Language users frequently encounter generic personal statements, which refer to a person or group of people whose gender is irrelevant or unknown (e.g., “A doctor must go to medical school.”). Though intended as gender-neutral, generic terms have been found to elicit an assumption of a male referent – i.e., a male bias. Whereas male bias studies in English have typically analyzed generic-used pronouns, German studies have overwhelmingly focused on plural nouns. As a result, male bias in English and German singular nouns is less understood. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether English and German language users are equally likely to read a singular generically intended noun as male. My dissertation remedies this gap by analyzing how linguistic differences between English and German impact the likelihood of interpreting a generically intended singular noun as male. Specifically, in my project, I contrast how the two languages impart gender information, both as a result of inherent properties – e.g., grammatical and lexical gender – as well as linguistic practices, such as the generic masculine (GM) – the “generic” use of male-specific terms – and the adoption of GM alternatives. I argue that singular generic nouns are more likely to elicit a male bias in German due to grammatical gender, higher rates of gender-specific personal nouns, and increased use of gender-specific terms in generic contexts. By contrasting English and German singular nouns, this project sheds new light on the potential sources of male bias in generic language.

Speakers of German and Afrikaans have been interacting with one another in Southern Africa for over three hundred and fifty years. In this study, the linguistic results of this intra-Germanic contact are addressed and divided into two sections: 1) the influence of German (both Low and High German) on Cape Dutch/Afrikaans in the years 1652-1810; and 2) the influence of Afrikaans on Namibian German in the years 1840-present. The focus here has been on the lexicon, since lexemes are the first items to be borrowed in contact situations, though other grammatical borrowings come under scrutiny as well.

The guiding principle of this line of inquiry is how the cognitive phenonemon of Herbartian apperception, or, Peircean abduction, has driven the bulk of the borrowings between the languages. Apperception is, simply put, the act of identifying a new perception as analogous to a previously existing one. The following central example to this dissertation will serve to illustrate this. When Dutch, Low German, and Malay speakers were all in contact in Capetown in the 1600 and 1700s, there were three mostly homophonous and synonymous words they were using. The Dutch knew banjer 'very', the Low Germans knew banni(g) 'very, tremendous, extraordinary', and the Malays knew banja(k) 'many, a lot, often, very'. All of these words can be considered the source for the modern Afrikaans hybrid word baie 'many, much, often, very', based on earlier banja or banje. These two forms are very close in sound and meaning to banjer, banni(g), and banja(k), and consequently when, for example, a Malay speaker heard a Low German say banni(g), he apperceived it as Malay banja(k). Likewise when a Low German speaker heard the Dutch word banjer, he apperceived it is as banni(g), and so on with all potential interlocutors. The ultimate form of the word is a compromise hybrid between them all, namely banje, which was motivated by the ease with which these three source words were apperceived by the respective speakers, as well as by their semantic similarity, which was also easily apperceived.

Bearing in mind the workings of apperception, Cape Dutch/Afrikaans and Namibian German are perfect case studies for intra-Germanic linguistic contact. Parallel developments, whether arrived at independently or by shared genesis, will reinforce one another when brought into contact, a situation which must have played itself out all throughout the history of contact between Germanic languages. Whether it was Burgundian influence on Franconian, Old Frisian on Old English, Danish on Faroese, or Dutch on East Frisian, the role of apperception must have been great in these cases of linguistic contact, whether we can show it or not, as is the problem with Langobardic, Vandalic, Burgundian and, to a lesser extent, Franconian. In the case of German and Afrikaans in Southern Africa, the well-documented archival and printed texts put the linguist in a favorable position to examine and elucidate the nature of this linguistic contact, as one will note in the study at hand.

The word class preposition contains many highly polysemous members whose meanings may often seem completely unrelated. This project in a close examination of the polysemy network of the German preposition mit in each of the four (documented) major time periods of the language, namely Old High German, Middle High German, Early New High German, and New High German (Penzl 1995). Each of the distinct senses of the preposition is analyzed using Charles Fillmore’s frame semantic approach (Fillmore 1982, Fillmore & Baker 2009, among others) and a visual representation of the polysemy network in each of the time periods is drawn up to show precisely how the senses are related to one another.By using frame semantics as a methodological basis for this undertaking, this work is able to illustrate the motivation behind the changes in the polysemy network diachronically rather than merely appealing to traditional textbook mechanisms of semantic change, such as amelioration, pejoration, synecdoche, etc. (Crowley & Bowern 2010). While these mechanisms are indeed still at work, they do not account for the motivation behind the semantic change. This project aims to offer the field of historical lexical semantics a framework to follow in order to analyze the polysemy network of a word both synchronically and diachronically and to show the motivation behind the semantic changes of that word. This study is organized as follows: In chapter 2, I review traditional, non-cognitive approaches to lexical semantics and illustrate the reasons for which these approaches are ill-suited for the undertaking in this dissertation. Chapter 3 is a discussion of cognitive approaches to lexical semantics and shows the reasons for which I have chosen frame semantics as the theoretical basis for this study. Chapter 4 details the methodology, including discussion of the applicability of frame semantics to this task as well as an overview of the corpora used and the method of data analysis. In chapter 5, I present the findings of this study, including a discussion of the twenty- five frames found in the data to be evoked by the preposition mit as well as visual representations of the synchronic and diachronic polysemy networks of mit. In this chapter, I also compare my findings to three authoritative works which offer semantic analysis of the preposition to varying degrees. In chapter 6, I make concluding remarks, discuss limitations, and suggest further research.

