Prolegomena to a German gender dictionary

Abstract

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.