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Rose Fisher

Rose Fisher

The Pennsylvania State University
The Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures

Junior Fellow
September 2022 – Juli 2023

E-Mail:

CV

  • Ph.D. Candidate in German Linguistics and Language Sciences at The Pennsylvania State University 
  • Native of the Amish community of Lancaster County and native speaker of their dialect of Pennsylvania Dutch 

Forschungsinteressen

  • Pennsylvania Dutch
  • Nominal Morphology
  • The Morphology/Phonology Interface
  • Language Contact
  • Language Change
  • Dialectology 

Publikationen (Auswahl)

  • Fisher, R. (2023). Language and Identity: The Amish in Relation to Pennsylvania Dutch. The Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities. Ohio State University Libraries.
  • Fisher, R., Natvig, D., Pretorius, E., Putnam, M. T., & Schuhmann, K. S. (2022). Why is Inflectional Morphology Difficult to Borrow?  - Distributing and Lexicalizing Plural Allomorphy in Pennsylvania Dutch. Languages. Baltimore, MD: Linguistic Society of America via Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Fisher, R. (2022) Varieties of Pennsylvania Dutch: Post-vernacular or Not so Simple? In E. Peterson & E. Sippola (eds.), Proceedings of WILA 12. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Fisher, R., Schuhmann, K. S., & Putnam, M. (2022). Reducing the Role of Prosody: Plural Allomorphy in Pennsylvania Dutch. In K. Biers and J. R. Brown (eds.), Proceedings of WILA 11. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.  

DSA-Projekt

The Historical Roots of Pennsylvania Dutch Gender
Pennsylvania Dutch is a German variety (primarily Palatinate in origin) spoken for over 300 years in North America. The pilot data for my dissertation study support my initial native speaker intuitions that grammatical gender marking in my native dialect of Pennsylvania Dutch (spoken by the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania) is in flux and does not strictly adhere to the paradigm presented in instructive grammars and the scientific literature. To determine the true current nature of the grammatical gender paradigm in my own dialect of Pennsylvania Dutch as well as an additional dialect (spoken by Old Order Mennonites in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania) and to explain how (possibly divergent) developments came about is the goal of my dissertation. However, in order to explain this synchronic state, it is useful to consider the diachronic development of the language in particular as it pertains to grammatical gender. During my time in Marburg, I have consulted the myriad resources (both online and physical) available at the Sprachatlas der deutschen Sprache to build an understanding of how grammatical gender is/was marked in the source dialects of Pennsylvania Dutch and how the paradigm developed (and in many ways shrank) throughout the history of the language. I have also gained a deeper understanding of the complex, non-transparent gender systems that are characteristic of Germanic languages and the trajectories they might follow across time (e.g., reduction and syncretism in Dutch as opposed to fairly rigid retention in German).