Gender assignment to English loanwords. (Variation in) Gender assignment: Status quo. Variation in gender assignment: What?

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1 A cross-linguistic comparison of variation in gender assignment to English loanwords in German and Polish Marcus Callies Philipps Universität Marburg Eva Ogiermann Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg Konrad Szczesniak Uniwersytet Śląski Sosnowiec Gender assignment to English loanwords Onysko (2007): Interaction of gender rules and a default hierarchy "Principle and rule approach": All anglicisms which are not default gender (i.e. masculine, considered the unmarked) receive their gender by specific rules (based on German): Primary rules: semantic and morphological rules Secondary criteria: phonological rules and lexical-conceptual equivalence Rules operate on top of an underlying default gender hierarchy: If s-/m-rules apply, secondary criteria are unimportant, conflicts are settled in favour of default If no s-/m-rules apply, secondary criteria can influence gender assignment before default DGfS Bamberg (Variation in) Gender assignment: Status quo Many studies do not explicitly address variation in gender assignment (aka gender vacillation, gender wavering, German "Genusschwankung") Mostly (diachronic) dictionary studies with few others using comp. small corpora, then often limited to only one newspaper or news magazine (e.g. Onysko 2007) Only rarely have dictionaries and/or corpora been supplemented by other types of data (Carstensen 1980, Schulte-Beckhausen 2002, Fischer 2005 worked with native speaker informants) Variation in gender assignment: What? 'True' instances of variation: Only those where the different genders do not indicate a differenc in meaning, i.e. gender does not separate lexical items (Onysko 2007): das Crossover ('mix of styles, genres') vs. der Crossover ('type of car') "Genusschwankung par excellence": No morphophonological or semantic rule available, hence inter-speaker variation between masculine and neuter (Talanga 1987) Carstensen 1980, Talanga 1987, Kilarski 2001, Schulte-Beckhausen 2002, Chan 2005, Fischer 2005, Onysko 2007

2 Variation in gender assignment: How much? Most studies claim that there is comparatively little variation in gender assignment to loanwords: Kilarski (2001): Variation between 3.5% for English loans in Swedish and 5.8% in Danish among all assigned nouns Schulte-Beckhausen (2002): Comparing dictionary, corpus and informant data, significant differences between the data types Nettmann-Multanowska (2003): Wavering more characteristic of German than Polish; 57 (10%) vs. 9 (3%) instances in her corpus) Chan (2005): Highest degree of variation between masculine and neuter (141 out of 3105 entries = 5%), M/F 0.9%, F/N 0.6%, M/N/F 0.1% Fischer (2005): Highest degree of variation between masculine and neuter; variation is highest with simple (monosyllabic), unaffixed words without any formal marking, esp. if the meaning of the word is unknown Onysko (2007): Only a minimal amount of gender variation in his SPIEGEL corpus (which is not quantified) Variation in gender assignment: How much? Why there is more variation than has been assumed to date: Bias towards dictionary data: Dictionaries have shown to be inconsistent and often document normative, expert language use Using only dictionaries or one type of newspaper / news magazine increases the likelihood of bias towards a specific in-house writing style or policy on anglicisms (see e.g. Yang 1990 and Onysko 2007 who used Der Spiegel) Rules for gender assignment usually explained on the basis of linguists' expert knowledge, but most native speakers are linguistically untrained: linguists' intuitions don't match those of other native speakers Variation in gender assignment: Factors Factors that are assumed to influence variation: Gender rules based on formal properties (morphophonological, semantic) Regional differences Recency of borrowing / diachronic factor Frequency Context of presentation Number of available lexical-conceptual equivalents in the recipient language (the more are available, the more variation: Login > die Anmeldung, das Passwort, der Benutzername) Bilingual competence / knowledge word meaning (variation higher when meaning is unknown) Carstensen 1980, Talanga 1987, Schulte-Beckhausen 2002, Fischer 2005, Onysko 2007 Variation in gender assignment: Why? Variation understood as conflicts between assignment rules, i.e. competition among rivaling factors (e.g. morphophonological and semantic criteria), and competition among lexical equivalents Variation also explained in terms of inter-speaker variation and indeterminacy of the closest lexical equivalent; thus relegated to arbitrariness and idiosyncracies, or non-linguistic factors ("Sprachgefühl") Carstensen 1980, Kilarski 2001, Schulte-Beckhausen 2002, Fischer 2005, Onysko 2007

3 Research questions 1. Taking into account corpus and informant data, how much variation is there? 2. What are the factors that cause variation in gender assignment to loanwords and what are those that make variation less likely? 3. Do these factors differ in the two languages, and if so, how do they play out? Corpus study (1) 10 out of a number of initial test items later used in the experimental study subject to pilot corpus studies German: Berliner Zeitung newspaper corpus (in DWDS), (252m words); low frequency items also checked in COSMAS II (W-öff, Archiv der geschriebenen Korpora, alle öffentlichen Korpora, 2.2b words) Polish: web-as-corpus study ( using collocational patterns to retrieve instances marked for gender Corpus study (2) Corpus study (3) Clearly, variation can be found in corpora. But... For some more recent borrowings very low frequency counts; many instances inconclusive because not marked for gender or ambiguous

