Gender, Language and the Periphery : Grammatical and social gender from the margins [1 ed.] 9789027266835, 9789027256690

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Gender, Language and the Periphery

edi t ed by Julie Abbou Fabienne H. Baider

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Gender, Language and the Periphery

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&bns) issn 0922-842X Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within language sciences. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/pbns

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Volume 264 Gender, Language and the Periphery Grammatical and social gender from the margins Edited by Julie Abbou and Fabienne H. Baider

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

Yunxia Zhu

The University of Queensland

Gender, Language and the Periphery Grammatical and social gender from the margins

Edited by

Julie Abbou Aix-Marseille University

Fabienne H. Baider University of Cyprus

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

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Table of contents

Periphery, gender, language: An introduction Julie Abbou and Fabienne H. Baider

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Part I.  Undoing grammatical gender Trying to change a gender-marked language: Classical vs. Modern Hebrew Malka Muchnik

25

Gender marking and the feminine imaginary in Arabic Mariem Guellouz

47

A poststructuralist approach to structural gender linguistics: Initial considerations Heiko Motschenbacher

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A hermeneutical approach to gender linguistic materiality: Semiotic and structural categorisation of gender in Hong Kong Cantonese Julie Abbou and Angela Tse

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Gender bias in Bantu languages: The case of Cilubà (L31) Francis Crequi Ngoyi Tshimanga

129

The representation of gender in Bajjika grammar and discourse Abhishek Kumar Kashyap

165

The lexical paradigm based on sex distinction and the semantics of its constituents in English and Belarusian Maryia Turchynskaya

195

Part II.  Intersectional peripheries When She and He become It: The use of grammatical gender in the Greek of the Armenians of Cyprus Chryso Hadjidemetriou

227

Lakota men’s and women’s speech: Gender, metapragmatic discourse, and language revitalization Jessica Fae Nelson

257

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Gender, Language and the Periphery

“Moldovan” and feminist language politics: Two distinct peripheral linguistic markets Anna-Christine Weirich

285

Eastern boys and girls! Comparative linguistic anthropologies of lesbian and gay communities, Kuala Lumpur and Sorwool Dimitrios Michael Hadzantonis

323

Harlots and whores but not lovers: Dressing down the pronoun for a female addressee in a Basque Old Testament Begoña Echeverria

353

About the contributors

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Language index387 Name index389 Subject index395

Periphery, gender, language An introduction Julie Abbou and Fabienne Baider

Aix-Marseille University / University of Cyprus

1. From centre to margin Studying gender at the periphery could be viewed as working on minor and irrelevant phenomena: why look into the linguistic gender system of a language when gender should be conceptualised as a negotiation in daily discursive interactions?1 Why would vernaculars be worth our time when we know the linguistic system of the standard language they compete with? Thinking ‘periphery’ as irrelevant is what drives to exclusion the phenomena and language which are at the core of the present volume. However, as Joseph has already stipulated, what one sees as centre and periphery depends on one’s view of language. Moreover, what appears marginal at first sight may turn out to be fundamental to science: The temptation to ignore such phenomena, therefore, often is great, yet it is argued here that by doing so, we as linguists do our science a grave disservice and, worse, miss out on a source of information that is highly revealing about the nature of language in general. (…) the examination of many of these areas has led to just as many useful insights as the study of the core alone has yielded, and perhaps even more.  (Joseph 1997, s.p.)

This volume aims to demonstrate that the centre/periphery tension allows for a theory of gender understood as a power relationship with implications for a political analysis of language structures (periphery of grammar), language uses (periphery of linguistic practices) and linguistic resistances (periphery as a political tool). For instance, ethnographies of gay and lesbian experiences illuminate ways in which identities emerge from social constructionist intersections of language and semiotic practice (Butler 2004) as well as from power: participants collaboratively 1. This text has been proofread by Maria Varsamopoulou. doi 10.1075/pbns.264.01abb © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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(re)construct gender differences and the institutionalized ‘gender orders’ (Connell 1987; Holmes 2007), even though these orders will be different according to the context. Associated speech acts, while immediately empowering speakers, may ultimately disempower individuals, grounded by systems of stratified sociocultural reproduction and power relations, thus validating patriarchal governance. It is not at all a coincidence that such a focus on the dynamics of centres and peripheries has echoes in feminism. Indeed, if gender is primarily a power relationship, these dynamics are thus vantage points to identify and qualify power relationships. Numerous feminist theories in the last decades originated from the shift provided by an approach from the margins and/or the peripheries, such as standpoint theory (Haraway 1988), intersectionality (Crenshaw 1993), transnational feminist theory (Shohat 2001), or queer theory (Butler 1990, 2004; Endsjø 2008), to mention only a few. Inherited from the socio-economic, political and geopolitical sciences (Wallerstein, Hopkins et al. 1982), the notion of periphery experienced the metaphorical fate of other travelling concepts: to be applied to new realms. Over the last thirty years, the notion of periphery fruitfully developed within the field of gender studies as a means to explore its articulation within non-western feminisms (Broomans and van der Waal 2002), sexualities (Symanski 1981), black feminism (bell hooks 1984), and more generally women’s studies (see for example Munson 2002). In linguistics, though, the journey was quite different, as Skrebtsova’s (2014) detailed review of the notion’s uses in different linguistic traditions testifies. In semantics, Trier (1973) made use of the centre/periphery metaphor to bring to the fore an understanding of structural relations as changing through time, thus challenging Saussure’s dichotomy between diachronic and synchronic approaches. Through the definition of a lexical/semantic field in terms of centre, periphery and borderline zones, Trier opened a path for a definition of semantic borders as uncertain and blurred. The Prague linguistic circle worked towards a conception of language as dynamic, by integrating the notion of periphery. Indeed, linguistic items were defined on a continuum in terms of more or less integrated in the system, or more central or more peripheral, with centres also understood as not static since their gravitation fields interact with one another: “The co-existence of the central and peripheral elements in the system of language (…) constitutes another hardly unimportant universal feature of language” (Vachek 1966, 32–33).2 Last, periphery as a concept is at stake within the cognitive linguistic realm, mainly in Rosch’s prototype theory (1975). Within this framework, the centre constitutes the category’s best example while periphery qualifies its non-typical members. Centre and periphery constitute the status of a lexical unit vis-à-vis its semantic category. 2. Some Chomskyan works also mention “core grammar” and “peripheral grammar” to refer to properties according to the model of Universal Grammar (see for example Hyams 1988).



Periphery, gender, language: An introduction

What these theoretical frameworks have in common is, therefore, the desire to understand language as a dynamic, non-static process, as well as the use of the centre/periphery tension “to account for asymmetries in language” (Skrebtsova 2014, 144). Although we definitely subscribe to this claim for including asymmetries in language analysis and we acknowledge the contribution of these frameworks towards an articulated understanding of speech/discourse and language, we would, nevertheless, express a reservation. Indeed, the underlying presumption of such theories, especially the prototype theory, is the unicity of a linguistic system, within which what is central and what is peripheral is commonly shared and understood by the members of a given linguistic community. Although diachronic changes are taken into account, the semiotic heterogeneity of language uses as well as the balances of power in meaning making within a society cannot be addressed by such theories. This constitutes, somehow, a restricted definition of polysemy, venting power and domination relationships out of language analysis. We assume here, on the contrary, that meaning making, from grammar to semantics, is also fostered by social negotiations. The coexistence of different meanings, or different units, is not always a vertical scheme, but could be scattered through time, spaces, and societies. It is then unsurprising that one can trace the notion of periphery when power issues are at stake within sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, rhetoric, or any kind of subfield focusing on social and human interrelations viewed through the lens of language. In particular, the notion has developed in the sociolinguistic field of multilingualism (Pietikainen and Kelly-Holmes 2013). Yet, linguistic codes and facts per se seem to have been barely investigated via the critical framework of periphery. Therefore to merge the notion of periphery, as it is used in feminist or social theories, within linguistic theories, requires addressing issues of asymmetries and dynamics together with issues of power and domination. We therefore work from the depth of grammar to the semiotic negotiation of gender categories. Regarding gender and language studies, an interdisciplinary framework nowadays looks ready to undertake this fruitful encounter; indeed, the notion of periphery reveals new spaces in the linguistic construction of gender, bringing a multidimensional perspective to the field. Margins and peripheries are at the edge, around, nearby, but also a zone. They offer a horizon as well as a standpoint. Most studies have asserted that gender and language theories cannot avoid the matter of power; in the same way the tension between centre and periphery figures as a crucial and refreshing dynamic for linguistic analyses of gender. This dynamic spreads out in two main directions. On one hand, minorisation questions our definitions of both linguistic structures and gender structures. On the other hand, starting from the periphery invites us to renew our methods toward a de-colonial and de- territorialised linguistics.

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2. Minor phenomena and minorisation: The structure in question 2.1

Theorising the minor

From a conceptual point of view, the notion of periphery allows for the investigation of the ideological dimension of grammars and enhances our understanding of grammatical structures and their links with power relationships, whereas numerous works in gender and language studies have given precedence to the linguistic structure as it has been inherited from the social gender system, or have focused on how gender variations influence speakers’ productions, without considering the linguistic structuralisation of gender. Few works open a path for an ideological reading of the linguistic gender structure itself (see Burr 2012 and Cameron 1992 as exceptions), which allows the questioning of both language and gender as structuralising processes, questioning centres and peripheries. Far from being understood, constructed and negotiated within a symmetrical relationship, gender – in language as well as in society – almost always allocates to the masculine and the feminine a central and a peripheral role/function/meaning, respectively. This symbolic marginalisation of women within the realm of humanity is one of the most powerful resorts of patriarchy, evidenced by linguistic investigations (Cameron 1998; Cameron and Kulick 2003 for an overview). The question that some linguistic works ask is how to identify the mechanisms of this centrifugal force relegating the feminine to the margins (see Michard analyses (1996, 2002) reminiscent of Beauvoir’s text (1949)). Furthermore, if we think of the social tension between centrality and periphery we quickly move towards thinking about the normal, obvious vs. the not normal/ab-normal, hidden or “minored”. Peripheral location not only indexes what is prohibited, tabooed or silenced, it also indexes what is to be denounced, or at least pointed out, what is monstrous (literally ‘noticeable’, Latin monstratus, monstrum (Perseus, online)): in grammar the feminine form is a ‘problem’ to solve whereas the masculine form is taken for granted as the norm, by default (see Echeverria’s contribution in this volume, or Hadjidemetriou for alternative uses). Therefore, adopting a peripheral positioning may also be interpreted as endorsing the voice of the unseen, the hidden, and, therefore, silent or to be silenced for the sake of homogeneity, while a more dialectical reading will understand centrality as the high place, and periphery as the low place. There are, thus, different peripheries, according to different gender theories.



2.2

Periphery, gender, language: An introduction

Structure, meaning and power

From a linguistic point of view, how does one make periphery an object and a stance? Beyond the casual opposition between linguistic structures and discursive practices, are these dynamics renewing the well-known dynamics between norms and gaps? We believe they are not doing so because the notion of periphery stands not only as a place of repression, but also as a place for experimentation. Indeed, describing these peripheral practices requires an effort to not erase them under the centrifugal force of structures, and rather to pay attention to the ways ‘centres’ or ‘peripheries’ are constructed. This investigation can be summarized with two related questions: (1) How does gender create a linguistic system and (2) how do linguistic features index semantic categorisations of gender? The syntactical mechanisms involved in creating a periphery are well-known, hence the allocation of the feminine to the periphery through the claimed unmarkedness of the masculine (Jakobson 1971), the embedment of generic value in masculine forms (Holmes 1998; Michard 1999), or the assignment of specificity to the feminine (see studies on the linguistic policy of ‘feminisation’). In this volume, investigations in different languages pursue this issue, taking into account a gender studies perspective and stance to inform and shape the linguistic analyses. The constructivist approach supports that, in the realm of semantics, (Scott 1986; Violi 1987) gender designation is a prime place for gender construction or deconstruction (West and Zimmerman 1987). Gender proceeds to a categorisation of the world, and therefore constitutes a proposition to understand the world; that is to say, gender conveys an ideological stance on the human world and language. Pioneering works such as Scott’s or Violi’s opened avenues to explore the intertwined categorisation processes of language and gender, as structuralising our access to reality, making it intelligible. This is the point the papers on morphological gender are making in the present volume (such as those of Muchnik or Guellouz) which argue that gender understood as a grammatical category is not thought of as independent from the cultural context. This context provides meanings and values to the physiological differences between male and female beings according to a minor/major opposition. In Hall’s terms, semiotics is about understanding “the political nature of representation itself, about its complexity, about the effects of language, about textuality as a site of life and death” (1992, 285). If both language and gender are semiotic processes, working on the interface of language and gender calls for a semiotic approach aware of power relationships.

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2.3

Gender structures and linguistic structures

Periphery is to be understood in its double dimension whenever we speak of gender and language: how does one confront the structurality of gender and the structurality of language? If a structuralist vision of gender has been challenged (and is still under discussion), the structural dimension of language is more difficult to question. One finds an illustration of this dissymmetry when looking at Foucault’s work and its ambiguous relationship to structuralism. Although Foucault describes a society moulded by plurivocal power relationships, and discourses as fluid spaces of power, language as a structure remains unquestioned. Butler fills in this gap when she invokes language without defining it only as a structure or as a discourse (1990). For her, the linguistic code is a further dimension of discursive power, a result of language practices and their relationships to the norm. Language structure is then contextualised as social practices and norms. Consequently, the linguistic structure of gender is understood as a centre, inherently building power relationships and allocating peripheries. These power relationships can be questioned when looking at and looking from the periphery. Another meaningful example of the negotiation of periphery’s place in the study of gender and power relationship is to be found in the controversy between the tenants of the theory of dominance and those of postmodern feminism. The story is well known: after Gender Trouble, Butler was attacked for the importance she gave to discourse practices to the detriment of body materiality. In the 1990s, one was expected to choose sides according to these different conceptions of power. Butler replied to these critics in Bodies That Matter (1993), where she reasserts her acknowledgement of body materiality and associates more narrowly semiotic processes of categorisation within their incorporated, material anchorage. She develops the idea that, if power relationships define the material dimensions of sexes, bodies literally embody these relationships. This debate spread out around two axes. On one hand, there was a view of gender as a system of domination vs. a view of gender as a repertory of performed actions. On the other hand, the debate focused on the body, sex and gender materiality. In both cases, the status of periphery and minor phenomena was at the core of the matter. It is difficult, though, not to hear in this controversy a parallel with the tumultuous relationship between language and discourse, between a structuralist approach to language and a semiotic approach to discourse included in gender and language studies. The theory of dominance draws a parallel between gender structure and language structure based on masculine domination in society (see feminisation of trade names). If we translate this stance into ‘periphery/centre’ vocabulary, the feminine is at the periphery, while the genericity of the masculine gives to it a position of centrality. Postmodern approaches focus on discourse as the labelling



Periphery, gender, language: An introduction

activity of gender, and more generally of any system of norms. Regarding periphery, they take interest in the making of centres and peripheries as significant spaces defining our repertory of actions. Queer theory applied to the linguistic field thus provides analyses counter to the feminist materialist approach to language (Spender 1980; Ochs and Taylor 1995). For example, the analysis of the grammatical neuter (as merely grammatical or referring to the inanimate, as a common gender, or as a third gender) implies different theoretical stances on both language and gender. We believe that periphery presents an illuminating crossroads to confront these stances, since the relationship between centrality and periphery might be analysed in terms of a dialectical understanding as well as in terms of a Foucauldian understanding of power (1972). Theorising periphery in gender and language studies is, therefore, a way to reveal our epistemological views and provides an arena for new discussions. With Butler’s argument from Bodies That Matter in mind, it seems we can also, at present, go beyond this opposition to work at the intersection of contingency and structures – that is to understand periphery as a relegated space as well as a dynamic place of gender making and negotiation. If we define structure as the result of a (successful) categorising process, gender structure and language structure may have a lot in common: grammatical gender, like sex, is a place where masculine gender and virility associate, or where any value is associated with feminine or masculine paradigms; syntactical rules embed gender dynamics (the masculine taking over the feminine, etc.) whereas heteronormativity is also found in the lexicographic or anaphoric detail. Such a definition of structure as a solidification of categories allows a vision of gender and language as two categorising processes related to power. These categories are always to be reiterated, negotiated, and above all, they are multiple, because structure is the result of power relationships, that is, structure is the outcome of centralising forces. Periphery functions then as an ‘indraught’, a vantage point to observe the solidification from outside and eventually as an escape from the totalising power of the structure. Starting from the periphery provides, therefore, the chance to understand linguistic structures, as well as a space from which to explore evolving gender categorisation. This is a proposition that prefers to overstep the language/discourse dichotomy in favour of a poststructuralist linguistics, in the sense that structure is not a departure point but a theoretical construction to question. This stance follows Benveniste (1974): instead of analysing everything in terms of structure, it confronts the structural dimension of language with the heterogeneity of social dimensions. Those who want to catch sight of this heterogeneity needs to take a distance from centralities and their prescriptive power to rationalize the world. In Angenot’s terms, we have to consider simultaneously “the formal [structural] point of view of the text and the socio-critical point of view of ideology” (1982, 11).

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This common ground of the volume is akin to the emerging field of queer linguistics, not understood as LGBT identity, but as a process and as an epistemological proposal for linguistics (Koch 2008; Leap 2008; Kulick 2010; Motschenbacher 2010; Greco 2013). Heterogeneity thus is inherently constitutive of margins and peripheries and challenges the definition of fixed, stable identities and linguistic categories (see Motschenbacher 2016).

3. De-territorialising and decolonising linguistics In the wake of the project Hellinger and Bussmann undertook fifteen years ago (2001, 2002, 2003), we aim to shed light on the variety of roles and the nature of gender, as far as the linguistic encoding of gender is concerned. Focusing on languages across the world which could be described as ‘less or least studied’, the present volume contributes to a plurilithic description of linguistic gender (Pennycook 2008). Our aim is to move from our specific standpoint (as researchers) and explore, question and reframe (at least linguistically) the existing categories through a postmodern theoretical framework by exploring the periphery. Speakers are categorised most of the time as women and men, even when they question this very categorisation and the fact of categorising. However, non-western cultures (see Tshimanga, Guellouz or Nelson’s contribution) as well as postcolonial settings (see Hadzantonis’ chapter) throw new light on this vexed issue. Indeed, many of the chapters included propose, for the first time, a description of gender and its functioning in a given language (see Kashyap, Abbou and Tse or Weirich). Perhaps more importantly, all of them start from linguistic “marginalia” (Joseph 1997) and reflect the diversity of theoretical frameworks which can apprehend the fluidity of gender(-ed) language and identity. This diversity highlights the social constraints on daily discourse and identifies discourses that resist gender norms. Working from the margin decentres the standpoint and destabilizes the notions and forms taken for granted, since as an external boundary, the periphery defines, shapes, and gives volume to the entity involved, and since in the present context the entity involved is gender, a positioning from the periphery then becomes, paradoxically, fundamental. Periphery offers new scientific, ideological, political and methodological perspectives. These perspectives open three different paths: a de-territorialisation of linguistics so as to conduct work on understudied languages or genderless languages; a decolonisation of our analytical tools; and a methodology acknowledging a transversal approach of the linguistic levels concerned by gender.



