constructions such as esi, bekh,izhe, byst', and sut', to name just a few (pp. 208-39). Another archaicelement that occurs in contemporarypoetry is the Double Nominative Case discussedon pages 368-70. Zubova also refers to the influence of the English language on the contemporary Russian language in relationto the use of nouns as describingwords (pp. 362-68): for example, Rus'-zemlia, shved-koroleva. Zubova'sbook mightbe seen as an attemptto mergelinguisticanalysiswith cultural anthropology (especially Durkheim's theory), since it claims that various linguistic experiments express an archetypal collective conscience (p. 7). The extensive bibliographywill be highly appreciatedby readersof the book, as well as Zubova's reassuring message that the poetic experiments reveal the dynamic process of language evolution and expose the mnemonic abilities of semiotic signs that enable the user to restore forgotten forms and contexts. Department ofFrench andRussian ALEXANDRA SMITH University ofCanterbugy, NewZealand Menzel,Birgit.Biirgerkrieg um Worte. Die russische Literaturkritik derPerestroika. Bohlau Verlag, Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 200I. xi + 420 pp. Illustrations . Notes. Bibliography.Tables. Index. DM 89.80: ?4s.9 I. How do you investigate a type of text like literary criticism? Not literary criticism in the general sense, but in a sense which native English speakers REVIEWS 53I normally do not use, and which the Russians, among others, do? Literary criticism in this particular sense means topical, applied writing that greatly influencesthe generalpublic and explicitlyevaluatesthe worksdiscussed. Two possibilities present themselves. We can analyse the contents for consistencyand substanceof the profferedargumentsand evaluations.Or we can focus on pragmatic aspects of literary criticism (for example, by underscoring, collating, and evaluating statistics illustrating the effects of criticismon the purchasingbehaviourof readers). In her Rostock habilitation thesis, Birgit Menzel chooses neither of the above possibilities.And with good reason, for she does not focus merely on the work of a single literary critic, or on the treatment of a single work by various schools or camps of literarycriticism. Rather, she assignsherselfthe more comprehensive task of presenting an 'overview of Russian literary criticism between I986 and I993' (p. I). The reader hoping for a detailed criticism of criticism in Menzel's book will thereforebe disappointed. What she does offer is a survey of groupings and argument-patternsalong with traditions and developments. In other words, Menzel seeks to grasp the changing structuresof literary criticism as an important form of literary communication underthe conditions of the disintegratingSoviet empire. The enticing path of marketingresearchremainsunfeasiblefor the simple reason that salesrecordsfor the period of the Soviet planned economy and the years which immediatelyfollowed do not at all provide an accuratepictureof what readersreallywanted. In her statisticalassessments,Menzel thereforeconfines herselfto extremely illuminatinginformationon developments regardingthe circulationnumbersfor the...

Sovremennaia russkaia poeziia v kontekste istorii iazyka by L. V. s> Zubova (review)

