Jan Ceuppens, Jossfinn Bohn, Clemens Ruthner, Heleen Van Mol, Torsten Leuschner

Germanistische Mitteilungen, Jahrgang 45 (2019), Ausgabe 1&2, Seite 141 - 156

Caduff, Corina / Vedder, Ulrike (Hg.): Gegenwart schreiben. Zur deutschsprachigen Literatur 2000-2015. München: Fink 2017 (Jan Ceuppens) Palm, Christian: Exil und Identitätskonstruktion in deutschsprachiger Literatur exilierter Autoren. Das Beispiel SAID und Sam Rapithwin. Heidelberg: Winter 2017 (Jossfin Bohn) Schenk, Klaus / Zeisberger, Ingold (Hg.): Fremde Räume. Interkulturalität und Semiotik des Phantastischen. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2017 (Clemens Ruthner) Gredel, Eva / Kämper, Heidrun / Mell, Ruth M. / Polajnar, Janja (Hg.): Diskurs – kontrastiv. Diskurslinguistik als Methode zur Erfassung transnationaler und sprachübergreifender Diskursrealitäten. Bremen: Hempen 2018 (Heleen Van Mol, Torsten Leuschner)

Heleen Van Mol

Germanistische Mitteilungen, Jahrgang 43 (2017), Ausgabe 1, Seite 5 - 30

Abstract: This study is concerned with the assignment of gender to French nouns in German. Like any noun in German, borrowed nouns must be assigned one of three genders, viz. masculine (e.g. le balcon > der Balkon ‘balcony’), feminine (e.g. la nuance > die Nuance ‘nuance’) or neuter (e.g. le bataillon > das Bataillon ‘batallion’). However, as French has only masculine and feminine, the question arises why a particular gender is assigned to a given French loanword (“Gallicism”) when it enters the German lexicon, as illustrated e.g. by le bagage, which is feminine in German (die Bagage) but masculine in French, and la gelée, which is both masculine and neuter in German (der/das Gelee) but feminine in French. The present study provides a preliminary answer by investigating the relative significance of ten principles of gender assignment (four semantic, six formal) in a sample of 498 Gallicisms, taken from the existing literature. Hierarchies showing respectively the relative range, validity and dominance of the ten principles are established and compared, and prospects are suggested for future research.