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 cause of debates within and outside linguistic research as they run counter the grammarian assumption of the masculine generic form to be 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 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 insight into the semantic representations of masculine generics are provided and it is shown that stereotypicality does not modulate the masculine bias.

Instances of bias: The gendered semantics of generic masculines in German revealed by instance vectors

“…An investigation of whether this imbalance between forms and meanings does indeed lead to a semantic masculine bias in generic masculines in German was the aim of Schmitz et al (2023) and Schmitz (2023).…”

“…Based on the annotated text corpus, Schmitz et al (2023) implemented a naive discriminative learning network (henceforth NDL; e.g. Baayen, Milin, Ðurđević, Hendrix & Marelli, 2011).…”

“…In their implementation of NDL, Schmitz et al (2023) treated genericity as a type of inflectional function. This resulted in one semantic vector for specific and one semantic vector for generic use.…”

“…The latest addition to the variety of methods used in this field of research comes from computational linguistics and is added by Schmitz, Schneider & Esser (2023) and Schmitz (2023). In these studies, which will be introduced in more detail in Section 2.2, the authors make use of computational frameworks to investigate the semantic similarity of generic masculines, specific masculines, and specific feminines.…”

“…The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 will provide further background on generic masculines in German, introduce the studies by Schmitz et al (2023) and Schmitz (2023) in more detail, and take a critical perspective on the computational implementations used therein.…”