Dieter Kastovsky

SEMANTICS AND VOCABULARY

Introduction 5.1.1 One linguistic concept, although fundamental and constantly referred to, is often taken for granted: the concept of ‘word’. The word is the domain of many phonological statements; it is the implicit ordering principle in morphology; and the word is a central, though again implicit concept of syntax in so far as the latter describes the patterns or rules according to which words are combined into larger linguistic structures. It is therefore necessary to be somewhat more explicit about this linguistic category, not only because words – more precisely, the aggregate of words making up the vocabulary (= dictionary = lexicon) of a language – are the topic of this chapter, but also because the term is familiar from non-technical, everyday language, where it is often employed in a variety of senses, while as a technical term it ought to be unambiguous. Thus, when talking about inflectional paradigms, the term ‘word’ might be used to refer both to each individual member of the paradigm, and to the global entity each member of the paradigm is a form of, as well as to the entity that is bounded by spaces to its left and right in a text. This, then, might lead to a seemingly contradictory statement such as (1) The word heah steap is written as two words. In actual fact, there is a sequence heah steap reced ‘very high house’ (lit. ‘high lofty house’) in Gen. 2840 (Sauer 1985:270), where heah steap is normally interpreted as an adjectival compound, which, however, is written in the manuscript as two separate words.

THE OLD ENGLISH SUFFIX -ER(E)

ABo King Alfreds Old English Version of Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, ed. W. J. Sedgefield (Oxford, 1899). ABoM The Metres of Boethius in ABo. AC Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. A.Robertson (Cambridge, 1956). ACP King Alfred8 West Saxon Version of Gregorys Pastoral Care, ed. H.Sweet, EETS, 45, 50 (1871-72). JECH The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church. The First Part Containing the Sermones Catholici or Homilies of JElfric, ed. B.Thorpe, 2 vols, (London, 1844-46). tälfrics Grammatik und Glossar, ed J.Zupitza (Berlin, 1880; 2. unveränderte Auflage mit einem Vorwort von Helmut Gneuss I960). Die Hirtenbriefe mfrics, ed. B.Fehr (Darmstadt, »1966). MLS JElfrics Lives of the Saints9 ed. W.W.Skeat, EETS, 76, 82, 94, 114 (1881-90). ALI Ancient Laws and Institutes of England, ed. B.Thorpe, 2 vols. (London, 1840). AOr King Alfreds Orosius, ed. H.Sweet, EETS, 79 (1883). Apoll The Old English Apollonius of Tyre, ed. P.Goolden (Oxford, 1958). APs Der altenglische Arundel-P salter, ed. G. Oess, AF, 30 (Heidelberg, 1910). ASPR The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, A Collective Edition, ed. G. Ph.Krapp and E. van Kirk Dobbie, 6 vols. (New York, 19311953). Az Azarias in ASPR. B Beowulf, ed. E. von Schaubert (Paderborn, 1963). Bd The Old English Version of Bede*s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Th.Miller, EETS, 95, 96 (1890-98). B1H The Bückling Homilies, ed. R. Morris, EETS, 58, 63, 73 (18741880).

Sexist German- non-sexist English or non-sexist German-sexist English? Historical observations on a pragmatic question

Abstract The paper investigates tendencies with regard to gender-specific or gender-non-specific designations in English and German by means of nouns in present-day usage as well as the historical development of these tendencies. German favours “feminisation”, i.e. the overt marking of gender affiliation by the appropriate morphological form and the corresponding splitting, e.g. Professor/Professorin, because it has a productive suffix for this purpose. English, on the other hand, prefers neutralised forms and also treats the agent suffix -er as basically neutral, relegating the gender-specificity to pronominal coreference. The reason for this difference is the loss of the original Germanic feminising suffixes in English, where the Romance loan suffixes -ess and -ette never really became productive (usually they have a pejorative connotation), whereas in German the -in-suffix preserved its productivity and now has become a major instrument in the struggle for political correctness.