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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Abstract
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.