German’s Gender Gap: A Morphosyntactic Analysis of Gender-Innovative Nouns

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2022
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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en
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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German role nouns are undergoing significant innovation with the spread of forms which do not belong to any of the established grammatical genders. To provide a morphosyntactic account for these ’gender gaps,’ this thesis proposes a structure based on the Merger of two ’n’ heads, allowing for an innovative set of active gender features in German. The proposed structure assumes the core components of the Minimalist Program and Distributed Morphology. To support this account, I first examine the interpretability of German role noun gender. I then survey the syntactic distribution and phonetic realization of ’gender gaps,’ finding a broader distribution than previous scholarship. While a prosodic analysis of ’gender gaps’ from the literature accounts for some speakers, the morphosyntactic analysis proposed here better accounts for nonbinary ’gender gap’ uses. Concluding, I consider the analysis’ predictions for further ’gender gap’ innovations and its implications for the study of morphosyntactic gender cross-linguistically.
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