Political discourse is inherently abundant with metaphors, which speakers use to reframe complex issues to the public in more concrete, familiar, and approachable terms. As research has shown (Charteris-Black, 2004, 2005; Lakoff, 2002, 2004, 2010; Musolff, 2000), the different ways of metaphorically framing a subject can influence reasoning and decision-making. Thus, metaphors hold vast potential for manipulating the public by groups of authority. In the last twenty years, Europe has seen a rise in far-right parties entering government and securing seats in European Parliament. These parties have become powerful forces in Europe’s political landscape, garnering more voter support and polarizing public debate. This study explores the metaphorical expressions used by the German right-wing populist party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), to conceptualize relevant political issues before and after the 2017 federal election, in which they secured 12% of the seats, making them the third biggest party in the 19th German Bundestag. Building on two approaches, Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) and Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004, 2005), this study not only identifies and analyzes the conceptual metaphors and source domains utilized in the AfD’s discourse on topics such as Europe and the state of the European Union, the Bundestag, and immigration, but also examines shifts in metaphor usage over time. Consequently, this work argues that an analysis of the metaphorical depictions illuminates the underlying ideological foundations of the party and provides insights to better understand the role of such rhetoric in persuasion and manipulation in the political sphere.

Over the course of the Early New High German (ENHG) period (ca. 1350–1650), the German inflectional system underwent significant restructuring. Among the affected Middle High German (MHG) inflectional classes was a class of masculine nouns traditionally labeled “weak,” defined by the presence of the ending -(e)n in all forms except the nominative singular, which usually ended in -e. In the modern language (New High German [NHG]), the nouns that once belonged to this class are spread out across at least four inflectional classes: one group of nouns (Group 1), most denoting people and large animals, has remained in the weak masculine class, while in each of three other groups (Groups 2–4), the paradigm has been rebuilt with a different part of the original weak paradigm as its base.This corpus study explores the causes of these changes through the lens of a usage-based framework, proceeding from the hypothesis that high token frequency renders word forms more resistant to analogical change, while low token frequency leaves them vulnerable to loss and replacement. It traces the diachronic paths of 37 current and former members of the weak masculine class from MHG through ENHG into NHG, measuring their token frequencies in different forms at different stages of their development. Token frequency is shown to have been the driving force behind the breakup of the class: in Groups 2, 3, and 4, the original weak forms that have been preserved and become the base of the rebuilt paradigm are, in most cases, the most frequent forms, while those that have been lost are correspondingly infrequent.

This dissertation addresses the issue of Slovene/German bilingualism in the province of Carinthia in southeastern Austria. The study examines the relationship between learning Slovene in the home and the ability to speak good German later in life; it is based on research conducted in the bilingual community of Bad Eisenkappel (Eisenkappel) in Carinthia. Over the course of two years (January 2013—August 2014 and June 2015), I made many trips to Eisenkappel to establish connections with the community and begin my fieldwork. This consisted of person-to-person interviews with residents of Eisenkappel, ten of which are represented in this study.

I argue that there is no basis for the claim that raising a child speaking Slovene in this community disadvantages the child by undermining the opportunity to speak German as well as those children who are raised speaking German only. My argument is contrary to both a long history of treating Slovene speakers as second-class citizens, and to the lingering perception among many monolingual and bilingual inhabitants of Eisenkappel that one must be raised speaking only German in order to be successful in mastering German.

In this dissertation I investigate the historical and cultural underpinnings of bias against the dialect of Slovene spoken in Eisenkappel, as well as against the speakers of Slovene themselves. I then draw contrasts between the dialect of German spoken in the region (Eisenkappel German) and that of the standard language taught in schools (Modern Standard German) in order to establish the two major varieties of German that inhabitants of Eisenkappel encounter. Finally, based on original data collected from my fieldwork, I analyze the similarities and differences in the speech of bilingual and monolingual speakers in Eisenkappel.

My dissertation challenges not only erroneous stereotypes envisaged for bilingual speakers in Eisenkappel or for speakers of Slovene in Carinthia at large, but also for bilingualism in border communities throughout Europe and the rest of the world. The principles of this study are applicable beyond border communities as well. This project could be replicated in virtually any community in which more than one language is spoken and there is incentive for minorities to learn the dominant language of the region or country.