The dynamics of feminisation

In this book feminisation - the marking of female sex on personal nouns - in Dutch and German is investigated contrastively diachronically and corpus-linguistically. The corpus-based approach entails a theoretical and methodological shift from a structuralist and essentialist approach to the interplay of language and sex to a poststructuralist usage-based and holistic perspective which has long been lacking from the scientific domain of Gender Linguistics.Starting from the observation that feminising morphology seems less frequently used in Dutch than in German in the same contexts the goal is to examine how intra- and extralinguistic factors influence the choice for or against the use of these morphological patterns. These (only partly consciously made) choices are called differentiation and neutralisation respectively. On the intralinguistic level the link between the use of feminising morphology and properties of the grammatical gender system is investigated contrastively and diachronically as well as more generally various semantic and pragmatic factors (semantics of the personal noun animacy referentiality) that may contribute to a more or less stable feminisation system. On the extralinguistic level the effect of diverging views on gender-fair language use in both language areas and within the respective areas (North vs. South for Dutch East vs. West for German) stands out.Drawing on diachronic corpus data the effects of these factors are investigated empirically in three case studies by focusing on the form (Case Study I) and function (Case Study II: feminisation in human reference and Case Study III: feminisation in nonhuman reference) of feminising morphology. Both formally and functionally Dutch feminisation is a complex system whereas the German one is more uniform and straightforward. The use of feminising morphology in Dutch has been restricted since at least the second half of the 20th century but less so in Northern than in Southe