Nonrandom Assignment of Loanwords: German Noun Gender

Nonrandom Assignment of Loanwords: German Noun GenderThe grammatical integration _of loanwords into various form classes available in the recipient language has not been extensively studied.Bloomfield, in Language, gives it a page or two.tWeinreich, in Languages in Contact, discusses it in a two-page section, 2 where just one paragraph deals with noun gender, and a few pertinent articles and monographs are cited.Only three of these, by Reed,3 Aron, 4 and Flom,s deal specifically with gender assignment of loanwords from English.All of the above studies are primarily descriptive, not analytic; they treat only loanwords well established in expatriate speech, which severely limits both the quantity and structural make-up of material available and the linguist's freedom of inquiry into criteria of assignment.The purposes of the research reported in this article are (I) to inquire directly into the factors governing gender assignment in German by eliciting ad hoc borrowings on a large scale from informants and by questioning these informants about the criteria operating in the assignment of gender in each case, and (2) to learn something, in the process, about gender distribution in the present Standard German noun inventory and about its quantitative relation to noun morphology (i.e., word shape and stress pattern).Weinreich makes a number of statistically unsupported but reasonable assumptions about the criteria at work in establishing the gender of loanwords.He mentions gender assignment by sex, by "the form of the word," by semantic association with a displaced native equivalent, and by relative 1 Leonard Bloomfield, Language (New York, 1933), pp.453ff. 2