One of the word-formational possibilities to mark the gender-semantics of a lexeme iscompounding. In this case, a lexically gender-specific morpheme is involved, as man inchairman or lady in lady doctor. Two types of compounds can be distinguished:In cases such as chairman, a gender-specific morpheme is the head of the compoundand makes it a noun denoting persons, while the modifier is not a noun denoting persons andmay belong to any word class.
The semantic relationship between the two elements can beany beside ‘X is also a Y’. Beside the lexemes for ‘man’ and ‘woman’, ‘mister’ and ‘lady’ aswell as kinship terms are candidates for this kind of gender marking, e. g., GermanFernsehonkel ‘television uncle’, Kindergartentante ‘nursery aunt’. In languages withproductive compounding, this type is a very common means of creating personal nounsdenoting professions, functions, titles etc. such as Finnish lakimies ‘law man’ ‘lawyer’,Turkish bilim adam? ‘science man’ ‘(male) scientist’, Danish sportskvinde ‘sportswoman’,Swedish statsman ‘statesman’, which tend to get lexicalized. Lexicalization may blur genderspecificity,which is, however, typical only for nouns with male lexical elements: the Germannoun Hintermann ‘person behind somebody (in a row)’ or ‘person behind something’, e.
Best services for writing your paper according to Trustpilot
g., ishardly understood in a gender-specific way. Nevertheless, the relation to a gender-specificinterpretation is never completely lost. This phenomenon criticized by the feminist critique oflanguage (pace Hellinger and Bußmann 2001-2003), has raised awareness in some languagesand led to political measures of language planning.
As a consequence, compounds with themorpheme {man} as head noun have been either substituted by gender neutral terms, as, e. g.,English chairman by chairperson, or parallel female forms have been introduced, cf.
GermanObfrau ‘chairwoman’, Dutch cameravrouw ‘camerawoman’, Turkish bilim kad?n? sciencewoman ‘female scientist’.Gender marking by compounding also occurs in another variation, where the lexicallygender-specific morpheme combines with another noun denoting persons. Following Braun(2000: 67-71) the word-formational semantics of this type of compound is the conjunction oftwo predicates X and Y, meaning a ‘Y that is also an X’ or an ‘X that is also a Y’. Let usillustrate this with Braun’s examples from Turkish: In the compounds in question, the genderspecificnoun can be either in the position of head (being the rightmost element) as in futbolcukad?n ‘football player woman’ or in the position of modifier as in kad?n futbolcu ‘womanfootball player’.
In the first case, the lexeme ‘woman’ in the head position highlights the
