Germanistische Linguistik

In German, the use of the suffix -:in to derive nouns denoting persons of any gender from grammatically masculine nouns (“gender motion”) has led to variation between non-derived and derived forms, particularly in contexts of generic reference....

If we look at the languages of the world, the development of gender systems follows a determined process of grammaticalization. This process usually proceeds from semantically to grammatically (formally) motivated gender systems. At the same time,...

In languages with grammatical gender systems like German, conflicts can arise between grammatical gender and gender association in pronominal references to human designations. An experimental study compared epicene, gender-nonspecific feminine forms...

The question which terms for person reference should count as genderfair has been controversially discussed for a long time. Hereinafter, the arguments that seem to be the most relevant will be reconstructed, systematized and discussed. Therefore, I...

Language should be inclusive, meaning it is understandable for as many people as possible. To this end, the concept of easy-to-read language (Leichte Sprache, LS) was developed which notably benefits people with learning difficulties, among other...

Generic masculines are masculine nouns that can denote persons of any gender. In gender discourse, generic masculines such as Teilnehmer ‘participant’, which have a gender-specific meaning in addition to a generic meaning, are considered...

In their seminal paper, Gygax et al. (2008) tested sentence pairs containing a masculine personal noun such as Sozialarbeiter ‘social workers’ in the first sentence, followed by a resumptive anaphor such as einige der Frauen/Männer ‘some of...

In recent years, the development trends of gender-sensitive language use in German linguistics has been more and more examined by using empirical methods. In addition to psycholinguistic studies on the perception of personal nouns, the focus is...

Linguistic gendering, understood as making all genders visible (cf. Hirschberg 2021), constitutes a morphological operation, which will be illustrated below for nouns, articles/pronouns, and adjectives. Not only do individual speakers often lack...

On the theoretical basis of a pragmalinguistic concept of representation and the discourse and speech act concept associated with the pragmatic concept of representation, the article analyses linguistic representations of health and illness in...

In psychiatry, mental representations are considered at a variety of complexity levels in a highly interdisciplinary context. Strict definitions, in which mental representation reflects the concrete external world are rarely used in the clinical...

The decline of behaviourism in psychology marked the triumphant advance of cognitive science as an interdisciplinary, primarily empirical investigation of mental phenomena. A core concept in this multidisciplinary research program is that of a...

To gain a better understanding of how language is mentally represented, modern linguistics provides us with a variety of empirical methods. This article focuses on two methodological approaches that are based on the observation of linguistic...

Already von Helmholtz, at the end of the 19th century, was working on the question of how the brain processes spatial sensory information and makes it available to the motor system in order to interact successfully with the world. We can see where...

This article deals with the concept of mental linguistic representation, which is used in research in many disciplines in specific ways. These uses have fundamental theoretical conditions that are linked to various challenges. Firstly, these...

Linguistic representations change over the course of a child’s life. Children are faced with the task of perceiving, processing and mentally representing the language that surrounds them. In language production, this dynamic is evident in...

Talkers vary in their production of speech, requiring listeners to work out the mapping between speech and linguistic representations for a talker. To accommodate talker variability, listeners use various sources of information, such as knowledge...

The Mismatch Negativity (MMN), an automatic and pre-attentive deviation detection response of the human brain, has widely been used as electrophysiological correlate of neural representations in the sensory cortices. Besides its importance for...

Pre-boundary lengthening (PBL), the increase in duration of segments preceding prosodic boundaries, has increasingly been studied regarding its form, but its function in the language system remains unclear. Previous research suggests that PBL is...

This article examines to which extent so-called image schemas contribute to explanations of linguistic variation at the level of concrete linguistic expressions. Following a discussion of the current state of research on image schemas that draws...

The article first explores how the term function (‘Funktion’) is used in publications from cultural linguistics (‘Kulturlinguistik’). Although ‘function’ is a central category in cultural linguistics, there is surprisingly little...

This article deals with ‘comparison’ as a concept and as a method in contributions to cultural linguistics. It briefly summarizes the history of comparative and contrastive approaches in linguistics and cultural linguistics in order to propose a...

Starting with a semiotic-praxeological and dialogistic understanding of ‘culture’, the paper explains three uses of ‘significance’ in culturally analytical oriented linguistic studies. Only briefly, a more general usage is outlined, before...