Volume 2010, Issue 53

In this paper, I will examine several aspects of second language acquisition of grammatical gender in German. Gender is an inherent feature of nouns which is not shown by the noun alone, but is only overtly marked at various other expressions, for example, articles, adjectives, or coreferential pronouns, which have to agree in gender with the noun. There are two challenges for the learner: even if there are some patterns, gender is a mostly arbitrary feature, and its morphological expression is closely connected with case marking. In order to examine how children in second language acquisition acquire the German gender system, data collected from a study conducted with children whose first languages are Turkish or Italian is analysed. The study shows that after case, gender is the second most difficult grammatical category for children to acquire in second language acquisition. This holds also for first language acquisition as a control group shows. It will be shown that the Italian speakers perform slightly better than the Turkish speakers, whose language does not have grammatical gender. For the Italian speakers, the neutral gender, which is absent in their first language, is the most difficult to acquire.

Various recent studies dealing with personal experiences of migration have addressed questions of identity by referring to the topos of “the third space” (Bhaba, The location of culture, Routledge, 2006): People who have migrated to Germany often classify themselves in narrative interviews as “sitting between two chairs” (Foroutan/Schäfer, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 5: 11–18, 2009) or as being “bi-local” (Spohn, Zweiheimisch. Bikulturell leben in Deutschland, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2006). However, such categorizations are often treated outside the context in which they were articulated to an interviewer. This article analyses the interactive settings of categorization sequences in which identity is negotiated by (dis)aligning with social categories that the speakers themselves set as relevant. Based on a corpus of narrative interviews with people of Vietnamese origin living in West-Germany, it is argued that categorization is a highly context-dependent communicative strategy in which practices of self and other positioning are applied on different levels of interaction with the interviewer. Moreover, “categorical formulations” (Ayaß, „Form und Funktion Kategorischer Formulierungen“, Opladen, 1999a, „Vom Ursprung der Sprichwörter und ihrem Schicksal“, Opladen, b, Nazarkiewicz, Interkulturelles Lernen als Gesprächsarbeit, VS Verlag, 2010) contextualise these categorizations as moral communication.

The following article investigates the construction of ‚gender· in recent advertisements for cosmetics, published in both women's and men's magazines. The analysis of the advertisements is based on the semantics of their texts and pictures as well as the relations between the two. This is in order to identify reoccurring gender-specific structures. The political background of the study is concerned with the highly debated question as to whether changes in traditional gender hierarchies are mirrored in advertisements.