Differential Gender. Substantivized Adjectives and Participles in Sorbian from the Point of View of Gender-Linguistic Preferences

Abstract

Differential Gender. Substantivized Adjectives and Participles in Sorbian from the Point of View of Gender-Linguistic Preferences

Adjectives and participles converted into nouns are subject to “differential gender”. This means that the feminine/masculine gender of personal referents is distinguished by gender-specific inflections only. In this way, a symmetrical expression of gender diffe­rences is made possible, which corresponds to gender-linguistic preferences in a parti­cular way. In this study, we evaluate the inventory of personal nouns derived from adjec­tives and participles in the online lexicography of Lower and Upper Sorbian. We examine firstly whether these forms appear in gender pairs. Secondly, using semantic and formal criteria, we examine whether they appear as loan translations from German and would thus be able to transfer the gender-linguistic preferences of this major contact language into Sorbian. This process applies in both Sorbian languages to almost half of the substantivized forms. The present-day lexicography of Lower Sorbian works in a more regular way in relation to the gender pairing of substantivized adjectives and participles with reference to persons, as compared with Upper Sorbian online lexicography.