Mia Limmer '22

German’s gender gap: An analysis of gender-innovative nouns

German role nouns are undergoing significant innovation with the spread of forms not belonging to any of German’s established grammatical genders. To provide a linguistic account for these “gender gaps,” this thesis argues that they use existing pieces of words in German in a new word structure. The study provides insight about the relationships between grammatical and social gender categories in German while establishing a case study for further research on innovations in the gender-encoding systems of languages.