While many languages distinguish gender categories in nominal forms (and in third person pronouns), gender in the second person is much less common. In my presentation I will look at the grammatical interaction of gender, person and number, focussing on the types of manifestations of a gender distinction in address forms.

Interestingly, the masculine/feminine differentiation is sometimes refunctionalised according to politeness considerations. Such cases include Jordanian and other varieties of Arabic, where a friction between grammatical gender and perceived ‘natural’ sex can convey impoliteness, and Early Modern varieties of German, where – due to the anaphoric status of the pronouns – feminine pronominal address is often used towards males in order to convey particular politeness (similar patterns occur(ed) in dialects of Italian).

I will present a first attempt at a typology of such polite gender trouble in address forms, where pragmatic effects, (im)politeness in particular, are achieved through incongruence of sex/gender-forms.

References

• Braun, Friederike. 1984. Anredeformen im jordanischen Arabisch. In Anredeverhalten. Werner Winter (ed.). Tübingen: Narr.
• Simon, Horst J. 2003. Für eine grammatische Kategorie ‘Respekt’ im Deutschen. Synchronie, Diachronie und Typologie der deutschen Anredepronomina. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
• Plank, Frans & Wolfgang Schellinger. 1997. The uneven distribution of genders over numbers: Greenberg nos. 37 and 45. Linguistic Typology 1, 53-101.
• Siewierska, Anna. 2004. Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.