No genericity in sight: An exploration of the semantics of masculine generics in German

Findings of previous behavioural studies suggest that the semantic nature of what is known as the ‘masculine generic’ in Modern Standard German is indeed not generic but biased towards a masculine reading. Such findings are cause of debates within and outside linguistic research as they run counter the grammarian assumption of the masculine generic form to be gender-neutral. The present paper aims to explore the semantics of masculine generics, relating them to those of masculine and feminine explicit counterparts. To achieve this aim, an approach novel to this area of linguistic research is made use of: discriminative learning. Analysing semantic vectors obtained via naive discriminative learning, semantic measures calculated via linear discriminative learning, and taking into account the stereotypicality of words under investigation, it is found that masculine generics are semantically much more similar to masculine explicits than to feminine explicits. The results presented in this paper thus support the notion of a masculine bias in masculine generics. Further, new insight into the semantic representations of masculine generics are provided and it is shown that stereotypicality does not modulate the masculine bias.