Gender related practices in person reference: Discourse, grammar, cognition

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Evelyn C. Ferstl; Professorin Dr. Helga Kotthoff; Professorin Dr. Damaris Nübling
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 456835372

The project "Gender-related person references: Discourse, Grammar, Cognition" addresses the following questions using a combination of qualitative, grammar analytical and psycholinguistic methods: 1) Which lines of argumentation, attitudes and stylistic manifestations can be identified in public debates and in guided interviews on gender-conscious language (so-called „Gendern“)? (SP1) 2) Which grammatical and lexical factors have an effect on the gendered associations elicited by of (reference-semantically) generically used masculine personal designations? (SP2) 3) How are the readability and the interpretation of words and texts influenced by gender-conscious and especially non-binary language forms? (SP3) Building on the results of two years of fruitful research and productive project discussions, the following important questions arose and will further be investigated: SP1: In addition to the qualitative analysis of metapragmatic utterances, keyness analyses are planned for the investigation of media discourse in order to make thematic focal points quantitatively visible. An analysis of the metaphors used will provide access to language ideologies underlying the evaluations. In addition, further guided interviews are planned in order to investigate emerging differences between interviews and the media debates on gender-conscious language use, for example with trans and/or non-binary people to investigate the extent to which this group differs from non-academics. In SP2, the question of the influence of grammatical and lexical factors on the processing of masculine person designations will be examined in greater depth. Here, the same personal names are embedded in differently gendered sentence contexts, which are to be named with first names in the form of cloze texts. The course of the project to date has shown effects not only with regard to the number of masculine markers present, but also w.r.t. to the word type of the pronominal gender carriers (e.g., relative, possessive or personal pronouns) that refer to indefinite pronouns such as jemand, keiner, niemand. The hypothesis is that personal pronouns are particularly strong promoters of masculine gendering. SP3: The focus of this project phase lies in the investigation of inter-individual differences, which have proven to be particularly relevant in previous experimental studies. Therefore, an eye-tracking experiment will be conducted with a non-student group of people across a wide age range to investigate the readability of texts with different forms of gender-conscious language. In addition, it will be analyzed in greater depth whether and how the behavior of the participants in the experiments is related to their attitude towards different forms of gender-conscious language.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants