Geschlechts\"ubergreifende Maskulina im Sprachgebrauch Eine korpusbasierte Untersuchung zu lexemspezifischen Unterschieden

TL;DR

This study analyzes the use of generic masculines in German press texts, revealing lexeme-specific differences and challenging assumptions about their gender-neutrality and referential scope.

Contribution

It provides the first corpus-based, empirical analysis of lexeme-specific differences in generic masculine usage in German, with detailed annotations of personal nouns.

Findings

GM occurs mainly in plural and indefinite noun phrases

Significant differences between passive role nouns and prestige-related nouns

GM is not primarily used to denote entire classes of people

Abstract

This study examines the distribution and linguistic characteristics of generic masculines (GM) in contemporary German press texts. The use of masculine personal nouns to refer to mixed-gender groups or unspecified individuals has been widely debated in academia and the public, with con-flicting perspectives on its gender-neutrality. While psycholinguistic studies suggest that GM is more readily associated with male referents, corpus-based analyses of its actual use remain scarce. We investigate GM in a large corpus of press texts, focusing on lexeme-specific differences across dif-ferent types of personal nouns. We conducted manual annotations of the whole inflectional para-digm of 21 personal nouns, resulting in 6,195 annotated tokens. Our findings reveal considerable differences between lexical items, especially between passive role nouns and prestige-related per-sonal nouns. On a grammatical level, we find that GM occurs predominantly in the plural and in indefinite noun phrases. Furthermore, our data shows that GM is not primarily used to denote entire classes of people, as has been previously claimed. By providing an empirical insight into the use of GM in authentic written language, we contribute to a more nuanced understanding of its forms and manifestations. These findings provide a solid basis for aligning linguistic stimuli in psy-cholinguistic studies more closely with real-world language use.