No genericity in sight: An exploration of the semantics of masculine generics in German

Abstract

Findings of previous behavioural studies suggest that the semantic nature of what is known as the ‘masculine generic’ in Modern Standard German is indeed not generic but biased towards a masculine reading. Such findings are the cause of debates within and outside linguistic research, as they run counter to the grammarian assumption that the masculine generic form is gender-neutral. The present paper aims to explore the semantics of masculine generics, relating them to  those  of  masculine  and  feminine  explicit  counterparts.  To  achieve  this  aim,  an  approach  novel  to  this  area  of  linguistic  research  is  made  use  of:  discriminative  learning.  Analysing  semantic  vectors  obtained  via  naive  discriminative  learning,  semantic  measures  calculated  via  linear  discriminative  learning,  and  taking  into  account  the  stereotypicality  of  the  words  under investigation, it is found that masculine generics are semantically much more similar to masculine explicits than to feminine explicits. The results presented in this paper thus support the notion of a masculine bias in masculine generics. Further, new insights into the semantic representations of masculine generics are provided and it is shown that stereotypicality does not modulate the masculine bias.