3.1

Periphery, gender, language: An introduction

De-territorialising linguistics

The sociolinguistic dimension of this volume includes the linguistic description of gender in minor, peripheral or under-studied languages or varieties of language. By doing so, these descriptions de-territorialise linguistics and its tools, and allow the linguistic description of languages where gender is grammatically peripheral (the so-called genderless languages). De-territorialisation is made possible by a different positioning. Indeed, by concentrating on mainstream theoretical spaces, margins and peripheries are made invisible, therefore insignificant. We argue that one cannot describe centres without taking into account the edges of these centres. This stance requires not only taking into account the margins but also thinking from the margins. Indeed, we need to reverse the thinking mode that usually proceeds from centre to periphery and discover what vantage points are possible from the margins onto the centres. The black feminist bell hooks asserted this need for a simultaneous understanding of both centres and margins when she wrote: “living as we did – on the edge – we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin.” (1984 s.p.). A linguistic translation of such a statement invites us to explore shadowed linguistic realms. So-called genderless languages turn out to have various ways to signify gender, including grammatical ones. What are the consequences for the analysis of ‘gendered’ languages? The description of so far un-described or under-described languages makes us aware of new spaces where gender can squeeze in. To look at gender across languages provides a new view of the linguistic materiality of gender. It also provides an understanding of gender complexity in language by contrasting gendered and genderless languages, languages with or without formalised (or grammaticalised) gender, languages with either no gender, or two, three or more genders, giving way to a broader analysis of linguistic potentialities. 3.2

Decolonising linguistics

If the notion of periphery is a “counter-reading” (bell hooks, 1984) of the story, it is a space at the edge of the political scope, barely visible for understudied languages. This volume attempts to provide a space for non-western linguistic analyses and non-Indo–European languages. Seeking to understand how gender is intertwined with language, we focus on its linguistic system in the most frequently described languages. Putting forward the plurality of linguistic encodings of gender constitutes the first step for a decolonisation of linguistics. The description of peripheral languages, beyond

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its indisputable scientific contribution to new data and frameworks, also sheds an ideological light on the making of the discipline. Pennycook demonstrated in English and the Discourse of Colonialism (1998) how a language (English) and a discourse (colonialism) shoulder each other. Giving prominence to central languages perpetuates an implicit discourse of colonialism. There is a crucial need for the description of languages otherwise made invisible. Indeed, more and more works focusing on ‘minor’ languages are being undertaken in gender and language studies: for the most recent see the ground-breaking work of Hellinger and Bussmann (2001, 2002, 2003), Atanga, Ellece, Litosseliti and Sunderland (2013) on Sub-Saharan Africa in the special issue of Gender and Language on endangered languages (Ahlers 2012) and other individual works (Lazović 2009 for Serbian, Xiaoping 2008 for Chinese, among others). Therefore, describing understudied languages (in general or from a gender perspective) takes part in the process of the decolonisation of linguistics itself. As we know, the conceptual and analytical tools of global contemporary linguistics were shaped in Europe; the traditional tools used by linguists have been created for the description of western languages since Aristotelian times, influenced by the writing systems and linguistic features of these languages. Later, those same tools were used for grammars of non-western languages: Pan and Tham report that, in the late 19th Century, some Chinese intellectuals worked hard “to establish a Chinese linguistic system based on the Western model”, introducing analytical categories such as “word”, “sentence” or “gender” (2007, 4). Anchimbe, in his book dedicated to linguistics and postcolonialism, wrote: The linguistic approaches [of postcolonial settings] have paid attention to the emergence of hybrid languages, new varieties of European languages and the general patterns of speech peculiar to these areas. Their analytical frameworks have generally been European-based theories that were originally designed for Western situations. (2007, 2)

This statement has a methodological counterpart. Decolonizing grammar calls for contextualising those linguistic tools and concepts in order to evaluate to what extent they are relevant for peripheral language analysis. This methodological need for decolonisation is particularly important since Anglo-Saxon research dominates the academic landscape of gender and language. Linguistic analyses of gender could then be modelled on the specific gender structures known in these Anglo-Saxon and Romance languages, constraining our knowledge and understanding of the linguistic gender phenomenon. A systematic precedence of grammar, for instance, has been noted: if gender was not grammaticalised, there was no need for linguistic analysis. We know today that this gendered/genderless language dichotomy, based on a syntactical criterion, is no longer valid. The



Periphery, gender, language: An introduction

grammaticalisation of gender is a matter of degree (Huddleston and Pullum 2008): in some languages, gender is “syntactically central”, while in others, gender is syntactically peripheral. Gender is a polysemic categorisation and as a categorisation necessarily relies on linguistic devices. Conversely, since this gendered structuralisation of the world uses language for its expression (among other means), we need to investigate the array of linguistic possibilities, including those used in the “ungendered” languages. On the other hand, these displacements and re-appropriations of western tools for non-western languages may produce a shift allowing new spaces for exploration. 3.3

Toward a transversal methodology

Lastly, and consequently, periphery also constitutes a methodological framework: a methodology of the shift. Similar to borderlands for historians (Hämäläinen and Truett 2011), or queer theories for gender studies, the notion of ‘periphery’, by allowing a shift from central frameworks, draws up new landscapes. Shifts and borders provide two new directions of analysis. As stated earlier, to take the peripheral stance is to stand against a totalising view within the system (Haraway 1988; Foucault 1972). If structures are powerful tools to understand language, and sometimes societies, they cannot be taken alone, at the risk of erasing the agency of actors (Butler 1990). A peripheral epistemology does not mean defining the periphery as necessarily subordinated to a centre. Otherwise, this centre again will be under the scope, covertly. ‘Periphery’ should become a means to draw new topologies. Careful attention is needed to still acknowledge the power relationships that the centre maintains toward the periphery. Methodologically, this means understanding periphery simultaneously as a space of power and as a place apart, as a new space providing new maps. In linguistics, such a peripheral stance is also a matter of discipline and indiscipline. Indeed, gender squeezes into all kinds of linguistic levels, making the borders of the linguistic subfields porous, permeable. Working on gender in language often requires working at different structural levels at the same time (morphological, syntactical, pragmatic, sociolinguistic, and interactional). It requires working on linguistic interfaces rather than on linguistic levels (see Baider and Jacquey 2010). This specificity of gender in language invites us to visit the borderlands of the linguistic subfields, stretching their concepts and limits in order to interconnect them. This also requires a simultaneous capture of macro and micro language phenomena. If the centre has to do with homogeneity, periphery allies with heterogeneity. Departing from a universalist frame, working from the periphery (1) explores the scattering of gender anchorages in linguistic structures; (2) reveals tensions

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between different peripheries and calls for an intersectional approach to linguistic and socio-linguistic phenomena; and (3) requires being at the interface between different frames, objects and linguistic levels. The following chapters make this notion of periphery at work in different ways, sometimes in the same direction, sometimes conflicting, but always exploring peripheral spaces and minor phenomena through hybrid methodologies, original data or emerging approaches. In this way, the contributions reveal the heterogeneity of gender making in language, its places of structuration and solidification as well as its places of negotiation.

4. Undoing grammatical gender The first section of the book, entitled “Undoing grammatical gender”, gathers critical contributions about the anchorage of gender in language structure. The integration of a centre/periphery dynamics in the analysis of masculine and feminine linguistic representation leads to questioning structural phenomena as solidified, enacted categories shaped by power. Whereas the power conveyed in gender is often analysed in discourse, these papers propose to identify it at the interface between structure and discourse, understood as co-construction. In other terms, they form a proposition to analyse the gendering of linguistic structure through the plasticity of discursive practices, illustrated in what we might call ‘minor phenomena’. This section emphasises the ideological dimension of grammar. When studying the semiotics of morphosyntax, it becomes obvious that grammatical words enforce, construct and perpetuate gender ideology. The chapters, therefore, bring diachronic and contrastive perspectives to the forefront of the analysis to reveal the linguistic gender shifts. A diachronic sociolinguistic perspective allows Malka Muchnik to investigate why it seems so difficult to change Modern Hebrew, a gender-marked language, into a less sexist language. Her chapter provides then an outline of grammatical potentialities, language policy orientations and challenging discursive realisations. Backgrounding historical language change regarding gender, Muchnik bounds up syntactical categorisation with a political reading of linguistics, at the interface of diachrony, syntax and sociolinguistics. The chapter methodically confronts gender syntactical potentialities, linguistic changes, gender recommendations and gendered realisations. The analysis proves that grammatical gender has displayed a relative flexibility through time. Yet, the contemporary tendency is towards masculinisation instead of feminisation or neutralisation, a tendency proceeding from a regressive social orientation.



Periphery, gender, language: An introduction

A few studies have explored gender and language in spoken Arabic, especially in Morocco (Sadiqi 2003; Ruitert 2008). Most have focused on dialectal varieties. Mariem Guellouz contrasts classical Arabic with the dialectal Tunisian language as far as feminisation is concerned. Drawing from different sources such as poetry and literary commentators as well as grammarians and contemporary media discourses, her chapter reveals the syntactical rules for feminising words is not as obvious as it seems (i.e. just adding a feminine inflection). As a matter of fact, trade names uses foster an asymmetric allocation of social spaces according to gender, with sexuality playing a decisive role.3 On the other hand, a grammatical masculinisation occurs in the case of adjectives describing specific physiological and social female phenomena such as hamel ‘pregnant’ or taliq ‘repudiated’. Guellouz argues two reasons for this ‘unmarkedness’ or avoidance of the feminine marker: (1) if the referential gender were enough to disambiguate a reference to a female, there would be no need to mark the feminine; (2) the feminine suffix has become grammaticalised into a marker of intensity.4 The feminine is, therefore, either sexualised, masculinised or muted. As shown by this work, the motives for such a grammatical resistance to the feminine may possibly be found in the linguistic and meta- linguistic imaginary. Structural gender linguistics has become marginalised in the field of language and gender and has been limited to a Saussurean structuralist analysis. Basing his argument on this statement, Heiko Motschenbacher proposes a poststructuralist approach to gendered language structures. His chapter offers a theoretical discussion of the relationship between linguistic materiality and language structure. To achieve such a theoretical turn, from structuralism to a poststructuralist perspective in linguistics, Motschenbacher invites us to consider a desessentialised understanding of linguistic structures, that abandons the notion of language as a stable system and to adopts a conceptualisation of language as a discursive, and everchanging, formation. This approach brings back power and normativity issues at the core of linguistic gender analyses. For this purpose, a double methodological proposal is made, consisting in integrating both diachronic and contrastive perspectives in gender and language studies. Through a historical contrastive analysis 3. This asymmetry is also found in the way the feminine form is described as derived from the masculine in grammars. We could refer to the phenomenon of ‘imitation’ but not derivation. Indeed, etymology does not prove that the masculine form is always the first to be invented. Moreover, one could consider feminine words derived from verbs just as the masculine words were (eng. waiter / waitress, governor / governess) or from nouns (fr. épicier / épicière) (Baider 2010). 4. In contrast, in French, a typical morpheme to mark the feminine such as -ette has become a marker of the diminutive.

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of gender in English, German and Croatian, the author illustrates the heterogeneity of linguistic gender constructions, and the linguistic fluidity of gender, pointing out the possible differences in the perception and conceptualisation of gender between languages as they manifest in language structures.5 The contrastive perspective is also at the core of Julie Abbou and Angela Tse’s chapter. If semiotic gender is differently embedded in linguistic structure across languages, a comparison between languages where gender is grammaticalised to different degrees can reveal the linguistic anchorage of gender. The chapter provides a comparison of the expression of gender in English and Cantonese and shows, through a corpus-based analysis crossed with an analysis of grammar textbooks, that while gender is very slightly grammaticalised in Cantonese with regards to English, anaphoric and pronominal references in the former are potentially “genderable”. Speakers of Cantonese erase or disambiguate gender information through different strategies, revealing the primarily semantic dimension of gender in linguistic structures. This work on gender categorisation as a semantic cut-off of reality is conducted on written Cantonese, which is understudied due to its emerging – and therefore highly un-normalised – features. The genderless Bantu language Cilubà is the topic of Francis Crequi Ngoyi Tshimanga’s paper. The chapter provides a systemic functional analysis of grammar, text and proverbs. Tshimanga argues that a ‘genderless’ language (Prewitt-Freilino, Caswell and Laakso 2012) does not mean it is ‘sexism-free’ and demonstrates that, on the contrary, gender-based ideologies are pervasive – from morphosyntax to discourse. The author shows that terms which have dual morphosyntactic genders will be interpreted as masculine only, a phenomenon reminiscent of the generic masculine tradition in many Indo-European languages. Semantically, a duality of positive qualities (men: strong) and negative ones (women: weak) can also be seen as a pattern, in language structure and in phraseology. On the syntactical level, sexism is located in transitivity, i.e. when there is a possibility of the duality agentpatient, verbs will be constructed with men more often as agents and women as patients. This overall sexist point of view is supported with conceptual metaphors such as ‘the wife is husband’s food’ reminiscent of woman as dessert and other conceptual metaphors referring to women as food for men. Abhishek Kumar Kashyap provides new data in his analysis of gender in Bajjika, an Eastern Indo-Aryan language, as well as a detailed review of the linguistic places of gender. Kashyap’s essay explores, as in Tshimanga’s, different linguistic levels and different linguistic scales, in light of systemic functional linguistics. The nominal and verbal compositions are described with regard to the semantic 5. This issue has also been shown to be relevant within the same language, as Silaški’s study (2013) has revealed.



Periphery, gender, language: An introduction

distribution of categories in Bajjika; differences of gender marking are identified between spoken and written realisations. All these movements, from pronominal systems to textual settings, and from morphology to semantics, reveal the dispersal of gender in Bajjika and echo the need for an ‘inter-level’ approach to gender in linguistics, that is, to work at the interface between different levels, to simultaneously seize grammar and discourse in the analysis. Kashyap concludes his work with hypotheses on potential future language changes in Bajjika regarding gender. Maryia Turchynskaya focuses her work on the pragmatic characteristics of a less studied language, Belarusian. She describes the constituents of the lexical paradigm based on sex distinction in the Belarusian and the English languages taking a contrastive perspective. The chapter uncovers that in both languages similar oppositions describe male and female animate beings (e.g. big, strong, brave etc. vs. small, weak, fainthearted etc.). Working from written data, Turchynskaya examines the spectrum of the gender-based features revealed in the meanings of the paradigms and concludes that the constituents of the lexical paradigm researched in English and Belarusian have a wide range of common gender-based pragmatic properties. Only a small number of cultural specific attributes are found and these attributes are also confined to the behavioural and psychological features associated with males and females. Given this commonality of features, the author draws the conclusion that the core semantic feature of gender is /sex/, that is, a biological one, which inevitably constrains the pragmatic properties which such words can have for a given linguistic community. Turchynskaya acknowledges that this hypothesis has to be verified with further linguistic data and psycholinguistic experiments.

5. Intersectional peripheries In the second section of the book, the interface between language, gender and periphery is at work to create a new conceptualisation and a new positioning. “Intersectional peripheries” is to be understood here from two – though not exclusive to each other – perspectives. First, gender may hide other power relationships: a peripheral linguistic community may seek to conform to a norm as a strategy to gain power, while subverting or contradicting another norm as a power relationship. This tension encapsulates the discussion of the notion of empowerment, as well as confronting the power of doing something (ability) and the power over someone (authority, conduct of conduct).6 This tension also illustrates the multiplicity of power and norms, at the

6. Foucault’s “conduite de conduite” (Dits et écrits, 1994, vol. IV, 237)

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core of theories of intersectionality. The founding work of Crenshaw on intersectionality “Mapping the Margins” (1993) echoes in most of the essays presented in the second section of this volume, which bring together intersectional theories and norm issues in linguistic analysis of gender.7 Some studies suggest indeed that resisting gender linguistic categorisation may create other spaces of domination through language, such as nationalistic purposes, ethnic class, or identity urges. Second, intersectionality also concerns academic disciplines. The chapters gathered in this section thoroughly discuss the interface between linguistics and other social fields, such as gender studies, anthropology, sociology, pragmatics, semiotics or religious studies in order to make new methodological or theoretical propositions in linguistic gender analysis. Being placed at the crossroads of different theoretical and empirical realms offers compelling insights on what has been constructed as central and as peripheral within our traditional disciplines. Working on the social and linguistic minority of the Armenians in Cyprus, Chryso Hadjidemetriou tested the acquisition of grammatical gender by Armenians speaking Cypriot-Greek (CG) as L2. Two bilingual groups were under scrutiny: (1) Adult speakers who were born in or arrived in Cyprus as infants (Armenian Cypriots), and (2) Armenians who arrived in Cyprus as teenagers or young adults. The chapter conveys original data about gender for the acquisition field, since differences and commonalities in linguistic acquisition are established based on empirical and spontaneous conversational data (recordings). It also takes into consideration sociolinguistic variables such as age, sex, generation, length of exposure to CG and intensity of contact. The analysis reveals a common uneasiness in the two groups as far as the use of grammatical gender is concerned, even though Armenian Cypriots were more successful in the tests. They both exhibited the same grammatical deviations, that is, a preference for using the neuter gender. The process of assigning the neuter gender seems to indicate that the neuter gender is the default gender for the Armenians, which they can grammatically use with less semantic implications, making of it a peripheral gender category. Further investigation has to establish whether this is common to all non-native CG speakers or whether the Armenian language is the source of the influence explaining such a choice. Revitalisation of language is considered from a gender point of view by Jessica Fae Nelson in her paper on Lakota (a Native-American language). Taking up previous claims that a different use of gendered Lakota had allowed speakers to construct alternative social meanings (see Trechter 1995; Agha 2005), Nelson compares metapragmatic use at two different time periods and draws different

7. See also McCall 2005; Rosenblum and Travis 2011.



Periphery, gender, language: An introduction

conclusions. If indeed there is a language shift and revitalisation of the Lakota language, language change regarding gender is limited by social pressure not to use gendered speech incongruent with the referential gender (for instance, the use by male speakers of feminine-indexing). From the grammatical point of view, the study shows that words that entail a female speaker identity became archaic and words that entail a male speaker identity are now used as gender neutral i.e. are able to refer to both sexes. Moreover, gender-neutral pronouns are now being gendered as feminine as if to fill in a necessary social gap. Variation in the use of gendered words would be portrayed unfavourably, as incorrect, as lacking knowledge and as inauthentic. To be ‘gender creative’ does not only challenge gender identities but also, it would seem, Lakota identities.8 Anna-Christine Weirich takes up the notion of peripheral linguistic markets to investigate linguistic practices in a non-dominant group of speakers, i.e. Romanian speakers in Moldova. Antisexist rules and challenges to the generic masculine are not widespread: the conservative linguistic practices can be understood partly as a conservative mentality as well as a result of the inflectional complexity of the language itself. Based on authentic data (discussions with participants in an experimental workshop), examples of feminisation and double gendering strategies are presented, discussed and evaluated. Even though speakers would not readily mark the feminine by adopting the usual ‘androgendering’ masculine, they would deploy creativity and a refreshing readiness to develop double gender forms when and where masculine and feminine forms were grammatically available, according to standard rules. They do not go as far as inventing new feminine forms, whereas in other previous studies this was the case (Abbou 2011). The chapter outlines how the practice of gender linguistic disturbances may conflict with social and linguistics mastery. In his comparative study of lesbian and gay discursive practices in Kuala Lumpur and Sorwool (Asian regions) Michael Dimitrios Hadzantonis first highlights how patriarchy emerges as a central linguistic clue, inspiring heteronormative practices, such as gender differentials. Nonetheless, although regions such as Malaysia and South Korea have increasingly drawn on both transnational and (consequently) national forces to mediate projects of governance (Harvey 2005; Rofel 2007), diversifying language facilitates the attempt to contest the homogenization and patriarchal constraints of colonialism. Language practices in gay communities appear to significantly subvert gender hierarchy and heteronormativity, while representing a critical difference between the two regions Kuala Lumpur and 8. During our discussions on the matter, the author suggested that these shifts have to do with women’s relative exclusion from formal speaking and with a more recent shift away from formal speaking in general, making gender, and not speech context, the most salient distinction.

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Seoul (Sorwool). In Malaysia, networks of male individuals favour male-inclusive languages whereas lesbian communities have limited social networks and the situation reaffirms that patriarchy. Seoul, in contrast, reveals aspects of a matriarchal society, hence the presence of diverse language practices in lesbian communities, which emerge from women’s strong social networks. However, nationalism is implicated, because of strict code switching practices that highlight both national and heteronormative gender hierarchy. Sexual identity politics can only be apprehended within the global and local contexts, local effects being as powerful as global effects, as is demonstrated in the paper, showing a clear difference between both regions as far as linguistic practices in gay communities are concerned. Begoña Echeverria, in her work on the discursive construction of female sexuality in a Basque Hebrew Bible (mid-19th Century Catholic Old Testament), argues that the second-person pronoun referring to female beings, noka, is the only way to indicate the female gender in the Basque language and is used in familiar circumstances. This pronoun had been connoted with intensity but a devious intensity. Indeed, in the data studied, the word underwent semantic derogation (Schulz 1975) and is associated with references to witches and violent sexual imagery. The translator of the text only uses the term for negative interactional purposes whereas noka has also been used in positive contexts, even romantic ones in other texts. These lexical choices are ideologically meaningful since within this important religious text, women are portrayed in the most misogynist fashion, as harlots or whores, exclusively. Another study on the French language, has also pointed at the possible influence of the Vulgate (Grisay et al. 1969) on the derogation of feminine paradigms and namely of the latin word mulier “woman”. The question of the actual influence of such lexical choices in religious texts on the evolution of grammar as a whole remains open to investigation.

