Senta Trömel-Plötz (born February 26, 1939 in
Munich) is a German linguist. Together with
Luise F. Pusch she introduced
feminist linguistics in Germany.
Life
Trömel-Plötz studied
linguistics in the USA. She received her doctorate from the
University of Pennsylvania with the dissertation, ''Simple Copula Structures in English''.
This was followed by her
habilitation
Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in many European countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excellence in research, teaching and further education, usually including a ...
. From 1980 to 1984 she was a professor in the Linguistics Department at the
University of Konstanz. The professorship was not converted into a permanent position. Trömel-Plötz believes that anti-feminist beliefs at the time prevented her being given tenure. She then chose to move to the USA for better opportunities at Universities. Since then she has worked as a freelance linguist, author, and professor. She has published numerous publications in the fields of formal linguistics,
psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind ...
, and
feminist linguistics.
Trömel-Plötz now lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Work
Her sociolinguistic text ''Linguistics and Women's Language'', which was published for the first time in 1978 in the journal
Linguistic Reports, broke new ground for feminist linguistics in German-speaking countries. This essay proposed "a problematic conflation of grammatical and biological gender" for the first time. Trömel-Plötz "initiated the debate about the supposedly gender-neutral generic masculine and criticized the fact that this form does not seem gender-neutral but conceptually erases women."
Published works
* ''Frauensprache in unserer Welt der Männer'' (1979)
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Trömel-Plötz, Senta
1939 births
Living people
German feminists
Franklin & Marshall College faculty
University of Pennsylvania alumni
Academic staff of the University of Konstanz
People from Munich
German women writers