Die Ausdrucksmittel für Genus und Geschlecht im Sorbischen: Grammatik und Lexik

Abstract

Means of Expressing Grammatical and Social Gender in Sorbian: Grammar and Lexicon

The grammatical gender of nouns functions in a semantic core area (which includes, amongst other things, personal terms) as expression of differences in the biological/social gender of referents. In Sorbian, congruence, inflections, derivation, and the meanings of words for personal terms provide linguistic indicators of gender affiliation and gender differences of the persons referred to. Helmut Faßke differentiates in his Morphologie (Morphology) (Bautzen 1981) three types of lexically based gender oppositions using a structuralist basis, according to the criterium of the relevant contrasting relationships (asymmetrical, equipollent, neutralized). This list is to be extended by semantic criteria: in addition, gender neutral, singular collectives are singled out, gender impaired (defective) nouns (from which no personal terms of the opposite gender are derived on lexical or cultural grounds), further on pejorative/emotionally connoted personal terms (where in some cases, according to information in the dictionaries of Sorbian, exists variation of referent based gender, and therefore a function similar to common gender nouns), and finally – as a sub-group of the latter – several nouns, whose derivational structure provides grounds for interpreting them as “generic feminine”. This article considers both Lower and Upper Sorbian.