REVIEWS 529 Zubova, L. V. Sovremennaia russkaia poeziia v kontekste istorni iazyka.Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Moscow, 2000. 432 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Priceunknown. ZUBOVA'S study offers a detailed and provocative analysis of Russian poetry of the I96o-9os. It discusses almost three hundred authors, including leading postmodernist figures such as Joseph Brodsky, Viktor Krivulin, Genrikh Sapgir, Sergei Stratanovskii, Dmitrii Prigov, Elena Shvarts and Viktor Sosnora. Zubova highlights playful and innovative aspects of Russian postmodernistpoetry, arguingthat many linguisticexperimentsembedded in the texts under scrutiny in the present study explore the shortcomings and inadequacyof contemporaryRussianlanguage. Zubova arguesthat linguistic games of Russian postmodernistpoets offeralternativeways of development for phonetic, semantic and grammar structures of the Russian language. Zubova holds an optimisticview that deviations from the standardlanguage, as observed in the texts she studies, do not destroy the language, but help to preserve it, especially because they resurrect from oblivion some forgotten linguistic norms from the past (p. 399). Zubova's main thesis is based on the belief that language 'is a self-correctingsystem as well as a combination of options to express various meanings' (p. 399). The book will be of great interestto linguistsand to studentsof Russianpoetry, since it offersimportant insightsinto today'sstateof the Russianlanguage. The book comprises seven chapters, including an introduction and conclusion. Chapter one outlines the main theoretical frameworkwhich is applied throughout the book; chapter two discusses phonetic aspects of contemporary poetic experiments; chapter three investigates etymological innovations; chapter four is devoted to lexical changes; chapter five talks about archaic aspects of various grammaticaldeviations;chapter six offersa detailed analysis of the linguistic games based around gender; and chapter seven analysessyntacticalstructuresof the texts. In addition, the book offersa briefsummaryof the main conclusions (pp. 398-99), bibliographyand index. To some extent, all the texts Zubova discussesmight be viewed as hypertext, with no significantdifferentiationbetween the language of the i 960S and of the I990s. Furthermore,Zubova revealspostmodernisttendencies in Russian poetry of this period by demonstratinghow the linguisticexpressionis linked to the postmodernist worldview of the authors she discusses. Zubova encouragesher readersto considersome seeminglybad poems and treatthem with a sensitivityto the irony and parodic intentions they display.As Zubova states, 'the most constructivedevices of postmodernisttext include irony, selfirony and linguistic game' (p. i i). Zubova also highlights the authors' balancing acts between high and low cultures. In this respect, such poets as Prigov, Sosnora, Shvartsand Krivulin appear to be particularlyimaginative in their use of language, exploring precarious borders between modern and archaic forms of communication, and between elitist and popular forms of expression. Zubova's findings illustratewell the intrinsicbond between postSoviet poetry and Soviet undergroundliterature.Zubova'sstudyis a welcome additionto the extensiveanalysisof postmodernistfictionundertakenby Mark Lipovetsky (RussianPostmodernist Fiction.Dialoguewith Chaos,Armonk, NY, 530 SEER, 8o, 3, 2002 I999). Zubova is well aware of the metatextual qualities of Russian postmodernism , and points to the intertextualgames of varioustexts. In addition to the more familiarnames, Zubova introducesher audience to lesser known authors, such as Vladimir Strochkov, Ian Satunovskii, and Vladimir Erl'.Unfortunately, Zubova's studydoes not contain any biographical detailsof the authorsshe quotes. Such an appendixwould be a usefultool for assessingthe spreadof linguisticdeviations, from the point of view of age groups, regional variations and the aesthetic preferences of the poets. It is difficultto assess whether some of the deviations from established linguistic norms were intentional, or derive from the contemporary sloppy usage of Russianlanguage that isparticularlynoticeable in post-Soviet Russianmedia. Krivulinand Shvarts,for example, are philologistsby training,and therefore are more inclined to have playful appropriationof some idioms, or absurd examplesof Soviet newspeak. As Zubova's study demonstrates, numerous poetic experiments reflect on the fluid state of the Russian language itself. In this respect, Zubova's discussion of the satirical elements relating to the concept of gender in contemporary Russian poetry is particularlyrewarding. Zubova's examples from Russian poetry reveal, for example, the uncertaintiesrelatingto gender of animals. Thus, some poets use the feminine form of the noun koshka (cat) with the additional note that it is used in their poem as a noun of masculine gender. Such examples are both amusing and obscure. Zubova suggeststhat contemporary Russian poets are struggling to revive the use of the neuter gender that otherwise has been steadily disappearing from the standard language (p. 301...

Determiner selection in noun phrase production.

In 3 experiments, native speakers of German named pictures of 1 or 2 objects by producing singular or plural noun phrases consisting of a definite gender-marked determiner and a noun. When singular and plural determiners differed (masculine and neuter gender), naming latencies were longer for plural utterances than for singular utterances. By contrast, when singular and plural determiners were identical (feminine gender), no such effect was obtained. When participants produced bare nouns, the Gender x Number interaction disappeared. This pattern indicates that during the production of plural definite-determiner noun phrases, singular and plural determiners compete for selection. The resulting constraints on number and gender processing in noun phrase production are discussed in the framework of models of language production.

