Linguistische Berichte Heft 204

There is a considerable amount of research and literature on “de-anonymization” of anonymous authors’ texts in linguistics and other fields. But what about research on “anonymization” of authors’ names? This paper, as a pilot study, wants to fill a gap by looking at an example of “real life” and providing an empirical analysis of “anonymization” of authors’ names of letters to the editor (LTE) in daily papers. The main working hypotheses are: (1) Anonymous vs. non-anonymous (indication of) authorship represents a continua rather than a dichotomy in real life everyday communication. (2) The continua are governed by a set of text type-specific rules. (3) They are to be described as culture-specific entities. (4) There are structural differences in the form of continua of “anonymization” of male and female authors’ names in LTE in a culture different from our own.

Syntactic aspects of the SLF-coordination (subject gap in finite clause coordination) in German are investigated. Some empirical observations give rise to a revision of the conditions that license this type of construction: i) SLF-coordination is subject to a constraint on constituent order: scrambling in the first conjunct is restricted if the predicates in both conjuncts are formed by transitive verbs; ii) adverb-placement in the second conjunct is impossible if the adverb must be inserted in a position preceding the gap; iii) non-subject-gaps are possible with a subclass of verbs if the gap precedes the subject in base word order. These empirical facts are incompatible with analyses that either exclude the subject from the coordinated phrases or restrict the gap to the subject function. In this contribution it is argued that both conjuncts have to be parallel with respect to their respective focus potential and that the gap is restricted to a position immediately following the finite verb. In order to capture the latter fact, a condition on NP-ellipsis is proposed building on Phillips (2003) theory of incremental structure derivation.

Many years of empirical research on the linguistic behaviour of women and men have shown that gender differences are not as pronounced as has been believed. This raises the question why men are often conversationally more successful than women. In this context, the hypothesis of stereotypical language perception offers a possible explanation: According to this hypothesis, language is processed on the basis of gender stereotypes, hence male speakers are perceived as more self-confident and assertive, i.e. more successful, than women. The present article describes two studies that were conducted with German language material to test this assumption. The results offer tentative confirmation for stereotyped language perception: Study 1 shows that native speakers of German indeed possess stereotypical conceptions of „female“ and „male“ language behaviour. In study 2, the evaluation of applicants’ linguistic behaviour in a job interview depended to a certain extent on whether the applicant was believed to be female or male.