Upper German dialects make heavy use of diminutive strategies, but little is known about the actual conceptual effects of those devices. This paper is the first to present two large-scale psycholinguistic experiments that investigate this issue in East Franconian, a dialect spoken in Bavaria. Franconian uses both the diminutive suffix -la and the quantifying construction a weng a lit. ‘a little bit a’ to modify noun phrases. Our first experiment shows that diminutization has no effect on conceptualization of magnitude: People do not think of a smaller/weaker/shorter etc. referent when the NP is modified by the morphological diminutive, the quantifying construction, or their combination. The second experiment involves gradable NPs and shows that, again, the morphological diminutive has no effect on how people conceptualize the degree to which a gradable nominal predicate holds; in contrast, a weng a reduces it significantly. These experiments suggest that diminutization does not have uniform effects across semantic domains, and our results act as a successful example of extending the avenue of cognitive psychology into dialectology with the active participation of a speaker community.*

This study addresses gender assignment in six North Scandinavian varieties with a three-gender system: Old Norse, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Old Swedish, Nysvenska, Jamtlandic, and Elfdalian. Focusing on gender variation and change, we investigate the role of various factors in gender change. Using the contemporary Swedish varieties Jamtlandic and Elfdalian as a basis, we compare gender assignment in other North Scandinavian languages, tracing the evolution back to Old Norse. The data consist of 1,300 concepts from all six languages coded for cognacy, gender, and morphological and semantic variation. Our statistical analysis shows that the most important factors in gender change are the Old Norse weak/strong inflection, Old Norse gender, animate/inanimate distinction, word frequency, and loan status. From Old Norse to modern languages, phonological assignment principles tend to weaken, due to the general loss of word-final endings. Feminine words are more susceptible to changing gender, and the tendency to lose the feminine is noticeable even in the varieties in our study upholding the three-gender system. Further, frequency is significantly correlated with unstable gender. In semantics, only the animate/inanimate distinction signifi-cantly predicts gender assignment and stability. In general, our study confirms the decay of the feminine gender in the Scandinavian branch of Germanic.

In this paper, we investigate an ongoing change in the grammatical gender system of Norwegian. Previous research has shown that the feminine form of the indefinite article is quickly disappearing from several dialects, which has led to claims that the feminine gender is being lost from the language. We have carried out a study of the status of the feminine in possessives across five age groups of speakers of the Tromsø dialect. Our findings show that the prenominal possessives are affected by the change to the same extent as the indefinite article, while forms that have been argued not to be exponents of gender (the definite suffix and the postnominal possessive) are generally unaffected.

This paper examines the acquisition of grammatical gender of indefinite and definite DPs in Danish. It investigates which grammatical contexts further acquisition and which slow it down, and whether distinguishing between monolinguals and bilinguals makes a difference. Danish has a two-way gender distinction (common and neuter), fusing gender with definiteness in the DP. In order to answer our research questions, we tested monolingual and bilingual Danish-speaking children (n=72) from different age groups using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, a Picture Description Task, and a Story Task. A generalized linear mixed effects regression analysis of the results showed that i) the children produced the Standard Danish determiner significantly more often with common than with neuter nouns; ii) the children produced significantly more Standard Danish gender marking in simple DPs than in complex DPs; iii) the children produced significantly more expressions with definite determiners realized as suffixes than with indefinite determiners expressed as prenominal articles in accordance with conventional norms; and iv) bilingual children produced significantly less Standard Danish gender marking than their monolingual peers, but ceiling effects in the monolingual group made it impossible to examine interactions between group and grammatical context.*

While major restructurings and simplifications have been reported for gender systems of other Germanic languages in multiethnolectal speech, this article demonstrates that the three-way gender distinction of German is relatively stable among young speakers from an immigrant background. We investigate gender in a German multiethnolect based on a corpus of approximately 17 hours of spontaneous speech produced by 28 young speakers in Stuttgart (mainly from Turkish and Balkan background). German is not their second language, but (one of) their first language(s), which they have fully acquired from childhood. We show that the gender system does not show signs of reduction in the direction of a two-gender system, nor of wholesale loss. We also argue that the position of gender in the grammar is weakened by independent innovations, such as the frequent use of bare nouns in grammatical contexts where German requires a determiner. Another phenomenon that weakens the position of gender is the simplification of adjective-noun agreement and the emergence of a generalized gender-neutral suffix for prenominal adjectives (that is, schwa). The disappearance of gender and case marking in the adjective means that the grammatical category of gender is lost in Adj + N phrases (without a determiner).

This paper examines grammatical gender from the sociolinguistic perspective. The question pursued is to what extent exponents of grammatical gender are tied indexically to identity categories. Building on literature and corpus data, I claim that within the Norwegian context, grammatical gender is associated with sociolinguistic dimensions such as the urban/rural distinction, political views, class, ethnicity. The traditional three-gender system is being replaced by a two-gender system in several dialects, resulting in the loss of the feminine gender. Indexical values associated with the feminine gender features are still valid, though, and some forms take on new pragmatic functions. Once grammatical gender is viewed through a sociolinguistic lens, with the agency of speakers being recognized, it becomes clear that it may not be fully understood without taking into account the context of interaction at a micro-level, and the sociohistorical characteristics of—for instance—regions with language contact at a macro-level.*

Previous research has shown that Dutch pronominal gender is in a process of resemanticization: Highly individuated nouns are increasingly referred to with masculine and feminine pronouns, and lowly individuated ones with the neuter pronoun het/’t ‘it’, irrespective of the grammatical gender of the noun (Audring 2009). The process is commonly attributed to the loss of adnominal gender agreement, which is increasingly blurring distinctions between masculine and feminine nouns and, therefore, requires speakers to resort to semantic default strategies (De Vogelaer & De Sutter 2011). Several factors have been identified that influence the choice of semantic vis-à-vis lexical agreement, both linguistic and social. This article seeks to weigh the importance of both structural and social factors in pronominal gender agreement in Belgian Dutch, using the Belgian part of the Spoken Dutch Corpus. A multivariate statistical analysis reveals that most effects are structural, including noun semantics and the syntactic function of the antecedent and the pronoun, as well as the pragmatic status of the antecedent. The most important social factor is speech register. We argue that these effects support a psycholinguistic account in which resemanticization is seen as a change from below, caused by hampered lexical access to noun gender.

This paper discusses grammatical gender in Norwegian by bringing together data from first language acquisition, Norwegian heritage language, and dialect change. In all these contexts, gender is often claimed to be a vulnerable category, arguably due to the relative non-transparency of gender assignment. Furthermore, the feminine gender is in the process of being lost in many Norwegian dialects, as feminine agreement forms (for example, the indefinite article) are merged with the masculine. The definite suffix, in contrast, is quite stable, as it is acquired early and does not undergo attrition/change. We argue that the combined data provide evidence that gender and declension class are separate phenomena, and we outline a possible formal analysis to account for the findings.*

This paper deals with the misplacement of the infinitival marker zu ‘to’ in German. While this phenomenon only occurs in certain config-urations in the standard language, such as auxiliary fronting, it is common in dialects and shows quite a high degree of variability. I discuss the misplacement of zu in Standard German due to auxiliary fronting, as well as other types of zu-misplacement found in dialects. I propose two parsimonious options for the analysis of the standard language as well as dialect cases, namely, i) precedence rules and ii) a special kind of infixing operation that was first proposed in the framework of Categorial Morphology (Bach 1984, Hoeksema 1985). I show that even though the first approach has its merits, the second one is more advantageous.*