Prof. Dr. Damaris Nübling

My main research areas include personal names that provide a wealth of information about the bearer of that name or invite assumptions about them. By marking gender, first names play a prominent role in the transition process of transgender people. Research has also shown that their functioning as a phonological means of gender distinction has converged during the last decades: The phonetic distance between girls’ and boys’ names is narrower than ever before (Luca, Luna).

My research also strives to uncover gender orders in the depths of the grammatical system using, e.g., grammatical gender (die Schwuchtel, das Weib), declension classes, or the sequence of woman and man in so-called binomials (pair forms) such as “brother and sister” or “mother and father.” The frequency of the diminution in personal designations (Mädchen, Junge) and names (Bärbel, Anke) also provides information about the underlying gender concepts.

At the Collaborative Research Center 1482, I lead Project C01: “Linguistic Human Differentiation: Drawing Boundaries between Humans and Animals in Discourse, Lexicon, and Grammar” and KF2 (Ambiguität und Kombinatorik). There has been little linguistic research thus far on the differentiation of humans within vocabulary and especially grammar—and even less on the differentiation of humans from animals. With today’s searchability of large text corpora, questions can be adequately addressed (see Griebel 2020, Nübling 2022).

I studied Romance studies (Spanish and French) and German studies at the University of Freiburg and later taught Scandinavian studies. I did my doctorate in 1992 on grammaticalization (origin of inflection) and my postdoctorate in 1998 on the irregularization of verbs in ten Germanic languages targeting the emergence of “morphological disorder” and its reasons. I have been teaching historical linguistics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz since 2000.

Foto: Stephanie Füssenich