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Project C3 - Variation of the morphosyntactic reference

PI and Ko-PI: Prof. Dr. U. Dohmas und Prof. Dr. C. Spieß

Research Context

The aim of the C3 project is to investigate how the form-meaning mapping of morphosyntactic markers can vary in language processing. One example of such variation is the interpretation of the anaphoric 3rd person possessive pronouns. In German, the 3rd person singular possessive pronoun in principle agrees with the genus of the possessor: (der Bruder - sein Buch, die Schwester - ihr Buch). However, there are repeated cases in which the possessive pronoun sein refers to feminines (e.g., die Sache geht seinen Weg; Duden, 2016, p. 275), which can be interpreted as a gender underspecification of sein. Results from corpus analyses suggest that gender-insensitive sein occurs primarily with inanimata (Fleischer 2022). In addition to animacy, also other factors play a role (Binanzer et al. 2021), such as the discrepancy between grammatical and semantic gender in gender-neutral expressions (die Lehrkraft; Schütze, dissertation), gender stereotypes (Molinario et al. 2016), or the conceptual field of referents in the lexicon (Köpcke & Zubin 2017).

The dissertation will experimentally investigate the variability in the relationship between form and meaning in gender processing, but also in other areas of morphosyntax. Electroencephalography (EEG) will be used to study the implicit processing of gender congruency deviations as a function of unambiguous and neutral gender references. This is a time-dependent method whose response latencies indicate at which processing steps incongruence is detected: at the morphosyntactic level (early components) or at the semantic level (later components). Another experimental approach is eye-tracking, in which the interpretation of presented utterances can be studied via eye movements and the detection of morphosyntactic deviations via pupil dilation.

Possible topics for doctoral theses:

  • Investigations into the role of social gender in the processing of gender congruent and incongruent references.
  • Studies of cross-linguistic contrasts in gender marking and their influence on gender interpretation in multilinguals.
  • Processing of different gender forms with different experimental methods.
  • Studies of other forms of morphosyntactic variance such as case or number.

References

Binanzer, A., Gamper, J., & Wecker, V. (2021). Prototypen – Schemata – Konstruktionen: Untersuchungen zur deutschen Morphologie und Syntax, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.

Fleischer, J. (2022): „Qualität hat seinen Preis“: Genus-insensitives ‚sein‘ im Gegenwartsdeutschen. Linguistische Berichte 271. 251–288. 

Köpcke, K.-M. & Zubin, D. (2017). Genusvariation: Was offenbart sie über die innere Dynamik des Systems?. In Konopka, M. & Wöllstein, A. (Hrgg.). Grammatische Variation: Empirische Zugänge und theoretische Modellierung (pp. 203-228). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.

Molinaro, N., Su, J. J. & M. Carreiras (2016): Stereotypes override grammar: Social knowledge in sentence comprehension. Brain and Language 155. 36–43.

Schütze, C. (in Vorbereitung). Dissertation, GRK 2700.