6. Conclusion In the 1980s, bell hooks, in Feminist Theory, from Margin to Center, advocated a new perspective on feminism, a perspective which would include other socially marginal, groups i.e. the non-white, non-middle class experience. This new standpoint allowed her to re-define the value of power, to tackle taboo issues such as gender-oriented violence, and to explore the boundaries of sexuality – in short, to destabilize a universally acceptable definition of what feminism was at the time. In effect, she has rethought “the relationship between the centre and the periphery as dynamic, fluid, and potentially contradictory” (Blackwood Pickrell 2013). The essays in this volume illustrate both the usefulness and the need for such destabilisation in language, initially echoed in Scott’s 1986 seminal article.



Periphery, gender, language: An introduction

This volume would not have been possible without the dedicated work of the two anonymous reviewers whose revisions, suggestions and comments were very helpful and of the scientific committee who evaluated the papers for the manuscript, namely Luca Greco (University of Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle), Silvia Nugara (University of Turin), Véronique Perry (University of Toulouse), Richard Trim (Toulon University) and Sylvie Voisin (Aix-Marseille University). We also thank Anita Fetzer, editor of the Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, Isja Conen and Susan Hendriks for their timely answers and support.

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part i

Undoing grammatical gender

Trying to change a gender-marked language Classical vs. Modern Hebrew Malka Muchnik Bar-Ilan University

Classical and Modern Hebrew are gender-marked in all morphological forms, and the rules of Hebrew syntax require gender agreement. Consequently, it is next to impossible to find a sentence without gender determination. Masculine content words are unmarked, while feminine words are derived from them. Masculine forms are also used generically, making them more visible than the feminine. Feminine function words, mainly pronouns, were used in classical periods for the masculine as well, leaving less specific features for the feminine. We could expect that feminist speakers would try to change this practice in Modern Hebrew despite the rigid linguistic structure. However, there have been only a few gender changes, mostly in one direction: using masculine, but not feminine forms, for both sexes. This article provides examples of this sociolinguistic change and explains why it has taken this direction. Keywords: Hebrew, gender markedness, linguistic changes, masculinization

1. Introduction Like other Semitic languages, Classical and Modern Hebrew are clearly marked according to gender in all morphological forms. They not only have different masculine and feminine forms for animate and inanimate nouns, but also for all inflected nouns, adjectives, personal, possessive and demonstrative pronouns, verbs, participles, inflected prepositions, and cardinal and ordinal numerals. Syntactic rules require gender agreement for all of these words, and therefore it is virtually impossible to find a gender-neutral sentence. 1.1

Grammatical gender and social context

It would seem that the division of the different parts of speech into masculine or feminine might have resulted in an equal distribution. However, in reality doi 10.1075/pbns.264.02muc © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

26 Malka Muchnik

feminine forms are less visible for two reasons: (a) the grammatical masculine serves also as a generic form, meaning that it includes the feminine and may be used to refer to both semantic genders; (b) many nouns, particularly names of professions and occupations, are only used in the masculine form and do not present feminine inflections, because in the social perception they are only associated with men and not women. Some scholars (e.g., Boroditsky, Schmidt, and Phillips 2003; Flaherty 2001; Guiora, Beit-Hallahmi, Fried, and Yoder 1982) found that the amount of grammatical gender in a language influences the identity of speakers, as well as their semantic and world perception (see Motschenbacher 2016). Romaine (1997) argues that grammatical gender systems may influence feminists’ awareness of the need for linguistic change. It could be expected, then, that in spite of the language’s rigid structure, feminist speakers would try to change Modern Hebrew forms and make them more egalitarian. Israeli feminist activism started at the beginning of the twentieth century, when women demanded to be included in the public sphere (Bernstein 1987; Izraeli 1981). However, the first women’s rights movements were only established in the 1970s. Beginning in the 1980s, we find many female writers and journalists, and even a feminist journal. In 1984, the Israel Women’s Network was established, in cooperation between female politicians and academics. The next step was the opening of gender and women’s studies in all Israeli universities and colleges. All these, of course, contributed to changing the previous manly dominant discourse, and could have been a trigger for a linguistic change. Although in some cases language changes related to the use of gender could occur as a consequence of linguistic simplification, known as a universal process, in fact it is mostly a conscious change arising from a social problem. Pauwels (1998) describes the different attitudes of linguists and feminists toward directed changes. Those who believe that language only reflects society and cannot change it, claim that linguistic reform will not help solve the problem and prefer to promote a social change to reduce gender inequality. Others, who believe that language changes have the potential to influence social and cultural practices, argue in favour of linguistic intervention. As shown by Cameron (1990, 93), language does not merely reflect social conditions, and “language change may come about through the efforts of individuals to produce new resources and new social relations.” Thus, even when determining that language reflects social reality, we must be aware of the fact that it also helps construct it at the same time. Therefore, we can expect that linguistic changes will contribute to social changes. Although linguistic interventions undertaken in different languages have not led to major achievements, they have at least helped generate awareness.



1.2

Trying to change a gender-marked language

Grammatical gender and linguistic change

It can be argued that the Hebrew language represents a special case, because it is totally marked, and therefore limited by its grammatical gender. Nevertheless, as Hellinger (1988) points out, the presence or absence of grammatical gender is not a sufficient criterion for determining the chances of linguistic change, whether by feminization or neutralization. She argues that we should also take into consideration non-linguistic factors, such as the relationship between the sexes in the speech community, women’s movements and the official language policies. I propose that we add to these factors the self-perception of women and their attitude toward the language and the social values that it represents. Indeed, it appears that there is a need for both types of criteria, linguistic and non-linguistic, to achieve goals and make change possible. The different possibilities for a non-sexist language reform, as described by Pauwels (1998, 2003), are (a) causing linguistic disruption, (b) creating a womancentred language, and (c) striving for linguistic equality of the sexes. Even without the need for linguistic disruption, many options for language changes exist. One way of making women more visible in language is by adding a feminine form for each existing masculine form. This is quite simple in gender-marked languages like Hebrew, because the structure is clear, and except in some cases, the suffixes required are well known. This kind of change, however, can be interpreted as accepting and even reinforcing the existing concept that the masculine form is the norm, while the feminine only derives from it, and therefore is dependent on it. Creating neutral forms for both sexes is impossible in a language such as Hebrew, where every word must be either masculine or feminine. Using the existing masculine forms for both males and females would be a very simple solution, because there is no need to create new forms. The problem in this case is that this would lead to the invisibility of females, and therefore be perceived as a renunciation of their identity. As shown in two studies conducted by Miller and James (2009), when masculine forms are used generically, people tend to interpret them sex-specifically and exclude women from their thoughts. The use of the generic masculine could have been interpreted as a feminist will to appropriate it, but feminine forms would still remain in the language. Of course, using feminine forms for both sexes is entirely improbable, because this would imply removing discourse conventions from the language.1 While previous studies in this area have pointed at specific changes that occurred in Modern Hebrew, the aim of the present article is to reveal the general 1. See Corbett (1991, 220) for languages having the feminine gender used as generic.

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direction shown in changes applied in the different periods of the language, understand the reason for this, and determine whether they have helped to a more equal manifestation in the language. After describing the special case of Hebrew, I will refer to the different theoretical strategies to achieve linguistic equality, illustrate some changes that have actually occurred, and try to determine whether others are plausible. I will argue that despite language limitations, gender changes could have been introduced in Modern Hebrew in favour of females, but this has not widely happened because masculine forms are perceived, even by women, as more prestigious and powerful as discussed in the section below.

2. Grammatical gender in Classical Hebrew Classical Hebrew mainly includes the biblical language, dated from the thirteenth century to the third century BC, and Mishnaic language, dated from the first to the fifth century CE. Hebrew was not spoken for approximately 1,700 years, from the end of the Mishnaic period through the end of the nineteenth century, when it was revitalized. Although the language evolved over time, grammatical features are still as clearly differentiated regarding gender as they were in the classical periods. Therefore, it is interesting to examine the changes that have been introduced in this regard and try to understand the language tendency and orientation. 2.1

Function words

Masculine and feminine forms were regularly differentiated in Biblical Hebrew, but this was not a strict rule. For instance, the second-person pronoun ’at, normally used for the feminine, was often used instead of the masculine form ’ata, even when referring to ‘God’. Interestingly, ’ata and ’at were only interchangeable in one direction, i.e. the feminine form served for the masculine, but not inversely. Similarly, we find the feminine form lax ‘to you’ used for masculine as well, beside the regular masculine form lexa, but in this case too, the opposite did not occur.2 In Mishnaic Hebrew, influenced by Aramaic, the form ’at was mostly used for second-person masculine singular, identical to the biblical pronoun for the feminine, which continued to be used as well, making it ambiguous. As a consequence of this, two forms could have been used for the masculine, ’at or ’ata, while only one remained in use for the feminine – ’at. Similarly, in the second-person plural, 2. It could be said that the feminine form included the masculine, but this is not the convention (see, for example, Bendavid 1971, 698).



Trying to change a gender-marked language

gender differences disappeared, and both forms ’atem and ’aten were used for the masculine, whereas only ’aten was used for the feminine. The same is true for the inflected prepositions ’etxen (accusative), laxen (dative) and baxen (locative), which were used for both masculine and feminine. One could argue that these changes are due to the phonetic replacement of -m by -n, but the use of feminine forms for both sexes was wider than that, e.g., šelax ‘yours’, originally feminine, which was expanded to the masculine as well, beside šelxa. The singular form for the third personal pronoun is regularly hu for the masculine and hi for the feminine. Nevertheless, in the Pentateuch no feminine form is found, and the pronoun hu mostly stood for the feminine as well.3 The lack of specific feminine forms for pronouns is also found in biblical Aramaic, which has different forms for third-person singular, but the second-person feminine singular does not exist at all. This could be explained as a process of generalization or simplification, according to which the masculine becomes the generic form, but it may also be seen as a patriarchal attitude, meaning that special forms to address women might have been considered superfluous. The third-person plural presents the same type of process – the masculine and feminine forms, hem and hen, respectively, were both used for the masculine, and the same is true for inflected forms, which present a suffix ending either in -m (originally masculine) or in -n (originally feminine). Thus, the inflected prepositions ’otan (accusative), lahen (dative), bahen (locative), served for both masculine and feminine. Again, we can see that the phonetic change led to gender confusion, but this only occurred in one direction, and masculine forms ending in -m were not used for the feminine.4 Moreover, the use of feminine forms was not general, and it was only applied to function words, but not always for content words. In verb conjugations for the imperfect and the imperative, the special forms for the second- and third-person feminine in the plural, which began to weaken in the last Biblical books, completely disappeared in Mishnaic Hebrew, and the originally masculine forms were used for the feminine as well. For instance, while in Biblical Hebrew we mostly find forms such as tilmadna ‘you [fem-pl] / they [fem-pl] will study’ or lemadna for the same persons in the imperative form, in Mishnaic Hebrew we only find forms identical to those related to the masculine, i.e. tilmedu / limdu. Table 1 below presents examples of function words distribution in Classical Hebrew. 3. This was later corrected and changed into hi by the Masorah scholars, who established the permanent text of the Bible in the tenth century CE. 4. The same process occurs in colloquial Modern Hebrew, where the suffix -m is frequently used for both masculine and feminine grammatical features.

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Table 1.  Function words and particles distribution Period

Person

Feature

Masculine

Feminine

Biblical Hebrew

II Singular

Nominative

’ata / ’at

’at

Dative

lexa / (lax)

lax

III Singular

Nominative

hu

hi / (hu)

II Plural

Future

t---u

t---na

II Plural

Imperative

---u

---na

III Plural

Future

y---u

t---na

II Singular

Nominative

(’ata) > ’at

’at

Possessive

(šelxa) > šelax

šelax

Nominative

’atem > ’aten

’aten

Accusative

’etxem > ’etxen

’etxen

Dative

laxem > laxen

laxen

Locative

baxem > baxen

baxen

Nominative

hem > hen

hen

Accusative

’otam > ’otan

’otan

Dative

lahem > lahen

lahen

Locative

bahem > bahen

bahen

II Plural

Future

t---u

t---u

II Plural

Imperative

---u

---u

III Plural

Future

y---u

y---u

Mishnaic Hebrew

II Plural

III Plural

From Table 1 we can clearly see that while either masculine or feminine pronominal forms were used when referring to the masculine, only one possibility is found when referring to the feminine. Regarding future tense and imperative forms, Biblical Hebrew had different forms for the second- and third-person plural masculine or feminine, whereas in Mishnaic Hebrew,5 masculine forms were adopted for the feminine. 2.2

Content words

In Biblical Hebrew, animate nouns and adjectives in concordance, were unmarked for the masculine, whereas feminine forms were marked with the suffixes -a or -(V)t, e.g., ’iš ħaxam ‘smart man’ versus ’iša ħaxama ‘smart woman’. Plural forms also had masculine and feminine markers, but they were very irregular. The suffix for the masculine was -im, and for the feminine -ot, but we find words such as ’avot ‘fathers, patriarchs’ with a feminine suffix, or našim ‘women’ with a masculine suffix. In both cases the grammatical singular forms are according to the referential 5. As we will see, this practice continues in Modern Hebrew as well.



Trying to change a gender-marked language

gender, namely the unmarked masculine form ’av ‘father’ and the marked feminine form ’iša ‘woman’, but plural forms present an inversed suffix. The same may occur with inanimate nouns, such as the masculine form šulħan ‘table’ which plural form šulħanot presents a feminine suffix, and the feminine form šana ‘year’ which plural form šanim presents a masculine suffix. In all cases, the grammatical gender is determined according to the singular form. The grammatical gender of nouns is not always used according to referential gender, as stated by Motschenbacher (2010, 66–68), and this is true even when referring to animate Hebrew nouns. Thus, for example, the words tsipor ‘bird’ and tsfardea‘ ‘frog’ are grammatically feminine, regardless of biological sex, and therefore we could say sentences such as zo tsipor yafa mimin zaxar ‘this is a pretty [fem] male bird’ or hatsfardea‘ hayeruqa hazot hi mimin zaxar ‘this [fem] green [fem] frog is male’.6 Unlike the reduction of grammatical inflected forms that were discussed above, derived forms, especially nouns, tended to be increased to create gender differences. Mishnaic Hebrew used part of the vocabulary found in the Bible, and in many cases feminine forms were derived from these words. For example, feminine suffixes were added for some animal names originally found only in the masculine, such as gdiya from gdi ‘young goat’ and ze’eva from ze’ev ‘wolf ’. The same process was applied to several human nouns, such as baħura from baħur ‘young person’ and te’oma from te’om ‘twin’. However, this cannot serve as evidence of feminization, because when looking at the whole language, feminine grammatical features decreased. Table 2 below summarizes the characteristics of animate and inanimate nouns according to gender and number. Table 2.  Gender in animate and inanimate nouns Noun type

Number

Masculine

Feminine

Animate

Singular

unmarked / basic

derived: -a / (V)t

Regular Plural

-im

-ot

Singular

unmarked

-a / (V)t

Regular Plural

-im

-ot

Irregular Plural

masculine referent with feminine mark

feminine referent with masculine mark

Inanimate Animate and Inanimate

As we can see in Table  2 above, while singular masculine animate nouns are unmarked and considered basic forms, feminine nouns are marked and derived from the masculine. Inanimate nouns too must be grammatically masculine or feminine, although this differentiation is arbitrary. As for plural forms, there are differentiating masculine and feminine forms, but irregular forms may present 6. It is noted that the same phenomenon is known in other languages such as Latin languages; for example in French la girafe or la souris will refer to both male and female giraffes and mice.

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opposite suffixes. This was the practice in Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew, and the same is true in Modern Hebrew, which will be addressed in the next section.

3. Grammatical gender in Modern Hebrew We could have expected that the modern language spoken in Israel today would be more equal in terms of gender, especially because Hebrew was not spoken for almost 1700 years, and its revival provided opportunity for change. When the spoken language was revitalized at the end of the nineteenth century, as part of the Zionist movement, the ideology was of an equal society, including gender roles. Moreover, women had a very important contribution and influence in the revivification process (Shilo 2005). However, it seems that at that time there was no awareness of the impact of language on gender identity and visibility. As in the classical language, Modern Hebrew is still fully marked regarding gender. It has no neutral forms, and almost all words must be either masculine or feminine. Masculine words are unmarked and considered basic forms, while feminine words are derived from them,7 and therefore marked. Thus, from the grammatical perspective, Modern Hebrew still looks like a typical patriarchal language, or in Spender’s (1985) terms, a “man-made language.”8 Here is a simple example: (1) hastudentit haћaxama hazot hitsliћa bešaloš habeћinot haqašot šelah hastudentit haћaxama hazot the-student [fem] the-smart [fem] the-this [fem] hitsliћa bešaloš habeћinot succeeded [fem] in-three [fem] the-exams [fem] haqašot šelah the-hard [fem] of-her ‘This smart female student passed her three hard exams.’

In the sentence presented in (1) all words are morphologically marked as feminine, because they agree syntactically to each other. The only unmarked particles are the definite article ha- ‘the’ and the non-inflected preposition be- ‘in’. Although 7. On feminine derivations in Hebrew see Schwarzwald 2002, vol. 1, 45; vol. 4, 11. 8. However Ordan and Wintner (2005) have suggested to add a common root for both male and female words in lexicography in order to represent both genders equally such as in prince princess

child_of_monarch

prince

‫“ נסיך‬prince”

princess

‫“ נסיכה‬princess”



Trying to change a gender-marked language

we can see that almost all feminine words present a suffix, the word šaloš ‘three’ is an exception. Thus, cardinal numerals from three to ten are formed in the opposite way, i.e. masculine numerals present an -a suffix in free use and a -t suffix in bound use, and this unusual case presents Hebrew speakers with difficulty. It appears that in spoken language feminine unmarked forms, which according to the norm serve in citation and in counting, are taking over as the only form for numerals for both genders, as found by Ravid (1995) and Meir (2008). This is the only exceptional case where feminine forms are more salient than masculine ones. As in classical Hebrew and in other languages, masculine forms are used generically, while feminine forms are only in female-specific use. Therefore, even if the initial number of masculine and feminine forms is balanced, masculine forms have double use, as masculine and as generic, while feminine forms become less used and less visible. Moreover, masculine forms are considered the norm, while feminine forms are derived from them and not independent. Thus, for example, dictionaries only present the word sofer ‘writer’ in the masculine, while the feminine form soferet does not appear as an independent entry. Instead, the feminine suffix -et is presented in brackets, together with plural masculine and feminine suffixes. These asymmetries may result in the invisibility of female linguistic expression. Clear evidence of this are captions in the Internet. For example, this is what appears in the official website of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament: ћaver hakneset merav mixa’eli ‘Knesset [masc] member Merav Michaeli’. When looking at a site named Simaniya for information about a female writer, we may find a default text in masculine form. For instance, hasofer ћana nave ‘the [masc] writer Hannah Naveh’ and hasfarim šekatav ћana nave ‘the books that wrote [masc] Hannah Nave’. Ironically, Merav Michaeli is the most feminist known member of the Knesset and activist for language feminization (see below), and Prof. Hannah Naveh is the former head of Women and Gender Studies at Tel Aviv University. According to Hebrew rules of syntax, if a sentence has two or more subjects and even if only one of them has a masculine grammatical form, the agreement must be to the masculine. For instance: (2) šneim-‘asar mehandesot, ’adrixaliyot, ‘ozrim umenahalot ћadašim ‘ovdim baћevra hazot šneim-‘asar mehandesot, ’adrixaliyot, twelve [masc] engineers [fem], architects [fem], ‘ozrim umenahalot ћadašim assistants [masc] and-managers [fem] new [masc] ‘ovdim baћevra hazot work [masc] in-the-company the-this ‘Twelve new female engineers, female architects, male assistants and female managers work at this company.’

