The interaction of gender marking and perspective-taking in German

Abstract

This paper addresses a phenomenon regarding the interaction of perspective-taking with morphosyntactic gender that to the best of our knowledge has not been discussed in previous literature. In 'Free Indirect Discourse' (FID), a vivid style of reported speech and thought, we observe a strong preference for a 'de se' pronoun, i.e. a pronoun that refers to an individual whose thoughts or utterances are represented, to match the gender identity / biological sex (by default) of that individual rather than the morphosyntactic / grammatical gender of the DP functioning as its immediate antecedent in discourse. We propose that the preference for semantic agreement in FID is due to the interplay of three factors: First, in FID the gender features of pronouns are interpreted with respect to the protagonist’s rather than the narrator’s context. Second, the introduction of a protagonist’s context leads to a strong preference for pronouns referring to that protagonist to project interpretable gender features matching their gender identity / biological sex. Third, the overtly realized grammatical gender features of a pronous, in contrast with lexical nouns, have to agree with the interpretable gender features.