nes/maa german gender 11-2011 short

8/3/2019 NES/MAA German Gender 11-2011 Short

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/nesmaa-german-gender-11-2011-short 1/13

How Random is the

Gender of German Nouns?

Prof Roger Bilisoly

Department of Mathematical Sciences

Central Connecticut State UniversityNovember 19, 2011



Grammatical gender in German

• Unlike modern English (but like Old English), all nouns inGerman are either masculine, feminine, or neuter:

– Die Frau (woman) is feminine

– Das Weib (woman) is neuter

– Das Auto (car) is neuter.

– Der Wagen (car) is masculine.

– Der Felsen (rock) is masculine.

– Die Schuld (guilt) is feminine.

– Der Mittwoch (Wednesday) is masculine



Some rules of German gender

• Modern German grammar books have many rules.

• Meaning based rules (semantics) – Seasons, months, and days of the week are masculine.

– Example: Der Mittwoch (Wednesday) vs. die Woche (week)

– Exception: das Fruhjahr (spring) inherits neuter from das Jahr – Female persons and animals are feminine.

– Example: die Frau (women), die Kuh (cow)

– Exceptions: das Weib (woman)

• Form based rules (morphology and phonology)

– Nouns ending with the syllable –

ung are feminine – Examples: die Einladung (invitation), die Prüfung (exam)

– Non-exception: Der Sprung (jump) is just one syllable (note: itsmasculine gender follows from the strong verb, no ending rule).

All rules are from Section 1.1 of Durrell (2002)



Rules or no rules?

• “In German, however, the gender of only a very small

percentage of nouns can be predicted on the basis ofsemantic and phonological properties of the noun. AsMark Twain notes, ‘there is no sense or system in the

distribution,’ that is, the German gender system islargely arbitrary.”

– Pfau (2009), p 109

• “This paper builds on previous evidence provided by theauthors showing that gender classification is notarbitrary in German.”

– From abstract of Zubin and Köpcke (1984)

Note: Highlighting is mine.



Statistical point of view:How do we predict a noun’s gender?

• Both gender and our predictor variables are categorical,so contingency tables of counts are a useful for dataexploration (EDA).

• For modeling, logistic regression (for binary responsevariables) can be extended to multinomial regression.



CV and VC clusters include manywell-known gender indicators.

Durrell (2002), Chapter 1, notes that – er , – en*, – el are predominately masculine;

– us is masculine ; – ung, – sion, – tion, – tät , – ik are feminine; and – e is predominately feminine.

*Note that – en is mostly neuter in the above table.



A Contingency table analysis of –ie :

The masculine exceptions are Brie, Goalie,

Hippie, Junkie, Oldie, Teenie, Yuppie, and Laie.

The first 7 are loan words, 6 of which refer to

types of people and hence are male. Laie

(layman) also refers to a type of person.

The neuter exceptions are Genie, Knie,

Portemonnaie. Genie (genius) is anomalous in

not being male, and Portemonnaie (purse) is a

loan word.



Köpcke and Zubin analyzed one syllable nouns.

• They and MacWhinney et al. (1989) claim that the proportion ofconsonants is correlated with masculine gender. So define thevariable: excess = # consonants - # vowels.

• We’ll fit a multinomial logistic regression to predict gender as a

function of x = excess . We’ll use neuter as the reference gender.• Model is below, and the next slide gives an interpretation of it.

See http://support.sas.com/rnd/app/da/new/802ce/stat/chap8/sect5.htm

x x Neut Gender P

xFemGender P

x x Neut Gender P

x MascGender P

fem fem

mascmasc

,1,0

,1,0

)|.(

)|.(log

)|.(

)|.(log



Conclusion: excess is related to gender.

Both masculine and femininegenders are related to the

variable excess. For example, if

excess increases by 1, the odds

ratio of masculine vs. neuter

increases by 58.5 %.

585.1

)1|.(

)1|.(

)2|.(

)2|.(

,1

,1,0

,1,0

1*

2*

masc

mascmasc

mascmasc

ee

e

x Neut Gender P

x MascGender P

x Neut Gender P

x MascGender P



References

• Beiler, Benedictus (1736). A New German Grammar, whereby an Englishman may Eaſily Attain to the Knowledge of the German Language.

• Berkemeyer, Victoria (1994). Anaphoric Resolution and Text Comprehension forReaders of German, Die Unterrichtpraxis/Teaching German , 27, 15-22.

• Bloomfield, (1914). An Introduction to the Study of Language .• Durrell, Martin (2002). Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage, 4th Edition.

• MacWhinney, Brian, Jared Leinbach, Roman Taraban, and Janet McDonald(1989). Language Learning: Cues or Rules? Journal of Memory and Language ,28, 255-277.

• Pfau, Roland (2009). Grammar as Processor: A Distributed Morphology Account of Spontaneous Speech Errors.

• Rice, Curt (2006). Optimizing Gender. Lingua , 116, 1394-1417.• Schwichtenberg, Beate, and Niels Schiller (2004). Semantic Gender Assignment

Regularities in German, Brain and Language , 90, 326-337.• Wendeborn, Gebhard. (1797). An Introduction to German Grammar, 3rd Edition.• Zubin, David, and Klaus-Michael Köpcke (1984). Affect Classification in the

German Gender System, Lingua , 63, 41-96.



Beginnings are not considered usefulwith respect to gender … except for Ge –.

Note that there are

only 3 cell chi-

squares above 10,

and all of these are

for Ge–



What linguists have done …

• They have considered semantics. – Example: Seasons, months, days of the week, etc.

• They have posited default rankings when conflicting rules donot determine a unique gender.

– Most marked (so least likely to be assigned) is neuter. – Least marked (so most likely to be assigned) is masculine.

– See p 1405 of Rice (2006).

• They have introduced new semantic variables. – Example: Section 2 of Zubin and Köpcke (1984) propose a variable

measuring extroversion/introversion and apply it to the irregular Mut compounds:

– Die Anmut (gracefulness), die Demut (humility), and die Sanftmut (tenderness) vs. der Heldenmut (heroism), der Lebensmut (exhilaration), and der Unmut (bad temper).



The final letters of a noun are correlated to gender.

Durrell (2002), Chapter 1, says that – e is mainly feminine, – ie and – a* are feminine.

*Note that there are an above expected number of neuter words ending in – a:

Dogma, Drama, Komma, Omega, Plasma, Schema, Zebra, etc.

nes/maa german gender 11-2011 short

Documents