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The only masculine noun in Example  (2) above is ‘ozrim ‘assistants’, but the numeral, the adjective and the verb agreement align with the masculine. In fact, it may have included any number of female persons, but a single male person is sufficient to require masculine forms in the whole sentence. Obviously, masculine forms are more visible and salient, while feminine forms are ignored. The language planning may influence and even prevent attempts for linguistic changes. Thus, for example, the Academy of the Hebrew Language has published a clarification following a rumour that a decision had been taken that when addressing a group of males and females, the grammatical gender may reflect the majority (Gadish 1998).9 The clear statement was that this was never determined because masculine forms include the feminine, while feminine forms are exclusively reserved for female-only audiences. The tendency throughout the history of Hebrew to abolish feminine in favour of masculine forms was further reiterated. We can see then, that masculine forms still serve as generics, and they are preferred to feminine specific forms, both individually and officially. As I will show in the next sections, intended attempts to change this practice in Modern Hebrew are generally ignored. In many cases the speakers have difficulty to introduce them, and in other cases changes are deliberately rejected or subjected to mockery. Moreover, instead of adopting linguistic feminine forms, many women prefer using masculine forms because they are perceived as more powerful.

4. Linguistic changes regarding gender As aforementioned, linguistic changes regarding gender can be introduced in three different ways – neutralization, feminization or masculinization. The ideal way to achieve equality would be by linguistic neutralization, but as we have seen, this is almost impossible in Hebrew, because almost all words are grammatically determined either as masculine or feminine. However, despite grammatical rules, some changes are still possible, whether by prescriptive stances or by individual attempts. In next sections, I will present some examples of such processes that have been conducted in Modern Hebrew. 4.1

Gender neutralization

Guidelines for the use of non-sexist language when referring to or addressing men and women were officially published by the Ministry of Education in 1984 and revised in 1993. A special publication (Malchiel and Fradkin 1987) was issued 9. See Khaznadar (2002) for similar reactions of the French Academy against feminising trade names.



Trying to change a gender-marked language

regarding the equal linguistic treatment required in textbooks. Alternative recommended forms were neutral infinitives or double forms for masculine and feminine. These forms are problematic, because infinitives are not perceived as personal forms of address, and speakers feel that double forms are clumsy. Non-discriminating forms are imposed on job ads in the media, and advertisers are supposed to use double forms. This directive, however, is not always implemented, and we still find ads for nurses, secretaries or domestic workers worded in the feminine, while drivers, engineers and managers are generally addressed in the masculine. Moreover, as found in a study conducted by Kantor and Muchnik (1999), even when double forms are used at the beginning of the advertisement texts, they very often change at the continuation. Here is a typical example, from which we can not only see the grammatical problem, but also reveal that the original intention was to address men and not women. (3) ’im ’at/a be’emet ma’amin šeyeš lax/lexa košer nihul, ’anaħnu ma’aminim še’etslenu ’at/a yaxol lehagšim zot ’im ’at/a be’emet ma’amin if you [fem/masc] really believe [masc] šeyeš lax/lexa košer nihul, that-there-is to-you [fem/masc] ability management ’anaħnu ma’aminim še’etslenu ’at/a we believe that-at-s you [fem/masc] yaxol lehagšim zot can [masc] realize this ‘If you [fem/masc] really believe that you [masc] have management abilities, we believe that at our place you [fem/masc] can [masc] achieve this.’

Some changes have occurred since the 1990s regarding the use of directives, trying to make them neutral. Kantor and Muchnik (op. cit.) found that in some fields there is an increased use of neuter forms instead of gender-explicit forms. For instance, cookbook authors used to write feminine imperatives such as simi ‘put’ (fem) or ‘arbevi ‘mix’ (fem), but now use neuter plural participles, samim, me‘arbevim, or infinitive forms, lasim, le‘arbev. It should be noted that in recent years cooking became a new trend among Israeli men. This example showing that language can then adapt to society changes or trends. That said, in instructions on products traditionally associated with women, like cosmetics, baby food and cleaning products, feminine forms continue to be predominate. Similar changes can be found in instructions written in textbooks and exams. Instead of using masculine singular forms, such as ta’er, ktov, hasber ‘describe’, ‘write’, ‘explain’ respectively, we find the plural forms ta’aru, kitvu, hasbiru (Kantor and Muchnik op. cit.). These forms seem to be neutral when compared to past

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tense forms in the plural, where feminine forms already disappeared in classical language. Nevertheless, in the case of the future and the imperative they are actually masculine forms used generically, because Hebrew still has parallel feminine forms for the plural, but are seldom used. Although, apparently, these changes represent a successful step towards a more equitable use of the language, as compared to classical Hebrew, and may avoid sexist forms of address, in reality this does not entirely happen, as we will see in next sections. 4.2

Gender feminization

As already stated, second- and third-person feminine plural in future and imperative forms, such as [ta]vona ‘[will] come’ (fem), have already disappeared in Mishnaic Hebrew, and masculine forms such as [ta]vo’u ‘[will] come’ (masc) were used instead. However, until up to a few decades ago, feminine forms were still used when addressing female groups, mostly among female teachers addressing female students or female commanders addressing female soldiers. These forms are scarcely used in contemporary Hebrew, and are almost exclusively found in canonic literary language or among highly educated older speakers. Today, however, these forms are sometimes used jokingly in speech, and are for the most part accompanied by a mocking tone with the use of female exaggerated high pitch. This change points at a process of regression, as feminine forms that existed in Classical Hebrew ceased been used in Modern Hebrew, causing female invisibility or being used to belittle women. Jacobs (2004) reports on a group of Israeli feminists trying to incorporate the use of feminine forms, as shown in the example from one of her informants: (4) mehayom medabrim binqeva mikevan šeyeš po raq našim mehayom medabrim binqeva mikevan from-today speak [masc-pl] in-feminine because šeyeš po raq našim that-there-are here only women ‘From today (we) speak [masc-pl] in the feminine because there are only women here.’

Despite the clear declaration of intent, the verb used in Example (4), medabrim ‘[we] speak’ is in the masculine, although the speaker could have used the feminine form ‘anaћnu medabrot. It seems that masculine forms are so well-established in the language, that even sensitive and conscious feminist speakers found it difficult to change or avoid them. It may also be that speakers do not see them as



Trying to change a gender-marked language

gender marks anymore. In the same group of feminists, the women tried to reincorporate the biblical plural feminine forms of address and reference. For example: (5) ’im lefaot našim tedaberna ‘al ‘atsman binqeva ’im lefaot našim tedaberna if at-least women would-speak [fem] ‘al ‘atsman binqeva about themselves [fem] in-feminine ‘If at the least women would speak [fem] about themselves [fem] in the feminine.’

The attempt suggested in Example (5) did not succeed, despite the fact that it does not imply mangling the grammar, but only selecting existing forms in the feminine to make them more salient. When asked about this, some of the feminist informants reported that they did not use these forms, because they are too difficult or because using them would make them sound like “snobs” (Jacobs op. cit.). Attempts to use feminine forms of address for mixed audiences instead of the generic masculine, which represents an intentional linguistic disruption in Pauwels (1998, 2003) terms, have proved unsuccessful in reality, although some popular female broadcasters and university lecturers consistently try to introduce them, similar to the use of the generic she in English by some professors as well. The most popular promoter of this change is the feminist media personality Merav Michaeli (now a parliament member), who uses to address audiences in either the feminine and masculine or only feminine forms. The following is an example of this: (6) boqer tov lexulan, ma’azinot uma’azinim yeqarot viyqarim, meqavot šešlomxen tov haboqer; ’anaħnu rotsot lehit‘adken banos’im habo‘arim šel haboqer boqer tov lexulan, ma’azinot morning good to-all [fem], listeners [fem] uma’azinim yeqarot viyqarim, and-listeners [masc] dear [fem] and-dear [masc], meqavot šešlomxen tov hope [fem] that-your-peace [fem] good haboqer; the-morning;

’anaħnu rotsot lehit‘adken we want [fem] to-be-updated

banos’im habo‘arim šel haboqer in-the-issues the-burning from the-morning ‘Good morning to all of you [fem], dear female and male listeners, (we) hope [fem-pl] that you [fem] are well this morning; we want [fem-pl] to be updated in the burning issues of this morning.’

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Michaeli’s unique style irritates many people, including women. This is what Yossi Verter, a male political writer in the daily newspaper Ha’aretz, wrote about her when she was elected as a member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in 2013:10

(7) One thing she is going to have to cure herself of immediately is her silly and childish habit of speaking in the feminine gender. If she chooses to speak in the legislature and committees like that, she will quickly become the laughing stock of the 19th Knesset.

An attempt made by a male teacher of history and civics in a Jerusalem high school was recently published (Yediyot Aharonot 23.03.2012). The teacher stated that he is leading “a feminist revolution” in the school by using only feminine forms in mixed classes. He reported that school authorities and many colleagues support this new trend, although others, and especially male students, disapprove of it. One of the arguments made by the boys who oppose this initiative was that this form of address is ungrammatical, but is obvious that they were opposed to the move because they felt ignored in the class. As we have seen, Hebrew requires syntactical agreement for almost all parts of speech. Using new derived feminine forms instead of masculine, traditionally generic, forms could be a strategy to make feminine features more apparent. In some cases, this is easy to do; in other cases, rules of grammar need to be changed to facilitate the move. For example, some feminists, mostly from Gender Studies departments and universities, intentionally mangle grammar to make feminine forms visible. In recent years, they have started using the term qol qoret [fem] ‘call for papers’ in announcements. The expression qol qore, literally ‘a voice calling’, originates in a biblical expression, where the verb qore ‘call’ is in the masculine and agrees with the masculine noun qol ‘voice’. The use of the feminine verb qoret is perceived as an error made out of ignorance, and therefore is not widely used. Some changes can be applied without grammatical disruption, as found in Jacobs’ (op. cit.) work. As a motto for her dissertation, she writes: ћizqi ћizqi venitћazaq ‘be [fem-sing] strong and we will be strong’.11 This sentence, ­originally formulated in the masculine form ћazaq ћazaq venitћazaq, is chanted in the synagogue upon completion of one of the books of the Pentateuch. It is addressed to the person who reads the Torah, and the masculine form seems to be logical, because in Orthodox communities only men read the Torah. However, although in liberal communities women too read the Torah, the congregation still blesses them using 10. See: http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/172115/new-feminist-knesset/#ixzz3 Cubj9leg 11. Note that the first-person plural nitћazaq presents only one form, without gender differentiation.



Trying to change a gender-marked language

the masculine formula. In a recent television interview with a woman who not only reads the Torah, but is even a Torah scribe, the reporter, Dan Margalit, blessed her using the formula ћizqi ћizqi vetitћazqi ‘be [fem-sing] strong and you [fem-sing] will be strong’. Although in both cases the feminine forms would not be a grammatical disruption, it is doubtful that they will be widely adopted, and would appear that the traditional form of the statement is stronger than feminist intentions. Surprisingly, two significant changes were officially accepted recently. The word roš (lit. ‘head’) had not been used in a feminine derivation, and only the masculine (allegedly neutral) form was used when referring to a man or a woman, e.g. roš memšala ‘prime minister’ or roš mišpaћa ‘head of the family’. A decision taken by the Academy of the Hebrew Language in November 2012 allows the use of the feminine form roša in free constructions, and the parallel form rošat in bound constructions. Thus, rošat memšala ‘female prime minister’, rošat miflaga ‘female head of party’, rošat maћlaqa ‘female head of department’ and the like, are now widely used in the media, but are still not heard in colloquial language. Similarly, the feminine form mišna ‘vice, secondary’ was accepted, following a request of the female vice-president of a tribunal, who did not want to be referred by the masculine form mišne. The new accepted feminine form is used now, particularly in the media, in expressions such as ha-mišna la-nasi ‘female vice president’, ha-mišna la-mankal ‘female vice CEO’ and ha-mišna la-nagid ‘female vice bank governor’. However, these feminine terms are not regularly used in the spoken language.

5. Masculinization as a new trend Despite sporadic attempts to cause neutralization or feminization of Hebrew, new trends seem to be leading to its masculinization. The perception of masculine as more prestigious than feminine forms result in their extensive use. For instance, in the minimal pair mazkir / mazkira ‘secretary’, the masculine refers to a person fulfilling an important administrative function, while the parallel feminine form refers to an office clerk, and a similar distinction is found for ‘ozer ‘assistant’ versus ‘ozeret ‘maid’ (Livnat 2006). Therefore, women in powerful positions prefer to be addressed in masculine forms such as mazkir ha-’aguda ‘association secretary’ or ‘ozer ha-sar ‘assistant to the minister’. This is also true when there is no semantic difference between the forms, as in the case of nasi / nesi’a ‘president’ or mankal / mankalit ‘CEO’. In these cases, women use masculine forms, because they are perceived as being more prestigious and powerful (Muchnik 2012, 2013a, b, 2015). In some cases, it is argued that no feminine form is possible due to grammatical constraints, and only the masculine form may be used. However, when grammatical

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derivations are possible, as in ‘oseq murše ‘licensed dealer [masc]’, ’iš qešer ‘contact man [masc]’ nišom ‘taxpayer [masc]’, tošav vatiq ‘senior citizen [masc]’, the respective feminine grammatical forms ‘oseqet muršet, ’ešet qešer, nišoma, and toševet vatiqa, are never used, neither in official nor in colloquial language. Traditionally, names for military high-ranking officers are only used in the masculine, such as segen ‘lieutenant’, or seren ‘captain’, although feminine forms are not grammatically impossible. In 2011, the Israel Defense Forces named the first female general, and her rank was officially defined as ’aluf ‘general [masc]’, although the feminine form ’alufa, also used to mean ‘female champion’, was recommended by the Academy of the Hebrew Language. Similarly, the highest ranks in the Israel Police and the Israel Prison Service use the masculine forms nitsav and gundar respectively for men and women alike, although the feminine terms nitsevet and gundarit could have been used. It is worth noting that feminine forms are commonly used for low-ranking functions such as tironit ‘female recruit’, tura’it ‘female private’, mašaqit ‘female non-commissioned officer’, samelet ‘sergeant’, šoteret ‘police officer’ and soheret ‘warden’. Tobin (2001) describes a special case of Modern Hebrew, where gender switch may occur. Males and females will sometimes use masculine forms when addressing females in intimate circumstances. For example, when talking to her sister, a girl says: Tutu, bo ’iti kvar ‘Tutu, come [masc] with me already’. Tobin explains this as a way of expressing affection, intimacy and solidarity. Although he presents examples from the spoken language and literature, this phenomenon is infrequent, and not all speakers are aware of it. However, there is evidence that this type of use is common among female soldiers, which can be explained as caused by a macho environment. Sunderland (2004, 88–89) reports on a similar finding among children in the United Kingdom. When the teacher said she needed two boys to perform dialogues, four girls volunteered to perform boys’ role and even declared, “We’re boys.” This reaction was naturally accepted, and nobody laughed at the girls. When two boys from this class were asked if they would say, “We’re girls,” they answered that they would definitely not do that. This reinforces the feeling that more females than males are ready to play the other’s sex role. Moreover, it seems that this has already been approved by society as natural, while the reverse is perceived as ridiculous. The reason for this is that male behaviour is identified with authority and respect, and therefore, females try to gain these characteristics by imitating them. In contrast, males are not willing to renounce authority and be considered weak by imitating females.12 12. In the same line Kulick (2010, 76) explains that masculinity is a self-contained form from which derives real power and results in real privilege. Therefore whereas humour is raised by the achievement of femininity, it is also raised by the failure of masculinity.



Trying to change a gender-marked language

Sa’ar (2007) analysed special cases of female Israeli speakers of Hebrew and Arabic. She found that for general or neutral talk, women not only use masculine forms, but even avoid the feminine. As female speakers witnessed, feminine talk sounds wrong to them, while masculine talk sounds right. Sa’ar argues that the reason is that using the feminine as generic implies challenging hegemonic positions of the male gender. The use of ’ata ‘you [masc]’ as a gender neutral form of address is well known (Horvits 1999; Livnat and Yatziv 2012; Tobin and SternPerez 2009), but Sa’ar (op. cit.) shows that women use it even in intimate feminine contexts, like birthing, nursing and mothering experiences. Here is an example from her study:

(8) keše’ata nihiya ’ima yom ’eћad ’ata pit’om tofes še’ata ’ima vexol ma še’ata rotse ze lehiša’er babait ‘im hayeladim

keše’ata nihiya ’ima yom ’eћad When-you [masc] become [masc] mother day one ’ata pit’om tofes še’ata you [masc] suddenly realize [masc] that-you [masc] ’ima vexol ma še’ata mother and-all that that-you [masc] rotse ze lehiša’er babait ‘im hayeladim want [masc] is to stay at-home with the-children ‘When you [masc] become [masc] a mother, one day you [masc] suddenly realize [masc] that you [masc] are a mother and all you [masc] want [masc] is to stay at home with the children.’

A similar use was found when a woman who gave birth on the unique date 11.11.11 was asked during a television interview about deliberately planning to give birth on this date. The following was her response: (9) keše’ata sovel mehatsirim ’ata mamaš lo ħošev leħakot ‘od qetsat keše’ata sovel mehatsirim, When-you [masc] suffer [masc] from-the-contractions, ’ata mamaš lo ħošev leħakot ‘od qetsat you [masc] really not think [masc] to-wait more a-little ‘When you [masc] are suffering [masc] from the contractions, you [masc] really don’t think [masc] about waiting a little longer.’

One explanation for the peculiar use presented in Example (9) could be the fact that the woman was speaking to a man, and therefore opted to use the masculine. However, it surprisingly also occurs when speaking to another woman, and in this

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case feminine forms could have naturally been used. From this evidence, we can clearly see that the grammar is not the only impediment, because at least in some instances female speakers have a choice, but consciously or not, they prefer using the widespread masculine generic or “neutral” form. As mentioned before, the preference for masculine forms has an additional function, namely gaining power, as has been found by Mordechai (forthcoming). After having interviewed women working in typical “masculine” or “feminine” professions, she reports on an interesting distinction. As female engineers must compete with their male peers in the workplace, they use masculine forms to be put on an equal status, while female teachers do not need this, because they are the majority. Below is an example from a female engineer who has been interviewed by a woman: (10) ’ani ħoševet še keše‘ovdim betsura ‘atsma’it […] ’ata tsarix lešaveq ’et ‘atsmexa, ’ata tsarix lada‘at letamħer, ’ata tsarix lada‘at ma hazman šelxa šave ’ani ħoševet še keše‘ovdim betsura I think [fem] that when-work [masc-pl] in-form ‘atsma’it […] ’ata tsarix lešaveq ’et independent […] you [masc] need [masc] to-market [acc] ‘atsmexa, ‘ata tsarix lada‘at yourself [masc], you [masc] need [masc] to-know letamħer, ’ata tsarix lada‘at ma to-price, you [masc] need [masc] to-know what hazman šelxa šave the-time yours [masc] worth ‘I think [fem] that when you work [masc] independently, you [masc] need [masc] to market yourself [masc], you [masc] need [masc] to know how to price, you [masc] need to know how much your [masc] time is worth.’

Additional evidence of the preference for masculine forms is the selection of children’s names. In previous generations, many female names were derived from male names, such as Yosefa (from Yosef), Re’uvena (from Re’uven), Me’ira (from Me’ir), Shmu’ela (from Shmu’el), Micha’ela (from Micha’el), Isra’ela (from Isra’el), Netan’ela (from Netan’el), Refa’ela (from Refa’el).13 It seems that this was an attempt to show female equality to males, because these kinds of names were in vogue when such an ideology was central in Israel society. However, this process 13. Interestingly, the name Jacoba was used in the Bible only for men, although it presents a feminine suffix.