4 Gender assignment in German (1) Phonological rules Monosyllabic words 24 phonological rules (Köpcke 1982) simplified version: masculine monosyllabic words are unmarked Morphological rules Masc: -er / -ling / -rich Fem: -e/ -keit / -ung/ -schaft Neut: -sel/ -tum/ nis Gender assignment in German (2) Semantic rules a) semantic field analogy Masc: days of the week / alcoholic drinks /spices Fem: names of trees / numbers Neut: colours / town names / languages b) hypernymy der Wagen der Honda, der Twingo die Zigarette die Marlboro, die Camel das Hotel das Hilton, das Meryan Biological gender (can be outranked by morphological rules) die Frau but das Fräulein Gender assignment in Polish (1) Phonological rules (Auslaut) Masc: all consonants dom 'House' /i/ dyżurny 'employee on call' /a/ dentysta 'dentist' Fem: /a/ krowa 'cow' some consonants noc 'night' Neut: /o/ jajko 'egg' /e/ słońce 'sun' /ę/ niemowlę 'infant' /um/ muzeum 'museum' Morphological rules (suffixes echo phonological rules) Masc: -ik / -iciel / -izm Fem: -ka / -acja Neut: -anie /-cie / -stwo Gender assignment in Polish (2) Biological gender (outranks phonological rules) Masc: mężczyzna 'man' Fem: babsztyl 'woman' (pejorative) Suggested hierarchy: biological gender > phonological rules > semantic rules

5 Hypotheses 1. Variation is low(er) with words that do have a marker that is a strong trigger for a specific gender (morphophonological and semantic rules are so strong that variation is marginal) { er} = masculine, {-ing} = neuter bitch = feminine, coach = masculine ending in consonant = masculine (Polish) 2. Variation is high(er) with words that have no marker/feature that determines a specific gender 3. Variation increases if there is no single clear lexical equivalent (i.e. a broad range of possible lexical equivalents or none at all) 4. Variation increases if the meaning of a word is unknown Experimental study (1) 26 loanwords (nouns), selected acc. to formal and semantic criteria to be applicable as test items in both languages biological gender/semantic field/cognate: bitch, coach; alcopop, shake, techno, domain words with morphological marking: browser, voucher, casting, posting deverbal nouns with particle: download, update, take-off, login words ending in a special sound: preview, crew; movie, cookie; badge, stage: label, jingle simplex, monosyllabic words: gate, sale, slot, gig Experimental study (2) Format: Gender assignment by providing the definite article (in German) or inflectional suffix(es) (in Polish) to words in contextualised sentences (translational equivalents) Further questions as to informants' knowledge of the meaning of the word (known, unknown, not sure) and potential lexical equivalents in the native language Questionnaire administered to 146 German and 100 Polish native speaker informants, all university students of English in their mid-twenties

6 Results (1) Variation measured in terms of a diversity index (Simpson's D) taking into account the range of gender categories present among the answers (how many) and the relative abundances, i.e. the evenness or equitability with which the answers are distributed among the different gender categories (how often a gender is represented) D is a figure between 0 and 1: If it is 1, the answers are spread equally across the given categories (e.g. 50 masc., 50 fem., 50 neut.) If it is 0, all answers fall into one category, there is no variation at all In short: the higher the D value, the more variation Results (2) Words for which there is a high degree of variation the most frequently mentioned gender category does not exceed 90% have a broad range of genders mentioned (range between 3 and 7) D value is higher than 0.4 show intra-speaker variation (mostly masculine/neuter) Results (3) Results (4) Variation only in German: voucher, take-off, login, techno Variation only in Polish: browser, download, update, domain, crew, stage, label, gate, sale) indicating the different weight that gender rules have in the two languages Variation in both languages: alcopop, preview, movie, cookie, badge, jingle High variation usually correlates with uncertainty/lack of knowledge of word meaning (few exceptions) /u:/, /I, i:/, /dz/ and /schwa+l/ are sounds that trigger variation in Polish

7 Results (5) Conclusion Hierarchy of factors that determine variation in gender assignment? gender marker > lexical equivalent > knowledge of word meaning Variation is highest if a) rules that work on gender markers are out and cannot be applied b) there is no single clear lexical equivalent in the respective language (broad range of lexical equivalents mentioned and a high percentage of answers in the category "no lexical equivalent given") c) there is lack/uncertainty about the meaning of the word References Thank you! Danke! Dziękujemy bardzo! Baran, Dominika (2003), "English loanwords in Polish and the question of gender assignment", Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 8:1, Carstensen, Broder (1980), "Das Genus englischer Fremd- und Lehnwörter im Deutschen, in Viereck, Wolfgang (ed.), Studien zum Einfluß der englischen Sprache auf das Deutsche. Tübingen: Narr, Chan, Sze-Mun (2005). Genusintegration: eine systematische Untersuchung zur Genuszuweisung englischer Entlehnungen in der deutschen Sprache. München: Iudicium. Fischer, Rudolf-Josef (2005), Genuszuordnung. Theorie und Praxis am Beispiel des Deutschen. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. Gregor, Bernd (1983), Genuszuordnung: Das Genus englischer Lehnwörter im Deutschen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Kilarski, Marcin (2001), Gender assignment of English loanwords in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. Ph.D. dissertation, Adam Mickiewicz University. Köpcke, Klaus-Michael (1982), Untersuchungen zum Genussystem der deutschen Gegenwartssprache. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Nettmann-Multanowska, Kinga (2003), English Loanwords in Polish and German after 1945: Orthography and Morphology. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. Onysko, Alexander (2007), Anglicisms in German. Borrowing, Lexical Productivity, and Written Codeswitching. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Schulte-Beckhausen, Marion (2002), Genusschwankung bei englischen, französischen, italienischen und spanischen Lehnwörtern im Deutschen: Eine Untersuchung auf der Grundlage deutscher Wörterbücher seit Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. Talanga, Tomislav (1987), Das Phänomen der Genusschwankung in der deutschen Gegenwartssprache untersucht nach Angaben neuerer Wörterbücher der deutschen Standardsprache. PhD dissertation, University of Bonn.