On the Dynamics of Article Use in Estonian Yiddish

This contribution describes the variation in article use in contemporary Estonian Yiddish, a dialect belonging to the North Eastern Yiddish (NEY) group. The definite article in Yiddish will be considered together with case and gender. A striking feature in NEY dialects is the loss of neuter gender, accompanied by the emergence of mass gender, intermediate genders, and partial redistribution of former neuter nouns between feminine and masculine (if a noun is marked semantically or formally). Nouns without any marking belong to intermediate genders and show a great degree of regional variation in gender assignment. The indefinite article in the plural is zero, in the singular it has the same form for all genders and cases. Loss of neuter in NEY is paralleled by the merger of Dative and Accusative. Yiddish nouns (with few exceptions) do not take inflection; only personal pronouns, the definite article in singular and adjectives change in case. The use of Dative and Accusative forms for articles and personal pronouns varies throughout the NEY territory. The North of NEY (north-west of Lithuania, most of Latvia and Estonia) shows a stable distribution: Dative forms have been generalised for personal pronouns and Accusative forms for definite articles. In certain cases in a prepositional phrase, the definite article can be omitted, if the noun is not preceded by an adjective. In general, NEY shows greater syncretism in case-article-gender than Standard Yiddish. Estonian Yiddish (EY), a relatively young NEY dialect that has remained uninvestigated until recently, preserves the main morphological features of NEY (loss of neuter and merger of Dative and Accusative). Interestingly, EY demonstrates even more syncretism of the case-gender-article system. There are instances of the definite article omission in prepositional phrases containing adjectives, as well as indefinite article omissions. Adjective inflection -e is gradually taking over the adjective paradigm in oblique c

(1469) Proposal to conserve the name Platoma (Rhodophyta) as being of neuter gender

(1469) Proposal to conserve the name <i>Platoma (Rhodophyta)</i> as being of neuter gender

A Response to "Sexism in the English Language"

This article is a response to to Piercey's (2000) Perspectives article "Sexism in the English Language" published in last issue of the TESL Canada Journal/La Revue TESL du Canada. Piercey says there is inherent sexism in the English language. This would mean that the language deliberately discriminates against one sex in favor of the other. But gender is not sex; sex is not gender. Gender rules in language have nothing to do with sex or sexism. In the five languages I speak, the rules of grammar dictate that the masculine noun or pronoun stands for both genders when no one person or thing is specified. As we used to say in high school, "Ladies first except in French grammar," which was a jocular way of reinforcing this grammatical rule. So first, let me clear up the increasingly prevalent incorrect use of the word gender. Again, gender is not synonymous with sex. Because the English language is less cursed with gender than many others, it is easy to forget that in the Romance languages everything-from tables and chairs to buildings and countries-has gender. To quote the redoubtable Fowler (1984), "gender, n., is a grammatical term only. To talk of persons or creatures of the masculine or feminine gender, meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder" (p. 211). People and animals are of the male or female sex. Male and female refer to sex, not gender, which is expressed three ways: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Masculine means "like a man," feminine means "like a woman," and neuter means "like neither." Once we start talking of male gender, female gender, and, uh, neuter gender, we are on a slippery slope of dehumanizing the human race. Or at least desexing it! Also, the use of gender seems to be a part of the political correctness movement, or perhaps it is just plain prudery and gender is used because in our sex-crazed world sex seems to refer only to the act of copulation. These days when I fill out a form that asks for my gender, I correct the word to sex and then write F. They want to know whether I am male or female, not whether I am feminine or otherwise. I no longer change gender to sex in the academic writing I edit, because I am outnumbered and I am tired of arguing. I agree with Piercey that sexism still permeates our world. Women have had a raw deal all through the centuries, and much needs to change before we can rest. For example, there are shelters for abused women and their

Some Quantitative Characteristics of Polysemy of Verbs, Nouns and Adjectives in the German Language

The purpose of this work is to analyze the correlation between the number of meanings of a polysemantic word and its other characteristics, namely, the belonging of a word to (1) a certain grammatical class (verb, noun, adjective); (2) a certain grammatical subclass (masculine, feminine, neuter gender of the noun, strong and weak verbs); (3) a certain semantic class (22 classes of the verb, 23 classes of the noun, 17 classes of the adjective); (4) a word-building subclass (simple, derivative, and compound words). More accurate data on the distribution of polysemantic words in the dictionary and their use in text were obtained which made it possible to correct some conclusions made earlier by other researchers.