Trying to change a gender-marked language

turns masculine names into the base or norm, from which feminine names are derived. An opposite process could have been expected by using back formation, transforming feminine names into masculine, as can be seen in names such as Shoshan (from Shoshana), Aviv (from Aviva), Hadas (from Hadassa), Li’or (from Li’ora), Or (from Ora). In fact, while all these names exist, they are not used solely for males, but for both sexes. The use of unisex names has become very popular in recent years, but in this case, too, increasingly more male names are becoming female as well. This includes names such as Aviv, Adar, Ofir, Gal, Yuval, Rotem, Tomer, Matan, Omer, Tom, Shaked, and many others. However, we scarcely find female names that are also used for males. It should be noted that in Classical Hebrew, some names with a feminine suffix were used for men, such as Yona in the Bible and Simcha in medieval times. Both names are no longer popular, but were still common a few decades ago for women as well, probably because they have a feminine form. For the same reason, some names with a feminine suffix that were only used for men in Biblical Hebrew, such as Levana, Zmira and Anat, are currently exclusively used for women. Thus, even when examining given names, we can see that grammar rules are not always the obstacle to gender equality in the language, because while feminine forms are not applied for masculine names, masculine forms are widely used for women. The fact that masculine forms are grammatically stronger than the feminine is not exceptional for the Hebrew language. For example, when discussing the case of French, Khaznadar (2002, 226) contents that masculine priority is not a linguistic practice but rather a socio-political one that reflects a rule created from a male dominance perspective. The same was described by Pavlidou (2003), who shows that grammatical gender in person reference in Modern Greek is socially and semantically motivated. The reason for this seems to be that grammatical rules were determined by authorities, dominated by men, driven by a social rather than a linguistic factor.

6. Conclusions In this article, I have shown that Classical and Modern Hebrew are morphologically and syntactically structured according to gender, and masculine and feminine forms are dichotomously distributed. However, despite the grammatical constraints of Hebrew, some gender changes have been undertaken. We could have expected that the long-time linguistic development of Hebrew, and more so the feminist struggle for gender equality in society, would have led to a change in favour of feminine or neuter use.

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In actuality, it appears that changes regarding the use of gender have switched direction over time. Regarding function words, Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew presented feminine forms used for the masculine as well, but not inversely. In contrast, in Modern Hebrew we find masculine forms used for the feminine, and not the other way around. These include mainly pronouns, forms of address, directives and instructions, terms referring to professions and occupations, and proper names. Although some feminine content words have been added to the language by deriving them from masculine forms, general attempts to make feminine forms more visible in the language have failed. In other words, we do not witness feminization or neutralization of the language, as could have been expected, but rather masculinization. The reason for this seems clear – masculine forms are perceived by Hebrew speakers as more prestigious and powerful. The consequence for this is that instead of achieving feminine visibility or at least gender equality, we witness a process of regression.

References Bendavid, Abba. 1971. Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew vol. 2. Tel Aviv: Dvir. [Hebrew] Bernstein, Deborah. 1987. The Struggle for Equality: Urban Women Workers in Prestate Israeli Society. New York: Praeger. Boroditsky, Lera, Lauden A. Schmidt, and Webb Phillips. 2003. “Sex, Syntax, and Semantics.” In Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition, ed. by Dedre Gentner, and Susan Goldin-Meadow, 61–80. Cambridge: MIT Press. Cameron, Deborah. 1990. “Demythologizing Sociolinguistics: Why Language Does Not Reflect Society.” In Ideologies of Language, ed. by John E. Joseph, and Talbot J. Taylor, 79–96. London: Routledge. Corbett, Greville G. 1991. Gender. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:  10.1017/CBO9781139166119

Flaherty, Mary. 2001. “How a Language Gender System Creeps into Perception.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 32(1): 18–31. doi: 10.1177/0022022101032001005 Gadish, Ronit. 1998. “The Academy and the Speakers of Hebrew.” Leshonenu La’am 49(2): 58–64. [Hebrew] Guiora, Alexander, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Risto Fried, and Cecelia Yoder. 1982. “Language Environment and Gender Identity Attainment.” Language Learning 32: 289– 304. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-1770.1982.tb00973.x Hellinger, Marlis. 1988. “Revising the Patriarchal Paradigm: Language Change and Feminist Language Politics.” In Language, Power and Ideology, ed. by Ruth Wodak, 273–288. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/ct.7.18hel Horvits, Miri. 1999. “First Person in Second Person: Discursive Analysis of a Pseudo Second Person Pronoun.” In Hebrew – A Living Language vol. 2, ed. by Rina Ben-Shahar, and Gideon Toury, 75–90. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute. [Hebrew] Izraeli, Dafna. 1981. “The Zionist Women’s Movement in Palestine, 1911–1927 – A Sociological Analysis.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7: 87–114. doi: 10.1086/493863



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Jacobs, Andrea M. 2004. Language Reform as Language Ideology: An Examination of Israeli Feminist Language Practice. PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin. Kantor, Hadassah, and Malka Muchnik. 1999. “Marked and Unmarked Directives in Modern Hebrew.” In Contemporary Journalistic Language: Memorial Book to Mina Efron, ed. by Miri Horvits, 134–147. Tel-Aviv: Mofet. [Hebrew] Khaznadar, Edwige. 2002. Le Féminin à la Française: Académisme et Langue Française. Paris: L’Harmattan. Kulick, Don. 2010. “Humorless Lesbians”. In Femininity, Feminism and Gendered Discourse, ed. by Janet Holmes, and Meredith Marra, 59–83. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press. Livnat, Zohar. 2006. “Gender Online in Hebrew: New Technology, Old Language.” In Corpus Linguistics and Gender: A Multilingual Analysis of an Electronic Corpus, ed. by Eva-Maria Thüne, Simona Leonardi, and Carla Bazzanella, 169–181. London: Continuum. Livnat, Zohar, and Illil Yatziv. 2012. “Functional Changes of Person, Tense and Mood in Spoken Discourse.” In Studies in Modern Hebrew and Jewish Languages – In Honor of Ora ­Schwarzwald, ed. by Malka Muchnik, and Tsvi Sadan, 461–472. Jerusalem: Carmel. [Hebrew] Malchiel, Zehava, and Nira Fradkin. 1987. Equal Treatment for Boys and Girls in Textbooks. Jerusalem: The Ministry of Education. [Hebrew] Meir, Irit. 2008. “The Role of Prosody in Morphological Change: The Case of Hebrew Bound Numerals.” Language Variation and Change 20: 41–65. doi: 10.1017/S0954394508000070 Miller, Megan, and Lori James. 2009. “Is the Generic Pronoun He Still Comprehended as Excluding Women?” American Journal of Psychology 122(4): 483–496. Mordechai, Anat. Forthcoming. Ambiguous Gender Identity and the Use of Language Variations. PhD dissertation, Bar-Ilan University. Motschenbacher, Heiko. 2010. Language, Gender and Sexual Identity: Poststructuralist Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/impact.29 Muchnik, Malka. 2012. “Is It Possible to Avoid Sexism in Hebrew?” In Studies in Modern Hebrew and Jewish Languages – In Honor of Ora Schwarzwald, ed. by Malka Muchnik, and Tsvi Sadan, 487–505. Jerusalem: Carmel. [Hebrew] Muchnik, Malka. 2013a. “Language and Gender.” In Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics vol. 2, ed. by Geoffrey Khan, 17–20. Leiden: Brill. Muchnik, Malka. 2013b. “Gender Variations in Hebrew.” In Gender-Linked Variation across Languages, ed. by Yousif Elhindi, and Theresa McGarry, 36–49. Champaign, IL: Common Ground. Muchnik, Malka. 2015. The Gender Challenge of Hebrew. Leiden: Brill. Ordan, Noam, and Shuly Wintner. 2005. “Representing Natural Gender in Multilingual Databases.” International Journal of Lexicography 18(3): 357–370. doi: 10.1093/ijl/eci032 Pauwels, Anne. 1998. Women Changing Language. London; New York: Longman. Pauwels, Anne. 2003. “Linguistic Sexism and Feminist Linguistic Activism.” In The Handbook of Language and Gender, ed. by Janet Holmes, and Miriam Meyerhoff, 550–570. Oxford: Blackwell. doi: 10.1002/9780470756942.ch24 Pavlidou, Theodossia. 2003. “Women, Gender and Modern Greek.” In Gender across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men vol. 3, ed. by Marlis Hellinger, and Hadumod Bussmann, 175–199. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/impact.11.11pav Ravid, Dorit. 1995. “Neutralization of Gender Distinction in Modern Hebrew Numerals.” Language Variation and Change 7: 79–100. doi: 10.1017/S0954394500000909

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Romaine, Suzanne. 1997. “Gender, Grammar, and the Space in between.” In Communicating Gender in Context, ed. by Helga Kotthoff, and Ruth Wodak, 51–76. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/pbns.42.05rom Sa’ar, Amalia. 2007. “Masculine Talk: On the Subconscious Use of Masculine Linguistic Forms among Hebrew- and Arabic-Speaking Women in Israel.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 32(2): 405–429. doi: 10.1086/508501 Schwarzwald, Ora. 2002. Studies in Hebrew Morphology. Tel Aviv: The Open University of Israel. [Hebrew] Shilo, Margalit. 2005. Princess or Prisoner? Jewish Women in Jerusalem 1840–1914. Waltham: Brandeis University Press. Spender, Dale. 1985. Man Made Language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2nd edition. Sunderland, Jane. 2004. Gendered Discourses. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:  10.1057/9780230505582

Tobin, Yishai, and Alison Stern-Perez. 2009. “Linguistic Sign Systems Indicating Proximity and Remoteness in the ‘Troubled Talk’ of Israeli Bus Drivers who Experienced Terror Attacks.” Israel Studies in Language and Society 2(2): 144–168. Tobin, Yishai. 2001. “Gender Switch in Modern Hebrew.” In Gender across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men vol. 1, ed. by Marlis Hellinger, and Hadumod Bussmann, 177–198. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. doi:  10.1075/impact.9.13tob

Gender marking and the feminine imaginary in Arabic Mariem Guellouz

Paris Descartes University

In classical and dialectal Arabic syntax, linguists identify two opposite genders: masculine and feminine. The latter is linguistically marked by the morpheme a(t) (called fatha) while the former is considered unmarked and there is no neuter. The morphosyntactical rule of feminine marking seems to be obvious: it consists of adding a feminine inflection. Yet, this morphosyntactic marking does not apply systematically. Some adjectives do not have any feminine inflections despite describing physiological and psychological female phenomena for instance, hamel ‘pregnant’, taliq ‘repudiated’, thaib ‘widow’, mourdhi ‘breast feeder’, tamich ‘post-menopausal woman’. This chapter addresses the following two questions: Why does the gender marker disappear in such typical cases relating specifically to female biological states? If we suppose these lexical units are masculinized, what does this say about the social imaginary regarding gender and especially, the feminine? Keywords: Arabic linguistics, feminization processes, gender, sexuality, linguistic and cultural imaginary, professional titles

1. Introduction In Arabic there are two gender categories available for referring to male and female: the masculine and the feminine gender. The latter is marked by the morpheme a(t) while the former is said to be unmarked. To understand this difference, I refer to Jakobson’s marker theory (1963). Jakobson called marker a grammatical unit which enables an opposition between two grammatical categories, a marked vs. an unmarked category. In most languages, the masculine is considered as being characterized by the absence of a marker (Corbett 1991, 2006). In Arabic, as in other languages, adding a suffix to nouns and adjectives is perceived as the most

doi 10.1075/pbns.264.03gue © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

48 Mariem Guellouz

systemic way to mark the syntactical category of feminine.1 The mechanism which allows such a systematic marking of the feminine gender in a specific language is called feminization. However, the relationship between the system (syntax, morphology, phonology) and the speakers’ discourse is also regulated by norms which can be transgressed or imposed. For Coseriu, the norm is “socially fixed, it is a common and current use of the speech community” (Coseriu 2001, 246).2 In Arabic, inscribing the feminine gender is therefore a matter of system as well as of norms, since it is a common and current process, easy to implement syntactically. Yet, in some contexts, it has been observed that the feminine gender is not grammatically marked whereas it is lexically and referentially marked.3 This paper discusses two cases of lack of grammatical gendering, that is, both Tunisian Arabic (Arabic dialect) and Classical Arabic. The first case relates to the absence of the feminine marker for adjectives and nouns denoting a profession even though a female is the referent. We can observe that when the professions are exclusively masculine or feminine, the regular feminine form is not applied. In particular when dealing with professions related to physical intimacy we distinguish two linguistic forms which do not obey the feminization rule. The second case consists in words referring to typically female physiological and psychological states such as hamel ‘pregnant’, taliq ‘repudiated’, mourdhi ‘breast feeding’, tamich ‘menopausal’, etc. These adjectives do not exhibit the typical feminine suffix. Why is gender marking not applied in such cases? 2. Gendering language and speech 2.1

Description of gender in Classical Arabic

According to Wright, in respect of gender, Arabic nouns are divisible into three classes (a) those which are only masculine (b) those which are only feminine (c) those which are both masculine and feminine, or as it usually phrased, of the common gender.  (Wright 1967, 177)

1. See Muchnik (2016) for Hebrew, Hadjidemetriou (2016) for Armenian and Greek, Tshimanga (2016) for Bantu, etc. 2. This research follows, as well, the theoretical viewpoints of Hjelmslev (1971) and Coseriu (2001) for whom the articulation between language as a system of signs, and the individual use and practice of speech, highlights the notion of norm. 3. We are using the same distinctions as those used in Motschenbacher (2016), i.e. lexical gender refers to the denotative-semantic level, social gender to the connotative-semantic level, grammatical gender to the grammatical level and referential gender to the contextual-pragmatic level.



Gender marking and the feminine imaginary in Arabic

As in many languages we can distinguish the lexical gender and the grammatical gender.

The lexical feminine gender (referring to entities which are considered female) Some lexemes are considered feminine, while they do not have any syntactical mark of the feminine. We consider their lexical gender feminine: 2.1.1

a. Female first names (e.g. Mariem ‫مريم‬, Souad ‫سعاد‬, Hind ‫)هند‬, and nouns which denote females (e.g. ‘om ‫‘ أ ّم‬mother’); b. Names of countries, lands and cities; c. Nouns which denote a natural force such as names of winds, the earth, the fire, the sky, the sun, parts of the universe; d. Names of th e parts of the body; e. Names of letters of the alphabet. In some cases, there is only one noun, either masculine or feminine morphologically, which denotes the species and which is called ‘epicene’.4 In this case the lexeme ‘female’ or ‘male’ is added to the noun to identify the sex of the referent: noun + female, noun + male:

‫‘ ذكرحاممة‬male pigeon’ (2) ħɑɱɑɱaʔunθa ‫‘ حاممة أنثى‬female pigeon’ (1) ħɑɱɑɱaðɑkar

When gender alternation exists, gender marking can also be ‘irregular’ (see Table 1 below) i.e. gender is lexically marked through asymmetric lexemes: Table 1.  Lexical marking in Classical Arabic imra’a ‫مرأة‬ ‘woman’

ama ‫إماء‬ ‘woman slave’

ʒarja ‫جارية‬ ‘female servant’

raʒul ‫رجل‬ ’man’

ˤabd ‫عبد‬ ‘man slave’

ɣulam ‫غالم‬ ‘man servant’

The morphological gender (with the feminine suffix): Nouns with these endings: a, at, ta In Classical Arabic, the most frequent feminine morphological marker is the morpheme a(t) called fatha followed by -t which disappears when the word is at the end of the sentence. The grammatical gender marking is quite easy, and requires only a suffix to the masculine word (see Table 2). 2.1.2

4. See Weirich’s chapter (2016) for the same phenomenon in Moldovan and Motschenbacher’s (2016) for a definition.

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Table 2.  Morphological gender in the Classical Arabic system ʒamil ‫جميل‬ ‘beautiful’

ʒamila ‫جميلة‬ ‘beautiful [feminine marker]’

However, some masculine nouns have the -an ending which is usually a feminine marker. According to Blachère and Gaudeffroy-Demombynes, “the ‘an’ inflection is to be found in a series of nouns which designate male animals, without any concern about distinguishing sexes in this particular case” (2004, 107). In this category we have for instance: karawen ‫‘ كروان‬partridge’, warachan ‫‘ ناشرو‬wood pigeon’, afawen ‫’ أفعى‬viper’, saadan ‫‘ سعدان‬monkey’, which are all masculine. Moreover, the speakers must also deal with some other irregularities or ambiguities. Indeed, the feminine ending at can have some other grammatical uses. For instance, this marker can be aspectual. It can be applied to nouns expressing a singular action (the action is accomplished just once), or for describing a way of doing something (in the plural form):5 (3) ʃarbatun ‫‘ بةرش‬drinking’ charba :t

plural form

(4) maʃjatun ‫‘ مشية‬the way of walking’ maʃjmachya :t plural form

The feminine marker is also used to express unicity, the way of doing something, and intensity, according to Wensinck (1927, 20). Indeed, he explains this linguistic rule by referring to unicity nouns which are derived from the infinitive form. For instance, with ʃharb ‫‘ رشب‬to drink’, maʃj ‫‘ ميش‬to walk’, we find ʃarbatun ‫ رشبة‬which is ‘the act of drinking’ and maʃjatun ‫ مشية‬which is ‘the act of walking’. In this context, Wensinck states: “The feminine and the infinitive are closely akin to another, in so far as both are abstract forms of intensity. In this respect both are akin to the plural” (id.) (my italics). All these linguistic ambiguities participate to create a grammarian discourse on gender. The next section will be dedicated to these issues. 2.2

Grammarian discourse and gender: A social and linguistic imaginary

In their grammar of Classical Arabic, Blachère and Gaudeffroy-Demombynes point out the following distinction: Put simply, any nominal with no feminine marker is exclusively masculine. In no way can it be treated as feminine, either from the point of view of social psychology or in language practice. The solution is to classify the feminine nominal.  (Blachère and Gaudeffroy-Demombynes 2004, 108) 5. It is also used to express animal species such as in: ħɑɱɑɱa ħɑɱɑɱa:t plural form ‘pigeons’.

‫‘ حاممة مامة‬pigeon’, also



Gender marking and the feminine imaginary in Arabic

The two authors also highlight the existence of a masculine zero index i.e. an unmarked initial form. Therefore, they support the idea of the masculine as the default form and the feminine form as derived from this default form. Thus, the feminine form exists only because of a derivation. This view is not limited to Blachère and Gaudeffroy-Demombynes. For example, in his book Al moudhakarwalmuanath [The Masculine and the Feminine], the grammarian Al Sigitani (1997, 36) clearly formalizes the hypothesis of a ‘light’ masculine: “One should know that the masculine is lighter than the feminine because it prevails over the feminine” (our italics). Therefore, not only is the feminine form described in such discourse as holding a second place (as is the case in a number of languages, see Muchnik’s chapter (2016)), but it is also “heavier” according to the Arabic grammatical tradition. Indeed, the masculine is called asl in the grammatical tradition which means ‘the original’, ‘the base’ and ‘the root’. This idea of the masculine as the original is recurrent, as we have seen above with Blachère and Gaudeffroy-Demombynes’s quotation. Therefore, Suleiman, in The Arabic Grammatical Tradition, explains that Arabic grammar was “a male preoccupation conducted by male grammarians studying male generated data” (1999, 24). In fact, here we can also refer to Gaddami’s book Al marawallugha [The Woman and the Language] in which the linguist (a male writer) states not only that the masculine form is the basic and the first form but invents another distinction: “The writing is male and the oral is female” (1996, 21 my translation). Because for Gaddami, man wrote first, he then inscribed his mark on civilization, and he is closer to language than women. This linguistic control is actually, according to him, linked to male virility. In the same vein, Ibn al Manzur, in the dictionary Lissan al Arab describes the term dakkar (“male”) by saying: The difference between the word formation of female and male is the same difference between the female and the male beings. A day is mudakkar (masculine) when it is filled with strength, difficulties and murders. Dakkar (male) means ‘fixed and solid’.  (Ibn al Manzur 1995, 49 my translation)

For this grammarian, the term “male” is linked to strength, but also to cleverness and pride: “A man is dakkar if he is strong, clever, proud”. (ibid.) These statements from grammarians build a direct link between grammatical gender and social gender as well as sexuality; they feed what we call a ‘social imaginary’, based on male supremacy over a secondary, minor female universe. In this regard, in her research on Arabic language and gender, Guardi (2008), concludes that the notion of asl is not related to objective linguistic reasoning, but to social and historical determination about male domination. Houdebine’s theory on a “linguistic imaginary” could also be relevant regarding these examples. Indeed, for Houdebine (1998), there are two kinds of norms: the objective norms

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and the subjective ones. The first are linked to the system of language (morphology, syntactic, semantics). The second are the result of the relationship between speakers and their language. Claims that the masculine is the asl, the origin, the light, and that, in contrast, the feminine is heavy, and secondary, fall within the framework of an imaginary highlighting patriarchy.

