DER ACCOUNT, DIE CLOUD AND DAS HASHTAG: GENDER ASSIGNMENT TO NOMINAL ANGLICISMS IN PRESENT-DAY GERMAN
THE ACCOUNT, THE CLOUD AND THE HASHTAG: GENDER ASSIGNMENT TO NOMINAL ANGLICISMS IN PRESENT-DAY GERMAN

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims at revealing the mechanisms governing gender assignment to recent Anglo- American nominal borrowings in German. The integration of loan nouns into one of the three gender classes of the receiving language proves to be, by no means, arbitrary. Gender assignment appears to be governed by two main principles: the word formation rule and the guide word rule. Accordingly, the gender of the new nouns is predictable based on their suffixes, morphemic structure or on the gender affiliation of their German semantic equivalent. Besides, natural gender, phonological regularities and the common cognate may play a marginal role in gender choice. All these principles are grounded on the strategy of linguistic analogy, which provides a motivation – be it of a structural, semantic or phonological type – for the correlation to a gender category.

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