Prolegomena to a German gender dictionary

This paper pursues three principal goals: 1) the modification of rules of German gender assignment that have been formulated in an imprecise, misleading, or uneconomical way; 2) the possibilities of conflating formal rules based on external structural similarities or minimal phonic variants so as to reduce the number of categories of rules; and 3) the addition of a number of new formal and semantic rules that have up until now gone unnoticed. It also has the aim of sketching the outline specifications for a German gender dictionary. Such a lexicon would include in its information for each entry the specific rule of gender assignment. A significant step in the advancement of reduction through conflation and elimination of redundancy is the proposal of the principle of masculine as the default-gender. It is based on the observation that masculine nouns in German—excluding animates—are not significantly gender-marked and receive their gender assignment by default, that is, there is no reason for them to be feminine or neuter, both of which, in contrast to masculines, are more gender-marked. Thus it is proposed that we work with a binary division, the essence of which is formulated as follows: all nouns in German are masculine unless there is a reason for them not to be. Accordingly, the task is reduced to discovering rules only for feminine and neuter gender assignment.

Un nouvel adjectif grec dans un document kiévien : l'inscription n° 67 de la cathédrale Sainte-Sophie

A new greek adjective in a kievan document: inscription n°67 from Saint Sophia's cathedral The last line of inscription n° 67 in S. A. Vysockij's 1966 edition contains a slavonicized Greek syntagm στιχηρὰ πανταρχικά (accusative neuter plural) « stichera to the Allmighty ». It offers a new example of the original neuter gender for стиχҍра/стиχирд, which is usually feminine in Slavic. Since this inscription is a prayer to Saint Artemios, and not to God, it is likely that the author took it either from a manuscript with Greek liturgical hymns not translated, but simply transcribed into Cyrillic, or from some Menæa or the like, but did not understand properly the meaning of the adjective, which he used wrongly in his inscription.

The gender of the generic name Onosma (Boraginaceae)

SummaryStearn, W. T.: The gender of the generic name Onosma (Boraginaceae). – Taxon 42: 679–681. 1993.‐ISSN 0040‐0262.Generic names ending in ‐osma, a transcription of Greek osmê (smell), have been treated as of feminine gender except Onosma which had a neuter gender. It is proposed that for uniformity and simplicity Onosma should be treated as feminine.

Influence of Social Power vs Status Envy Modeled Behaviors on Children's Preferences for Models

Social power and Whiting's status envy theory were compared for their effects on children's model preferences. Kindergarten children observed a show in which neuter gender puppets exhibited behaviors dictated by these theories. Statistical analyses showed that: (a) sex was not associated with model preference and (b) the status envy model was significantly preferred by Ss. It was concluded that models who dispense both positive and negative reinforcements are not likely to be preferred to models consuming positive reinforcements. These results were interpreted within a social learning framework.

Foreign Nouns in German

One of the topics neglected in our German instruction is that of foreign nouns, especially those of masculine and neuter gender. The feminine foreign nouns are easily recognized because of their relatively frequent endings (-ie, -ik, -ion, -tilt, -age, etc.), and their plural offers no difficulties since it conforms to the general scheme of the feminines (-en). It is, however, helpful to emphasize that practically all foreign nouns of masculine and neuter gender belong to the -e declension (usually called the second declension) and to the fourth (weak) and mixed declensions.

Indo-Hittite Collective Nouns with a Laryngeal Suffix

Scholars are accustomed to deriving the Indo-European neuter plural ending -a/9 from the ending -a of the feminine singular. Since I am convinced that the feminine gender was developed after the separation of Hittite (or rather ProtoAnatolian) from the parental stock, I have suggested1 that we should rather assume that the singular collectives were originally of neuter gender; although they seem to have become feminine in Proto-Indo-European. I have never collected all the evidence upon which the thesis is based. The most important part of it has long been familiar; it consists of collective nouns of feminine gender in the historic Indo-European languages, such as Skt. rasa 'moisture', Lith. rasd, OCS rosa 'dew' beside Lat. ros 'dew', or Gk. Obpa 'door' (cf. Lat. foras 'out of doors') beside Lat. fords 'pair of doors, double doors'; and of neuter plurals in IE -a or -9. The familiar Greek use of singular verbs with neuter plural nouns as subject is often cited as confirming the derivation of neuter plurals from prehistoric singular nouns; and in Hittite also neuter plural nouns are often followed by singular verbs. One customarily mentions such

The Neuter Gender of old Norse fljōđ and sprund

The Neuter Gender of old Norse fljōđ and sprund

The Neuter in Modern French

Author's summary.— The neuter gender still finds frequent expression through pronoun forms in modern French, being used to indicate the non‐personal elements in daily human experience.