3. Feminisation and masculinisation of nouns and adjectives Bearing in mind this social and linguistic imaginary, we will try to understand the connections between grammatical gender and the cultural construction of the feminine in Arabic. As a matter of fact, Scott explains that: Gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power. It might be better to say that gender is the primary field within which, or by means of which, power is articulated. Gender is not the only field, but it seems to have been a persistent and recurrent way of enabling the signification of power in the west, in JudeoChristian as well as Islamic traditions.  (Scott 2007, 72)

Our research depends on this Arabic and Islamic tradition and we will study some examples in order to understand how the status of women and their representations may be linked to grammatical gender and vice-versa. To that end, in the next section (Section 3.1), we will study the gender marking in professional titles both in Classical Arabic and in Tunisian Arabic, before focusing on adjectives (Section 3.2). 3.1

Feminisation of professional titles in Classical Arabic and Tunisian

3.1.1 Grammatical dimension As mentioned in our previous section, in the Arabic language there is a clear morphosyntactic process which allowes denoting the feminine for a human referent – which includes professional titles – by adding the -a(t) suffix. Typical male professions without any feminine equivalent can be feminized by analogy in Classical Arabic: (5) tˁabib ‫ طبيب‬/ tˁabiba ‫ طبيبة‬

(6) katib ‫ كاتب‬/ katiba ‫ كاتبة‬

(7) naʔib ‫ نائب‬/ naʔiba ‫ نائبة‬

‘man doctor’ / ‘woman doctor’ ‘man writer / ‘woman writer’ ‘man deputy’ / ‘woman deputy’

Some function or trade names can be problematic though, for example: naïba refers both to a woman deputy and a catastrophe. Moreover, the masculine noun saydali denotes only a “male chemist” but the feminine saydaliya denotes both the chemist’s store and the female chemist. However the presence of feminized



Gender marking and the feminine imaginary in Arabic

professional titles in written Classical Arabic (in the media for instance) is quite widespread and such ambiguities do not hinder communication. 3.1.2 The media and legal discourse The feminine gender is generally marked in the mainstream press as far as professional names are concerned, although the Official Journal in Tunisia appears to have adopted a more purist approach. However, although on the one hand, Tunisian newspapers make use of feminized trade names, on the other hand, they write the same names in the masculine form in Arabic and French official appointments, such as in “Mrs X, General Manager, has been appointed Executive Director of the hospital.” The examples below are taken from the Tunisian magazine Alasarih dated November 10th, 2013 where all the titles are masculinized: (8) ‫مبهام مدير الدراسات باملعهد العايل‬-‫كلفت السيدة إنصاف الكيالين –استاذ‬ Koulifat Al sayida Insaf Alkilani, aloustedth, bi maham moudir aldirasset bilma’hed al ‘ali’ Mrs Insaf Alkilani, professor, has been nominated director at the high school of …’ (9) ‫مبهام رئيس قسم الصيدلية‬-‫كلفت السيدة فاطمة بن عيل –صيديل مختص‬ Koulifat Al sayidaFatma Ben Ali, saydali moukhtass, bimahem ra’issqissm al saydaliya’ Mrs Fatma Ben Ali, chemist, has been nominated president of the Chemistry Wing in Sfax’s hospital’.

The words ‘professor’, ‘director’ and ‘president’ are used in these examples without the feminine mark (moudir instead of moudira, outshedh instead of oustehdha, ra’iss instead of rai’ssa). They are in this case official nominations reported by the newspapers. In this case, it is important to distinguish the function from the profession’s title. The function is a generic noun which does not require a gender marking. In these examples, we could notice that the profession’s title is also masculinised. In addition to these examples, many others have been found in journalistic articles showing that feminisation is required, as is the case in the following examples taken from the newspaper El Maghreb, dated August 17th, 2014: (10) ‫ ىلا ةيماحملا ىرشب جاحلاب‬2014 ‫تحنم ةسسؤملا انأ دنيل اهتزئاج‬ Manahat mou’assassatu analindh jayzatouha lissanat 2014 ilaalmouhamiya Bochra Bilhaj ‘The Anna Lindh Foundation awarded its 2014’s prize to the Tunisian lawyer and militant in the field of human rights Bochra Ben Hadj Hmida’

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These usages show discrepancies between the grammatical system (which allows feminine forms), the official use (which does not use the feminine) and the journalistic use (which uses feminization). This exemplifies the necessary distinctions that we mentioned above between the rules considered as syntax constraints, and the norms considered as social constraints as well as the practices of a certain language in a specific community. Why does The Official Journal in Tunisia, published in Classical Arabic, refuse to feminise the function nouns when the Arabic language itself allows it and when it is found elsewhere? In this context, beside the hypothesis regarding the function’s name, which we had previously scrutinized, I would propose two other ones: The first Official Journal in the Arabic world actually appeared before colonization, in 1864. During this period, there were no female nominations in the administration sector nor in the public service sector. In its contemporary form, The Official Journal in Tunisia is of colonial heritage, even though it existed prior to this time. Indeed, after colonization, this Official Journal continued to include French official nominations, and nowadays its publication in Arabic may still be influenced by the French language and its rules. The Arabic version could then be considered an example of linguistic colonization. The second hypothesis relates to the way the Group of Arabic languages in Cairo during their 44th colloquium in 1965 decided new norms i.e. to generalise the masculine form for all professions, whether the reference is male or female. Actually Gaddami, to whom we referred before, explained the masculinization of titles in terms of eloquence. For him, the Arabic speaker must masculinize female professional titles in order to have “eloquence and authenticity” (1996, 21). Although the Arabic grammar system provides an easy way to feminize profession titles, the grammarians and some language speakers do not accept these grammatical rules, thus inflicting and enforcing the masculine forms. Interestingly the French academy (l’académie française) also refused and rejected the feminization of profession titles in the French language. This denial and rejection of the feminine forms reflect both an entrenched vision of a patriarchal society and an ingrained linguistic rigidity. As a matter of fact, when referring to the French language, Anne-Marie Houdebine considers this type of rigidity as provoked by linguistic insecurity: We have seen that both conservative social ideology and prescriptive linguistic imaginary, which is rather conservative in itself as well, interact and participate in preventing change. The speaker / subject gives up his or her potential linguistic creativity. Legislation and institutions dictates to him / her how to use language.  (Houdebine 1998, 173; my translation)



Gender marking and the feminine imaginary in Arabic

3.1.3 The case of prostitutes Studying feminization of professional titles in Classical and Tunisian Arabic would be incomplete unless it took into account the so-called ‘oldest profession’ in the world. In Tunisia, the common noun for a prostitute has always had a feminine form and no masculine form. Even if male prostitution does exist, both Classical and Tunisian Arabic language do not have a word to refer to the phenomenon. Moreover, the Tunisian Arabic word referring to ‘prostitution’ in Tunisia has an etymology which is important to remember. The word qaħba ‫‘ قحبة‬whore’ derives from the stem qaħaba ‫ قحب‬which signifies in Classical Arabic ‘to cough’, referring to the semantic field of old age and disease: marʔatun qaħbaʔ denotes ‘an old woman who has a cough’. Then, a semantic shift took place and the sexual feature was added. The Lisân al Arab (1995) specifies that this extension of meaning in Classical Arabic was influenced by the fact that sex workers used to signal their availability to their clients by a subtle cough. In Tunisia, prostitution is illegal and punished by law. Nevertheless, brothels exist in some urban cities like Tunis and Sousse, where prostitution is permitted by civil law, protected and controlled by the state administration (The Interior Ministry). Both official texts and other Classical Arabic writings make use of two other words than qaħba ‫‘ قحبة‬whore’ to refer to prostitutes: baɣji ‫ بغي‬and mumis ‫مومس‬. It is noticeable that both these words have no feminine ending. The legal language (Classical Arabic) has preserved one word: baghîyy ‫بغي‬. Indeed, the equivalent name of action, baɣa ‫بغاء‬, denotes a profession convicted by the Penal Code. The Tunisian Penal Code, in Section 231, uses the classical Arabic term al khana xana ‫ الخناء‬which is a noun meaning prostitution. Baghîyy ‫ بغي‬and mumis ‫ مومس‬have a moral connotation but khana xana ‫ الخناء‬is a juridical noun referring to prostitution. The absence of any qualifying adjective is rather astonishing since the Classical Arabic language has a great variety of semantically equivalent terms referring to a prostitute: baɣji ‫بغي‬, mumis ‫مومس‬, fajira ‫فاجرة‬, qahba ‫قحبة‬, maxur ‫ماخور‬. However, the profession is called mumis on the identity card of the legalized prostitutes who are considered employees of the Interior Ministry. These terms baɣi ‫بغي‬, mumis ‫مومس‬, etc., have a rather distinctive status and are to be found in two chapters of the Koran: “Mariem” and “Ennour”. In the Surat “Mariem”, the term appears twice in verses 20 and 28. In verse 20 the Blessed Virgin speaks with the angel Gabriel and was surprised at the news he announced to her. She said: “How can I have a boy while no man has touched me and I have not been unchaste?” ‫ش َولَ ْم أَ ُك بَ ِغ ًّيا‬ ٌ َ َ‫قَال َْت أَ َّ ٰن يَكُو ُن ِل غ َُل ٌم َولَ ْم َ ْي َس ْس ِني ب‬. In verse 28, it is the tribe that addresses Mary following the birth of Jesus: “O sister of Aaron, your father was not a man of evil, nor was your mother unchaste.” ِ ُ‫ْت َها ُرو َن َما كَا َن أَب‬ ‫س ْو ٍء َو َما كَان َْت أُ ُّم ِك بَ ِغ ًّيا‬.َ َ‫وك ا ْم َرأ‬ َ ‫ يَا أُخ‬In the Surat “Ennour”, it is substantially

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used in verse 33: “…and do not compel your slave girls to prostitution, if they desire chastity, to seek temporary interest of worldly life.” ‫ َوال ت ُ ْك ِر ُهوا فَتَ َياتِ ُك ْم َع َل الْ ِبغَاء إِ ْن أَ َر ْد َن ت َ َح ُّص ًنا‬. Here, the terms ‘unchaste’ and ‘prostitution’ translate the words baɣi and baɣaa. In fact, the word baɣaa in these cases has a double signification, meaning at the same time ‘adulteress’ and ‘prostitute’. Therefore, the adulteress woman is considered in Muslim religious discourse and perhaps imaginary as similar to a prostitute. In most of the countries of the Arab world, adultery committed by women is indeed viewed as a crime and punished by the criminal code similar to that of prostitution. Other professions are also exclusively practiced by men or by women and they show a striking lexical and social dissymmetry. 3.1.4 Trade names and distribution of social spaces In this section, we will start by discussing some Arabic Tunisian examples. In fact, Arabic Tunisian applies the general feminization rule in the case of words denoting profession. Therefore, the corresponding nouns that designate them both have either a masculine or a feminine form as we can see in Table 3: Table 3.  Tunisian lexical dissymmetry tˁaʔieb ‫ طيّاب‬/ ħarza ‫حارزة‬

maʃtˁa ‫ مشّ اطة‬/ elhajjem ‫الح ّجام‬

‘Male masseur’ / ‘female masseur (hammam)’ ‘male hairdresser’ / ‘female hairdresser’

The standard syntactical rule would impose pairs such as: hariz ‫ حارز‬and harza ‫حارزة‬ (‘masseur’), however this is not the case in usage. Instead, the title of profession lexically switches according to the gender of the person practicing it, namely by men or women. Thus, the separation of social spaces is encouraged by lexical distinction. Language itself separates male spaces from female spaces. It is noteworthy that this asymmetric distribution occurs especially in the case of professions dealing with bodies and intimacy. Beyond the lexical distinction, there is also a semantic distinction affecting all these nouns, depending on the social gender they refer to. There is indeed no semantic equivalence between sanii ‫ صانع‬and sanaa. Sanii is a ‘trainee’ whereas sanaa refers to ‘a woman dancer or singer’. The masculine trade names have a positive and high value meaning and, conversely, the feminine nouns have a pejorative meaning a phenomenon called derogation and known to happen in other languages (see Schulz 1998 for English). This asymmetry reveals that trade names are impacted by social and political determinations, based upon gender segregation. Feminization of trade names indexes, therefore, more than a mere female reference.



3.2

Gender marking and the feminine imaginary in Arabic

Masculinised feminine and feminized masculine: ‘The rebellious adjectives’

However, it is not only feminization of trade names that reveals the gender imaginary at stake in the Arabic language. Masculinization also informs us on the gender imaginary. This section focuses on the adjectives in Classical Arabic that do not have a feminine ending while referring to female beings such as ħamil ‫حامل‬ ‘pregnant’, and ʔanis ‫‘ عانس‬old maid’. Conversely, some masculine nouns have a feminine ending while referring to male beings: xalifa ‫‘ خليفة‬caliph’, kahia ‫كاهية‬ ّ ‘great learned and xuʒa ‫[ خوجة‬military ranking derived from Turkish], ˤalema ‫علمة‬ scholar’, darrak ‫‘ د ّراك‬very skilful connoisseur’, nassaba ‫‘ نسابة‬good at family genealogy’. They are the superlative forms of allim ‫‘ عامل‬scholar’ and of darrek ‫‘ دارك‬connaisseur’. How to find some logic in this gender trouble? In the list below, we notice that adjectives which are not inflected refer to women’s social, physiological or anatomical features: (11) ħamil ‫‘ حامل‬pregnant’

(12) tˁaliq ‫‘ طالق‬repudiated’ (13) ʔanis ‫‘ عانس‬spinster’ (14) θajb ‫‘ ثيب‬widow’ (15) ˤaqir ‫‘ عاقر‬sterile’

(16) nachiz ‫‘ ناشز‬adultery’ (17) ħaið ‫ حائض‬

‘not feeling well’ (menstruating)

(19) tˁamiʃ ‫ طامش‬

‘menopausal’

(18) murðˤiʔ ‫‘ مرضع‬breastfeeding’

(20) nahid ‫ ناهد‬

(21) mumis ‫ مومس‬

‘well-endowed, having large breasts’ ‘whore’

(22) bikr ‫‘ بكر‬virgin’

We can call them “rebellious adjectives” since they are grammatically masculine while referring exclusively to female social gender. In Kitabfiqh al lughawasirru al Arabiya, [The book of the Knowledge of Language and the Secret of Arabic], particularly in the section dedicated to “the description of woman and her adjectives”, Althaalabi Alnassaburi enumerates all the Arabic adjectives which are typically feminine. This list of adjectives cited by the author is very interesting insofar as it shows several cases of masculinization and constitutes a pertinent collection. Here are a few examples:

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And if she has many children she will be called nathouron, and if she has only few children, she will be called nazouron, and if she gives birth only to boys she will be called midhkarun, and if she gives birth to only girls she will be called minaathun, and if she gives birth to unintelligent boys she will be called mihmaaqun.  (Althaalabi Alnassaburi 1954, 169)

In these examples all the adjectives referring to women are not marked. The book of Thaalbi gives a rich corpus of examples regarding non marked but typically feminine adjectives (in the sense that they refer to women’s existence). The following section is an attempt to understand this absence of feminine markers and to formulate some hypotheses concerning them. 3.2.1 The linguistic hypothesis Our first hypothesis is based on a linguistic principle known as the ‘economy principle’. Since these adjectives are specifically feminine according to extra-linguistic factors, language would not use a feminine morpheme in order to mark gender opposition, given that they obviously refer to women; specifying gender would be redundant grammatically since lexically it is already marked. However, grammarian Al Sigitani believes that the feminine inflection was removed in order to “lighten” the term (1997). This hypothesis is framed within the theory that the masculine gender comes first as mentioned in the first section of this chapter: indeed, this ‘ordinal’ approach imposes the connotation of ranking and hierarchy between the genders. We can also consider that the absence of feminine marker renders these adjectives neutral. There is then no need for the speaker to distinguish gender, unless it is necessary. This hypothesis does not work for Arabic because it is most unlikely that the neutral ever existed, according to a number of scientific studies on Semitic languages: Some grammarians used to think that the feminine nouns lacking both feminine inflection and a natural feminine aspect could be retraceable to an ancient neutral. It is very tempting to retrieve the same grammatical features discovered by Antoine Meillet in the Indo-European languages and thereby apply them to the Semitic languages. But the fact is, there is no traceable neutral in the Semitic language.  (Blachère and Gaudeffroy-Demombynes 2004, 115)

The first explanation sounds more convincing and is supported by recent linguistic practices: some new feminine forms appear in the mass media such as mutallaqa ‫‘ مطلّقة‬divorced woman’ or hamila ‫‘ حاملة‬pregnant’. As we previously explained, these adjectives are lexically marked (i.e. related to women) and do not show any feminine marker in standard Tunisian or Classical Arabic. Note that muttalqa, as a Classical Arabic word, is frequently used in Tunisia unlike the majority of the Arabic countries, since the Personal Status Code allows women to ask for a



Gender marking and the feminine imaginary in Arabic

divorce. Indeed, elsewhere, the word taliq ‘repudiation’ prevails, which is a passive form. In Tunisia, mutalaqa ‫ مطلّقة‬is mentioned in the civil status of a divorced person. The introduction of a feminine form for taliq testifies to the legal changes concerning women’s status: repudiation is replaced by civil divorce which is very important progress regarding women rights in the Arabic world. In fact, this small inflection stands for a big evolution in women’s legal and social status. 3.2.2 The diachronic hypothesis: Feminine or intensity marker? As mentioned above, the feminine marker can express other meanings than reference women or the feminine. We mentioned in our first section that the feminine marker can express aspectual meanings as well as intensity. Indeed, the same marker which functions as an intensity marker, can express both the plural and superlative: (23) malika ‫ ملكة‬

‘queen’ malika:t ‫ مليكات‬

(24) taalim ‫‘ تعليم‬instruction’ taalima:t ‫ تعليامت‬ (25) waqt ‫ “وقت‬

‘time’ awqa:t ‫ أوقات‬

‘queens’ ‘instructions’ ‘times’

Moreover, some masculine adjectives show this feminine ending as well. In such cases, they express exaggeration or derogation, as in some previous examples such ّ ‘great learned scholar’, darrak ‫‘ د ّراك‬very skilful connoisseur’, nassaba as Allama ‫علمة‬ ‘good at family genealogy’ or rawiya ‫‘ راوية‬good story teller’. Larchère (2002, 233) refers to the Muallaqat (Arabic Suspended Odes), probably written by a certain Hammad called al rawiya, ‘woman story teller’, and he explains: The context helps to avoid any feminine interpretation, unless Hammad was transsexual! In fact, when these two words refer to a man, rawiya is different from rawi, the same way ‘a great story teller’ is different from ‘a common story teller’  (Larchère 2002, 233, my translation)

In such cases, the feminine suffix provides a superlative and augmentative value. Our hypothesis is then that the feminine inflection could be interpreted as a marker of intensity. At the very beginning of his famous article on ‘Gender in the Semitic languages’, Wensinck underlines the very same hypothesis: “Our linguistic analysis of the feminine forms leads us to the conclusion that they are of the same nature as numerical phenomena, the bond between the two groups being the idea of intensity” (Wensinck 1927, 25). If the feminine inflection is closely attached to a marker of intensity and given that in the Semitic languages the feminine inflection would be used mostly with words referring to nature, parts of the universe, fire, parts of the body, rocks (as aforementioned), the author defends the idea that in the original usage, this morpheme would have been added to the names

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of persons and objects with magical connotations, whether from a negative point of view (fear, disarray, depreciation) or from a positive one (admiration, praise).6 He thus explains: A comparison between the groups of words that are feminine by meaning in the different Semitic languages, induced us to conjecture that there was a time when persons, animals, objects, natural phenomena etc. to which a heightened magical energy was ascribed, were given the grammatical influence which we call feminine.  (id.)

