| Senta Trömel-Plötz | |
| Native Name Lang: | German |
| Birth Date: | February 26, 1939 |
| Birth Place: | Munich, Germany |
| Children: | 3 |
| Nationality: | German |
| Citizenship: | German, American |
| Education: | University of Pennsylvania |
| Movement: | Feminism |
Senta Trömel-Plötz (born February 26, 1939, in Munich) is a German linguist. Together with Luise F. Pusch she introduced feminist linguistics in Germany.[1]
Trömel-Plötz studied linguistics in the USA. She received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania with the dissertation, Simple Copula Structures in English.[2] This was followed by her habilitation. 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, and feminist linguistics.
Trömel-Plötz now lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Her sociolinguistic text German: Linguistik und Frauensprache (Linguistics and Women's Language), which was published for the first time in 1978[3] in the journal German: Linguistische Berichte,[4] 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."[5]