The feminine imaginary of Arabic culture could then very well be haunted by magical and/or non-human forces. Women are venerated and feared at the same time. Language would reflect as much as construct these cultural meanings.7 Building on Wensinck’s works on gender in the Semitic languages, Blachère (2004, 115) risks this explanation as well: “The nouns which are feminine by nature would have sufficiently preserved in themselves this magical force, so they needed no longer the index at.”8 Wensinck underlines the fact that there is a close connection between these unmarked adjectives and gender imaginaries. Closely attached to the idea of sexuality, life and death, these adjectives would have had enough magical force and would have not needed any marker. In this magical universe related to witchcraft, whether they are pregnant or indisposed, demonic or powerful, women always seem to be inaccessible; she is both admired and feared at the same time. We certainly want to avoid the oriental preconception which influenced Wensinck’s era, however, the hypothesis of a feminine intensifier is an interesting one, revealing certain representations of women’s bodies. These representations contribute in constructing a feminine cultural imaginary.

4. The construction of the feminine imaginary? In this chapter we sought to discover the connections between linguistic practices and socio-cultural practices through the analysis of the ambiguous rules of gender marking in the Arabic language. Indeed, statements from grammarians make 6. We could also note that the feminine marker expresses affect; therefore we find the wellknown cliché relating feminine nature to the emotions. 7. See Motschenbacher (2016) for the same hypothesis in other languages. 8. Feminine by nature is like a lexical gender.



Gender marking and the feminine imaginary in Arabic

a direct link between grammatical gender and social gender as well as sexuality; they feed asocial imaginary based on male supremacy over a secondary, minor female universe. Claiming that the masculine is the asl, the origin, the light, and that, in contrast, the feminine is heavy, and secondary, falls within the framework of an imaginary highlighting patriarchy, as mentioned in our chapter. Our study of professional titles, media and legal discourse, especially in the case of the concept of ‘prostitute’ and the lexical gender within these trade names, illuminates how linguistic uses reflect, perpetuate and consolidate gendered and separate social spaces. Conversely, recent Tunisian linguistic innovations reveal that adding a small inflectional ending can provoke a revolution in the social and legal status of women. However, we also witnessed a limitation (which could be seen as paradoxical) of the feminine gender marker as far as intimacy is concerned. At the same time, we have noticed a gap between grammatical, lexical and referential feminine gender, especially with the examples of what I called ‘the rebellious adjectives’; this gap can be explained using the ‘economy principle’ as well as by reading the grammarian narratives of the Origins and Magic. In fact, we have seen that the same marker can function as feminine marker or as intensifier marker. We analysed this double marking as a reflection of a two-sided imaginary about women, feared and admired at the same time. Indeed, contradictions such as love and hate, fear and fascination are fully embraced by Arabic poetry when relating to women. Bashar Ibn Burd, a poet that lived before the Islamic period, speaks about his fascination for women using the following terms: “It has always been difficult for me to choose between her demonic or human part or the two of them” (2010, s.p.). The ambivalence of the women’s position, both venerated and feared, contributes in making the feminine imaginary complex. In this context, we can witness a dialectic relationship between language practices and cultural ones. After this study of the linguistic feminine marker, we will conclude with a brief reflection on how these feminization processes and uses in language affect the cultural imaginary about women, in particular in the Arabic language, literature and poetry. Actually, a number of erotic writings have left their mark on Arabic literature. Cheikh Nefzaoui’s book The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight (1999), written in the 14th century is probably the most famous text. It is almost considered an Arabic Kama Sutra. The Perfumed Garden is also a manual with a table of contents referring to the feminine sex in various possible terms. According to Nefzaoui, (1999), the feminine sex is a frightful and astonishing apparatus “provided with ample flesh, it resembles the head of a lion. It is called vulva. Oh! How many men’s death lie at her door?” Ait Sabbah observes that women fascinate, frighten, and are endowed with wild animal qualities (Aït Sabbah 2010).

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Karen Horney explains this fear of woman from a Freudian point of view. She recounts the tales of Ulysses and Samson: Samson, whom no man could conquer, is robbed of his strength by Delilah. Judith beheads Holofernes after giving herself to him. Salome carries the head of John the Baptist on a charger. Witches are burnt because male priests fear the work of the devil in them. Might not this be one of the principal roots of the whole masculine impulse to play out the never ending conflict between man’s longing for woman and his dread of her. (Horney 1932, 349)

Language provides, therefore, a memorial space, a testimony of past centuries and of those to come, of the stigma and discrimination of the feminine. Language is also a mirror that reveals female status, her body and her desire. As a case in point I mentioned the change from taliq ‘repudiated’ to moutaliqa ‘divorced’, a linguistic change with deep social ramifications. Nowadays, in a post-revolutionary Tunisia, the war of words is announcing a true gender controversy. Semantic and linguistic representations describe the future of Tunisian women: thus, a choice must be made between being complementary or equal, a wife or a woman citizen.

References Aït Sabbah, Fatna. 2010. La femme dans l’ inconscient musulman. Paris: Albin Michel. Al Sigitani, Abu Hatim. 1997. Al mudakkarwalmuaanat. Damas: Dar El Maaref. Althaalabi Alnassabouri, Ismail. 1957. Kitabfiqh al lughawasiru al arabiyya. Bayrut: Dar Alkutubalilmiyya. Blachère, Régis, and Maurice Gaudeffroy-Demombynes. 2004. Grammaire de l’arabe classique. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose. Corbett, Greville G. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:  10.1017/CBO9781139166119

Corbett, Greville G. 2006. “Gender, Grammatical”. In Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. by Keith Brown and Anne Anderson, 749–756. Boston: Elsevier. doi:  10.1016/B0-08-044854-2/00191-7

Coseriu, Eugenio. 2001. L’homme et son langage. Louvain: Peeters. Gaddami, Abdallah. 1996. Al marawallugha, al markizalthaqafialaarbi. s.l.: Daralbaydha. Guardi, Jolanda. 2008. “Pour un usage non sexiste de la langue arabe.” Studi maghrebini 6: 111–124. Hadjidemetriou, Chryso. 2016. “When She and He become It. The Use of Grammatical Gender in the Greek of the Armenians of Cyprus.” In Gender, Language and the Periphery. Grammatical and Social Gender from the Margins, ed. by Julie Abbou and Fabienne Baider, 197–226. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hjelmslev, Louis. 1971. Essais de linguistique. Paris: Minuit. Horney, Karen. 1932. “The Dread of Women.” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis XIII: 349–361.



Gender marking and the feminine imaginary in Arabic

Houdebine, Anne-Marie. 1998. “Insécurité linguistique, imaginaire linguistique et féminisations des noms de métiers.” In La femme et les langues. L’insécurité linguistique en question, ed. by Pascal de Singy, 155–177. Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé. Ibn al Manzur. s.d. [1995]. Lisān al-‘Arab, ed. by Yûsuf Hayyât. Beyrouth: DārLisān al-‘Arab. Ibn Burd, Bashar. 2010. Diwan Bachar Ibn Burd. Beyrouth: Dar El Kutub. http://www.adab.com/ modules.php?name=Sh3er&doWhat=shqas&qid=8721, (consulted on October, 1st 2016). Jakobson, Roman. 1963. Essais de linguistique générale. Paris: Minuit. Larchère, Pierre. 2002. “Masculin/féminin : sexe et genre en arabe classique.” Arabica 49 (2): 231–234. doi: 10.1163/157005802753778834 Motschenbacher, Heiko. 2016. “A Discursive Approach to Structural Gender Linguistics. Initial Considerations.” In Gender, Language and the Periphery. Grammatical and Social Gender from the Margins, ed. by Julie Abbou and Fabienne Baider, 65–88. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Muchnik, Malka. 2016. “Trying to Change a Gender-Marked Language: Classical vs. Modern Hebrew.” In Gender, Language and the Periphery. Grammatical and Social Gender from the Margins, ed. by Julie Abbou and Fabienne Baider, 25–46. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nefzaoui, Mouhamed. 1999. The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight. London, New York: Kegan Paul International. Schulz, Muriel R. 1975. “The Semantic Derogation of Woman.” In Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance, ed. by Barrie Thorne and Nancy Henley, 64–75. Rowley: Newbury House. Scott, Joan. 2007. “Gender as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” In Culture, Society and Sexuality: A Reader, ed. by Richard Parker and Peter Aggleton, 61–82. London, New York: Routledge. Suleiman, Yasir. 1999. The Arabic Grammatical Tradition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tshimanga, Francis C. Ngoyi. 2016. “Gender Bias in Bantu Languages. The Case of Cilubà (L31).” In Gender, Language and the Periphery. Grammatical and Social Gender from the Margins, ed. by Julie Abbou and Fabienne Baider, 129–164. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Weirich, Anna. 2016. ““Moldovan” and Feminist Language Politics. Two Distinct Peripheral Linguistic Markets.” In Gender, Language and the Periphery. Grammatical and Social Gender from the Margins, ed. by Julie Abbou and Fabienne Baider, 255–292. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wensinck, Arent Jan. 1927. Some Aspects of Gender in the Semitic Languages. Amsterdam: ­Leterkunde Nieuwereeks. Wright, William. 1967. A Grammar of the Arabic Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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A poststructuralist approach to structural gender linguistics Initial considerations Heiko Motschenbacher

Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main

This article attempts to counter the contemporary marginalisation of structural gender linguistics within the field of language and gender. It argues that, in order to make structural gender linguistics compatible with recent developments in the field, it is necessary to initiate a conceptual shift from treating language structures as stable parts of a language system to viewing them as unstable and ever-changing in linguistic performance. This theoretical move towards a poststructuralist approach to structural gender linguistics also has methodological consequences. Its central aim is the de-essentialisation of gendered language structures by documenting their heterogeneity, instability and incoherence. This can be achieved in three major ways: cross-linguistic comparison, historical linguistic description and analysis of the usage patterns of particular forms. The three methods are illustrated using language material from English, German and Croatian. Keywords: structural gender linguistics, poststructuralism, contrastive linguistics, historical linguistics, de-essentialisation, grammatical gender, lexical gender, social gender, referential gender

1. Introduction The field of language and gender looks back on a history of four decades in which it has gone through various theoretical shifts (see Motschenbacher 2012, 1–3). While during the earlier phase of this history, descriptions of gendered, and especially androcentric, language structures were a central topic (see Baron 1986; Bodine 1975; Martyna 1983; for a bibliography documenting this early work, see Thorne, Kramarae and Henley 1983, 166–215), structural gender linguistics has become clearly less central in the field today. A relatively recent example of such doi 10.1075/pbns.264.04mot © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

66 Heiko Motschenbacher

work are the three volumes of the Gender Across Languages project (Hellinger and Bußmann 2001–2003), which provide descriptions of gendered structures in thirty languages from various parts of the world and with typologically different profiles. The most recent volume of the project (Hellinger and Motschenbacher 2015) adds descriptions of twelve more languages, most of which have so far received little, if any, attention in structural gender linguistics. The critical discussion of linguistic sexism and male and/or masculine generic forms is today sometimes considered an outdated or unfashionable task (see Mills 2004) and, accordingly, has become marginalised within the field of language and gender at large. However, there are deeper theoretical reasons for this development. Descriptions of gendered language structures are traditionally rooted in Saussurean structuralist ideas about language as a (stable) system of signs. More recent work in language and gender has widely adopted social constructionist and poststructuralist theoretical approaches, which clearly clash with such a conceptualisation of language (see Hornscheidt 2002; Mills 2008). The present article seeks to address this fact and aims to link the analysis of gendered language structures with a poststructuralist perspective (see also Motschenbacher 2015). It does so by outlining the theoretical underpinnings of such a shift and making suggestions of how to proceed methodologically with such a theoretical background in mind. Finally, these suggestions will be illustrated with sample analyses of gendered language structures, mainly from English, German and Croatian.

2. A poststructuralist approach to gendered language structures In a structuralist conceptualisation as found in Saussurean and Chomskyan linguistics, language is seen as a stable system of signs that is abstract in the sense that it is considered to be, in principle, independent of language use (compare the wellknown langue vs. parole and competence vs. performance distinctions). Such a reasoning contrasts markedly with social constructionist and poststructuralist notions of gender being performatively enacted (partly) through language (e.g. Butler 1990, 1993). The analysis of gendered language structures is not per se incompatible with more recent approaches. However, in order to achieve compatibility, a conceptual shift is necessary. In a poststructuralist or discursive approach, language cannot be seen as an abstract, stable system in the minds of the language users. Rather, it is viewed as continually shaped in language use and, therefore, as invariably changing. The (normative) treatment of linguistic structures in grammars describes language as a state. A poststructuralist conceptualisation, by contrast, views language as a matter of materialisation processes taking place across individual instances of language use. Such linguistic materialisation reaches its substance through continual



A poststructuralist approach to structural gender linguistics

citation and re-citation of certain communicative behaviours and is, as a consequence, frequency-based. It is this substance that linguists try to capture in grammars and dictionaries. This procedure, of course, has some legitimacy with respect to language teaching and other applied linguistic issues, but from a poststructuralist perspective, such attempts of codification are inadequate and ultimately bound to fail, because they suggest a fixedness and absoluteness that clashes with the processlike, ever-changing character of language. A fundamental principle which lies at the heart of language as a discursive formation is what has been called citationality or iterability (e.g. Derrida 1988; Harvey 2002; Nakassis 2013). These concepts refer to the fact that language use does not evolve from scratch but relates back to (or “cites”) earlier uses of linguistic forms. Silverstein (2005) views these discursive practices as a matter of “token versus type interdiscursivity”. This means that concrete contextualised uses (“tokens”) cite the decontextualised discursive materiality (“types”) that certain forms have gained across a chain of earlier uses. Crucially, the meaning of a certain form in concrete use is never fully identical to the meaning that has become materialised up to that point, which, in turn, makes individual uses cause (subtle) meaning shifts as part of the ongoing materialisation process, as also noted by Silverstein: “A term or expression has gotten an intensional ‘meaning,’ such that this component of its intension carries along with it the history of extensional uses on specific occasions of use” (Silverstein 2005, 12). For example, referential gender as a property of contextualised uses is a driving force for semantic change in personal reference forms. Language use, as a consequence, works at the interface of similarity and difference. Note that such a conceptualisation departs from the structuralist notion of the linguistic sign as a symbol, i.e. an arbitrary connection between form and meaning that is regulated by convention, and, at the same time, highlights the iconic (similarity-based) and indexical (contiguity-based) features of linguistic signs. Whereas the meaning of linguistic types is generally associated with “normativities of form and function” (Silverstein 2005, 6), the use of actual tokens may flout such normativities to some extent. It is this functional gap between type and token that invariably leads to language change and “open[s] up new social horizons of possibility, signification and performative power” (Nakassis 2013, 51), which poststructuralist (language) policies seek to exploit. The role that frequency and repetition play in the shaping of language is, of course, neither entirely new nor an idea of poststructuralist thinkers alone: [B]y the 1980s, a number of linguists had begun to think of linguistic structure (grammar) as a response to discourse needs, and to consider seriously the hypothesis that grammar comes about through the repeated adaptation of forms to live discourse.  (Bybee and Hopper 2001, 2)

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One example of such a theorisation within linguistics is the notion of the “emergence” of structures in language use (e.g. Hopper 1998). It sees linguistic structure not as a pre-existent matrix but as a response to communicative requirements, materialising across repetitions in concrete communicative events. Frequency of exposure and use are crucial aspects in this process, as input for the discursive and cognitive formation of language. The advent of corpus linguistics has further deepened our understanding of language as frequency-based, at times refining or even challenging usage descriptions in traditional grammars or dictionaries (see Bybee and Hopper 2001, 4). With respect to language and gender, this reconceptualisation entails the view that gendered language structures are a matter of materialisation across linguistic performances. In other words, gendered language structures (lexical gender, social gender, grammatical gender, androcentric generics etc.; see Hellinger and Bußmann 2001) are tools that can be used to perform gender and are, at the same time, discursively shaped in such performances. These structures possess a high degree of materiality. In fact, the degree of linguistic materiality laid down in grammars and dictionaries is so high that processes of discursive formation are sidelined. This, in turn, necessitates a critical look at such structures that exposes their cultural, historical and contextual variability and heterogeneity (see, for example, Motschenbacher 2008, 2014). More specifically, recent poststructuralist-minded approaches to language and gender such as Queer Linguistics (Motschenbacher 2010a, 2011) question such dominant discourses as gender binarism, female-male difference and monolithic male-female power differentials – in short, discourses that also surface in the means that languages provide for gender representation and construction – and aim to destabilise them by exposing the heterogeneity and cultural relativity of linguistic gender construction. A final theoretical aspect that needs consideration is the possibility of linguistic intervention. Both traditional feminist linguistics and poststructuralist-minded gender linguistics pursue a long-term goal of challenging, and ultimately changing, harmful dominant gender discourses as manifest in gendered language structures. However, while more traditional approaches to feminist linguistic activism have generally aimed at changing the language system by providing, and often officially implementing, alternative, non-sexist formulations, a poststructuralist approach does not seek intervention at the level of the language system but at the level of linguistic performance (see, for example, Mills 2008). This means that reform proposals are meant to provide speakers with more formulation options to draw on contextually. These alternatives then play a role in the competition of discourses and thereby take some power away from formerly unquestioned dominant gender discourses.



A poststructuralist approach to structural gender linguistics

3. Methodological considerations The theoretical considerations in the previous section have repercussions for structural gender linguistics at the methodological level. Analytical procedures that help researchers to destabilise gender as a monolithic category fall into three major categories: (1) de-essentialisation through cross-linguistic comparison, (2) de-essentialisation through historical linguistic analysis, and (3) de-essentialisation through highlighting gender incoherences associated with specific personal reference forms. These three procedures will be briefly illustrated in Sections 4 to 6 of this article. It goes without saying that the respective linguistic phenomena would have to be studied in-depth and that the analyses carried out here should be read as suggestions for further, more detailed research. Cross-linguistic comparison of language structures helps to relativise gender cross-culturally. For example, it is of interest which lexical fields more generally and which specific forms are lexically or socially gendered in a given language. Furthermore, it is enlightening to see whether a certain language possesses grammatical gender and, if it does, which specific configuration of grammatical gender categories it shows (for example, masculine and feminine, masculine, feminine and neuter, or common gender and neuter) and how these categories relate to gender representation. Additionally, it is advisable to compare which satellite elements are involved in grammatical gender agreement, because even when two languages exhibit the same grammatical gender classes, these may affect agreement to varying degrees. Similar issues arise for the comparison of gendered structures at various historical stages. Such an analysis highlights the fluidity of gender across time. Research questions that are relevant in this context are the following: Are there diachronic semantic changes in the lexical or social gender values of certain forms? How have individual grammatical gender systems and associated agreement systems evolved and how has this affected their capacities for gender representation? Finally, a de-essentialisation of gender can also be achieved through an analysis of specific personal reference forms on various linguistic levels, the most prominent ones being the denotative-semantic level (lexical gender), the connotative-semantic level (social gender), the grammatical level (grammatical gender) and the contextual-pragmatic level (referential gender). Such an analysis is likely to show that gender binarism is for most personal reference forms not a strictly coherent business, but may exhibit incoherences between the various linguistic levels, which in turn throws doubt on the notion of gender as a simply structured, binary category.

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4. De-essentialisation through cross-linguistic analysis: Gender categories in English, German and Croatian English, German and Croatian are Indo-European languages. Within the IndoEuropean language family, English and German belong to the West Germanic subbranch, while Croatian is a South Slavic language. As will become evident later in this section, English and German provide highly different structural prerequisites for gender construction, despite their close relatedness. Lexical and social gender (Hellinger and Bußmann 2001) are universal characteristics that surface in all languages, and therefore also in the three languages discussed here. Still there are subtle differences, for example in terms of which concepts are expressed with lexically gendered nouns or how social gender manifests itself in a given language. Social gender is more prevalent in English than in Croatian and German. It surfaces in anaphoric pronominal agreement patterns in non-specific contexts, where nouns denoting professions stereotypically associated with women are generally pronominalised with female pronouns (1a), while nouns denoting stereotypically male professions are generally referred to by means of male pronouns (1b): (1) a. A nurse has a hard working day. She has to get up early in the morning. b. A surgeon has a hard working day. He has to get up early in the morning.

Social gender may also surface in higher frequencies of adjectival premodification to override social gender (e.g. male model is more frequently used than female model, because the female social gender of model is so strong that female specification is not usually felt to be necessary). In German and Croatian, by contrast, social gender is less relevant (though not irrelevant), because it is regularly overridden in pronominalisation and other forms of agreement by grammatical gender. In the German examples (2a/b) below, the personal nouns trigger masculine agreement in the possessive pronoun due to their grammatical gender, although they denote professions that are stereotypically gendered and therefore socially male (2a) and socially female (2b). (These generic masculine agreement patterns are here translated as ‘his’, even though a translation as ‘his or her’ might be deemed more adequate if one accepts these forms as true generics.)

(2) a. Ein Anwalt muss sich um seine Klienten kümmern.

Ein Anwalt muss sich um seine Klienten indef.masc lawyer.masc must refl of poss.3.sg.masc clients kümmern. take care

‘A lawyer must take care of his clients.’



A poststructuralist approach to structural gender linguistics

b. Ein Kindergärtner muss auf seine Kindergruppe aufpassen. Ein Kindergärtner muss auf seine indef.masc nursery teacher.masc must over poss.3.sg.masc Kindergruppe aufpassen. group of children watch

‘A nursery-school teacher must watch over his group of children.’

c. Ein Model muss auf seinen/ihren Körper achten. Ein Model muss auf seinen/ihren Körper indef.neut model.neut must after poss.3.sg.neut/fem body achten. look

‘A model must look after her body.’

As can be seen in Example (2c), in grammatical gender languages with a masculinefeminine contrast, social gender can only affect pronominal agreement with neuter controllers (here: the feminine possessive form ihren ‘her’, triggered by the female social gender of the noun Model “model”). But even in these cases, grammatical gender agreement (here: the neuter possessive form seinen ‘its’, triggered by the neuter grammatical gender of the noun) is possible. Modern English no longer possesses a grammatical gender system in the strict sense. As illustrated above, German – like Croatian – shows a fully-fledged tripartite grammatical gender system, distinguishing masculine, feminine and neuter gender classes. In other words, while in English grammatical gender is irrelevant for gender construction, the grammatical masculine-feminine distinction in German and Croatian can be exploited for gender representation and in fact forms a central aspect structuring personal reference forms. Suggestions for gender-fair language use generally differ, depending on the typological make-up of a language. For English as a grammatically genderless language, gender neutralisation is normally recommended and seems the most feasible strategy to achieve gender equality. For Croatian and German as grammatical gender languages with a masculine-feminine contrast, gender specification (i.e. specification of both female and male referents) is usually suggested as the primary strategy. This is the case because gender neutralisation is in many contexts impossible, not just because of the grammatical gender of personal nouns but especially because of the masculine and feminine agreement that is shown by the satellites inside and outside the noun phrase. Interestingly, even when two languages have the same grammatical gender configuration overall, such as in Croatian and German, they need not necessarily behave in the same fashion in

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terms of agreement. In other words, which targets are involved in gender agreement is language-specific. Table 1 contrasts English, German and Croatian with respect to the gender agreement behaviour of various satellite types. The plus and minus signs indicate that a certain satellite type shows or does not show grammatical gender agreement in the respective language. The symbol X is used where certain satellite types do not exist in a given language. Table 1.  Satellite types showing grammatical gender agreement: English, German and Croatian Configuration

English

German

Croatian

no grammatical gender masc./fem./neut. masc./fem./neut. NP-external satellites 3rd p. sg. pronouns 3rd p. pl. pronouns predicative adjectives sg./pl. verbal participles sg./pl.

(+) − − −

+ − − −

+ + + +

− − − − − −

+ − + − + −

+ + X X + +

NP-internal satellites attributive adjectives sg. attributive adjectives pl. articles sg. articles pl. relative pronouns sg. relative pronouns pl.

It is evident from Table 1 that gender agreement plays the least role in English, whereas it is much more systematically entrenched in the structure of German and Croatian. Modern English only shows remnants of a formerly intact grammatical gender system in the third person singular pronouns (he, she, it). These remnants are not grammatically conditioned. Their usage is rather semantically or pragmatically determined by lexical, social or referential gender (see Section 6). This is why the plus sign has been placed in brackets in Table 1. In German, by contrast, grammatical gender agreement affects several types of satellites. Within complex singular noun phrases, articles, attributive adjectives and relative pronouns may show gender agreement with the head noun. Outside the noun phrase, third person singular pronouns (er, sie es etc.) also show grammatical gender agreement. Predicative adjectives and participles as parts of verb phrases are generally uninflected in German and therefore do not distinguish gender (neither in the singular nor in the plural).



A poststructuralist approach to structural gender linguistics

German distinguishes between a weak adjectival inflection, which hardly shows gender-distinct inflections (only in the accusative singular where the masculine inflection -en contrasts with feminine/neuter -e), and a strong adjectival inflection, which distinguishes the three genders in the nominative and accusative singular. Singular noun phrases that contain both an article and an attributive adjective are marked for gender in at least one of these two premodifiers. This is illustrated in Table 2, which shows the declension of the three German noun phrases ‘tall man.masc’, ‘tall woman.fem’ and ‘tall child.neut’, both as indefinite noun phrases (for the strong adjectival declension) and definite noun phrases (for the weak adjectival declension) (see also Jobin 2011, 329–332). Table 2.  Agreement patterns of articles and adjectives in German noun phrases Strong Sg.

Weak Sg.

Strong Pl.

Weak Pl.

der groß-e Mann die groß-e Frau das groß-e Kind

Männer groß-e Frauen Kinder

Männer die groß-en Frauen Kinder

Gen. Masc. ein-es groß-en Mannes des groß-en Mannes Männer Gen. Fem. ein-er groß-en Frau der groß-en Frau groß-er Frauen Gen. Neutr. ein-es groß-en Kindes des groß-en Kindes Kinder

Männer der groß-en Frauen Kinder

Nom. Masc. ein groß-er Mann Nom. Fem. ein-e groß-e Frau Nom. Neutr. ein groß-es Kind

Dat. Masc. Dat. Fem. Dat. Neutr.

ein-em groß-en Mann dem groß-en Mann Männern Männern ein-er groß-en Frau der groß-en Frau groß-en Frauen den groß-en Frauen ein-em groß-en Kind dem groß-en Kind Kindern Kindern

Acc. Masc. Acc. Fem. Acc. Neutr.

ein-en groß-en Mann ein-e groß-e Frau ein groß-es Kind

den groß-en Mann Männer die groß-e Frau groß-e Frauen das groß-e Kind Kinder

Männer die groß-en Frauen Kinder

As can be seen in Table 2, adjectives and articles do not show any gender distinctions in the plural (the indefinite article has no plural forms). This is not just true for articles and adjectives within noun phrases but for all plural forms, even those for which the corresponding singular forms are gender distinct (i.e. relative pronouns and personal pronouns of the third person). This is why pluralisation is often a useful gender neutralisation strategy for German. In Croatian, grammatical gender agreement affects many more satellite types than in German. Inside the noun phrase, attributive adjectives and relative pronouns are affected; outside the noun phrase, gender agreement affects predicative adjectives, verbal participles and third person pronouns. In contrast to German, plural satellites are equally affected as singular satellites, which ultimately means that neutralisation cannot be achieved through pluralisation in this language.

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(3) Noun-phrase internal agreement with plural noun phrases in English, German and Croatian a. these young actress-es who sing this.pl young actress-pl rel sing.3.pl b. dies-e jung-en Schauspielerin-nen, die sing-en this-pl young-pl actress.fem-pl rel.pl sing-3.pl

‘these young actresses who sing’

c. ov-e mlad-e glumic-e koj-e this-fem.pl young-fem.pl actress.fem-pl rel-fem.pl pjev-aju sing-3.pl

‘these young actresses who sing’



(4) Noun-phrase external agreement with plural noun phrases in English, German and Croatian a. The actress-es have been tired. def actress-pl aux.3.pl been tired They sleep now. pro.3.pl sleep.3.pl now b. Die Schauspielerin-nen sind müde gewesen. def.pl actress.fem-pl aux.3.pl tired been Sie schlaf-en jetzt. pro.3.fem.pl sleep-3.pl now

‘The actresses have been tired. They sleep now.’

c. Glumic-e su bil-e umorn-e. actress.fem-pl aux.3.pl been-fem.pl tired-fem.pl One sad spav-aju. pro.3.fem.pl now sleep-3.pl

‘The actresses have been tired. They sleep now.’

Even though Croatian shows gender distinctions in more satellite types, there is one type that only exhibits gender distinctions in German, namely singular articles. This is due to the fact that Croatian, as is typical of Slavic languages, does not possess any articles (see the X symbols in Table 1). Moreover, Croatian has two sub-genders, animate and inanimate, within the masculine gender category, which German does not possess. However, these sub-genders are only formally distinct in the accusative singular.



A poststructuralist approach to structural gender linguistics

Within the group of grammatical gender languages, the various gender configurations attested relate to varying degrees to the construction of gender as a binary phenomenon. Languages that only distinguish common gender and neuter (e.g. Danish, Dutch, Swedish) generally cannot use grammatical gender for a binary male-versus-female construction. Only the third person pronouns in such languages may be employed for this purpose (just as in English). Languages that only possess masculine and feminine grammatical gender classes (e.g. French, Italian, Spanish) exhibit the most clearly binary picture, with nouns denoting female beings overwhelmingly being feminine and nouns denoting male beings mainly belonging to the masculine gender class. Languages with the three gender classes masculine, feminine and neuter, like Croatian and German, also exhibit a largely binary gender representation, but it is somewhat less absolute due to the presence of the neuter gender, to which also certain groups of personal nouns belong. We can see from these comparisons of the three languages at hand that the means that a language provides for the linguistic construction of gender (lexical, social and grammatical gender) vary in their manifestation across the respective speech communities and therefore pay witness to the various ways in which gender has discursively materialised in the individual languages. Even languages that show a close kinship relation (like English and German) may be fundamentally different in the gendered structures they possess, and even languages with the same grammatical gender configuration typically show differences with respect to gender assignment and agreement patterns. The fact that there is such crosslinguistic variance clearly points to gender as a culturally variant phenomenon.

5. De-essentialisation through historical linguistic analysis While a synchronic cross-linguistic comparison deals with languages and language structures as the result of historical formation (and, therefore, as a state), diachronic linguistic analyses can yield insights into the very process of discursive materialisation. Gender is traditionally conceptualised as a natural, stable or universal phenomenon. But grammatical, social and even lexical gender are not per se stable phenomena but can change over time. Tracing gender-relevant linguistic changes contributes to the historical relativisation of gender by exposing its temporal fluidity. Lexical gender is probably the most stable linguistic gender category, as it is less likely to be affected by major changes. However, it needs to be noted that such changes are not impossible. They can affect which and how many genders are recognised in a given language (compare, for example, the third gender in Thai, Attaviriyanupap 2015; or recent discussions revolving around gendered identity

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labels on Facebook, Baron 2014) as well as the lexical gendering of particular forms. A well-documented mechanism commonly associated with lexically female forms is semantic derogation (Schulz 1975; Waksler 1995), i.e. the pattern that as soon as personal nouns denote a female person, they show a tendency of semantic pejorisation, which often becomes evident in comparison to lexically male corresponding nouns (e.g. bachelor – spinster; master – mistress; governor – governess). But even the status of a certain personal noun as lexically male or female is not necessarily stable. What is commonly found are changes from male or female to lexically gender neutral or vice versa. Even complete lexical gender switches are attested, although they seem to occur more rarely (see, for example, Norri 1998). Some examples are given in Meyerhoff (2006, 58), who presents the historical meanings of various personal nouns as they appear in the Oxford English Dictionary. The noun girl, for instance, used to refer to ‘a child of either sex’ (1290) before it acquired its meaning of ‘female child’ (1530). A complete gender switch has been undergone by the term harlot, which used to denote ‘a male servant’ (1386) but later acquired the meaning ‘an unchaste woman’ (1450), which represents a male-female meaning switch within (probably less than) 64 years (see also Norri 1998, 284). Similarly, the noun bimbo today denotes ‘a comely woman of limited intelligence’ but used to denote ‘a fellow, chap, usu. contemptuous’ (1919) (see Norri 1998, 281–282). According to Norri (1998, 274 and 284–285), the female personal nouns crone, hoyden, shrew, virago and vixen all used to be lexically male in earlier stages, while the male noun rake used to be female. It is apparent from the examples given that male-to-female shifts clearly outnumber female-to-male shifts. This, in turn is reminiscent of the common androcentric pattern that male forms can more easily be used to refer to women than vice versa. When (originally) male terms are used to refer to groups of mixed or indeterminate gender, so-called male generics evolve. These forms are well documented across languages and are much more frequent than female generics (see, however, Motschenbacher 2010b). A notorious usage pattern that has been criticised by feminist linguists as androcentric is the use of man in the (pseudo-)generic sense of ‘humankind’ or generic uses of compounds such as policeman or fireman when talking about the respective professions in general. A more recent instance of such a development is the noun guy, which is today commonly used to address a mixed-sex or potentially even all-female group of people (as you guys; see Clancy 1999; Norri 1998, 271). In contexts where such androcentric linguistic practices are less valued, alternative forms have been suggested, either to neutralise (lexical) gender (e.g. police officer, firefighter) or to make women linguistically visible (e.g. policewoman, firewoman). The introduction of such new forms that compete with more traditional ones clearly shapes gender representation in a given



A poststructuralist approach to structural gender linguistics

language. Lexical change or innovation may, therefore, be just as important as semantic and grammatical change. The social gender of personal nouns can also change throughout time, often as a reflection of changed social realities, i.e. increasing numbers of women or men working in a certain profession. For example, the noun secretary used to be strongly socially male in earlier times, while it is today strongly socially female in its connotation – a development that seems to go hand in hand with a decrease in the prestige of the profession. High-status occupational titles containing this term (such as state secretary or secretary general) are today (still) stereotypically perceived as male. Furthermore, it is interesting to see that both female and male meanings can be attached to one and the same form, with the context usually disambiguating which of the two meanings is relevant. One such example is the word queen, which, on the one hand, denotes the female equivalent of a king but today is also used to denote a gay man (see Baker 2002, 182). It is, of course, evident that the newer male meaning is more negative than the original female meaning. When originally male words extend their meaning potential and also denote female persons, this often results in a less negative effect (see the noun tomboy, which denotes ‘a girl who behaves like a spirited or boisterous boy’ and has rather positive connotations; Norri 1998, 285). Such asymmetrical cross-gender developments indicate that masculinity is in general more highly valued than femininity. Grammatical gender is also not stable across time, as grammatical gender systems are highly likely to undergo semantic restructuring (Jobin 2011). As Corbett (1991) has pointed out, all grammatical gender systems have a semantic core and are therefore not purely formal, morphosyntactic phenomena. This dovetails with the widely attested cross-linguistic finding that female animate nouns are generally grammatically feminine and that nouns with a male meaning potential tend to be grammatically masculine. It is interesting to study, on the one hand, how this grammatical masculine-feminine distinction evolved and how the association of grammatical gender with sex specification developed, and, on the other hand, how such a grammatical gender system may erode or be lost completely over time (as, for example, in Afrikaans, English or Persian; see Duke, 2008 on the Germanic languages). For the Indo-European language family, it is today widely accepted that Proto-Indo-European did not have a sex-related tripartite gender system (as Old English, German and Croatian) but rather a two-gender system that distinguished animate (common) gender and inanimate (neuter) gender nouns. This conclusion is largely based on evidence from Hittite (the earliest Indo-European data available to linguists), which shows no traces of a feminine gender (Luraghi

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2011, 435–438). In other words, the feminine gender as we know it from many of today’s Indo-European languages is a later development (Janse, Joseph and de Vogelaer 2011, 240; Trudgill 2013, 77). There is some evidence that the evolution of the feminine grammatical gender originally had little to do with sex-specification but was rather used to express a kind of numeral aspect. The Proto-Indo-European two-gender system probably developed into a three-gender system by splitting the inanimate gender into two categories: inanimate/abstract or collective, which was later to become the feminine gender, and inanimate/concrete, which became the neuter gender (e.g. Matasović 2004). However, other researchers have tried to substantiate the claim that the development of the feminine category was related to sex specification from the start and that this development is logical for a system that is originally animacy-based (e.g. Luraghi 2011). The rise of the feminine gender is associated with the Proto-Indo-European suffix -*h2, which originally was a derivational suffix creating abstract nouns. It became grammaticalised and developed into the theme vowel of the feminine gender (see the Latin a-stem declension). In some modern Indo-European languages, as a consequence, female specification in personal nouns (so-called “motion”) is still more a matter of inflection than of derivation, i.e. feminine nouns are created by shifting masculine nouns to the feminine declension class. This is a systematic pattern, for example, in Italian and Spanish, where masculine personal nouns ending in -o correspond to feminine personal nouns ending in -a (see (5a/b); Marcato and Thüne 2002; Nissen 2002), but there are also some such cases in Croatian, where the ending -a is added to the base forms of the consonant-final masculines to create feminine personal nouns (see (5c); Motschenbacher and Weikert 2015):

(5) Female specification through declension class shift in Italian (a), Spanish (b) and Croatian (c)

a. maestr-o ragazz-o amic-o zi-o

‘teacher’ ‘boy’ ‘friend’ ‘uncle’

maestr-a ragazz-a amic-a zi-a

‘female teacher’ ‘girl’ ‘female friend’ ‘aunt’

b. chic-o herman-o abogad-o enfermer-o

‘boy’ ‘brother’ ‘lawyer’ ‘nurse’

chic-a herman-a abogad-a enfermer-a

‘girl’ ‘sister’ ‘female lawyer’ ‘female nurse’

c. suprug bratučed kum susjed

‘husband’ suprug-a ‘cousin’ bratučed-a ‘godfather’ kum-a ‘neighbour’ susjed-a

‘wife’ ‘female cousin’ ‘godmother’ ‘female neighbour’



A poststructuralist approach to structural gender linguistics

As Luraghi (2011, 457) notes, “[i]n such cases, gender fulfils the function typical of derivation, i.e. to enrich the lexicon.” That grammatical gender inflection is used to create new words with the lexical meaning ‘female’ pays witness to the partly de-grammaticalised status of gender inflection. In grammaticalisation theory, degrammaticalisation (Norde 2009; Trousdale and Norde 2013) refers to developments that run counter to the normal unidirectionality of grammaticalisation, i.e. cases in which the function of certain forms moves from a more grammatical to a less grammatical one. Gender inflection is originally a morphosyntactic phenomenon that facilitates textual cohesion and reference tracking. When this feature is used to specify the sex of a referent or in accordance with the lexical gender of a noun, it has (partly) come to fulfil a pragmatic or lexicosemantic function and thus has undergone semantic strengthening. Among the major subtypes of degrammaticalisation, the semantic strengthening of gender inflections is most closely related to the process of deinflectionalisation (Trousdale and Norde 2013, 39–42). Degrammaticalisation is untypical cross-linguistically in the sense that it occurs much less frequently than grammaticalisation (Hollmann 2009b, 315) and contrasts with the unidirectionality normally exhibited by such changes. However, it is not surprising that it is a culturally salient aspect like sex specification that may cause such an uncommon pattern. There is also other evidence that a certain degree of degrammaticalisation has taken place in most gender languages with a masculine-feminine contrast. For example, third person pronouns are not just used anaphorically (a construction type in which they can be said to formally agree with the controller) but may also be used purely deictically without any connection to a controller noun, especially in spoken interaction. In such cases, it is clearly referential gender – and not grammatical gender – that determines pronominal choice. Similarly, referential gender may also be decisive in other construction types that lack a nominal head, as can be seen in the following Croatian utterances: (6) a. umoran si tired.masc be.2.sg ‘you are tired’ (when addressing a male person) b. umorna si tired.fem be.2.sg ‘you are tired’ (when addressing a female person)

Examples in which lexical rather than grammatical gender may be decisive include the semantic agreement patterns shown by hybrid nouns, which allow for both grammatical and semantic agreement (see, for example, Braun and Haig 2010 on German, and Motschenbacher and Weikert 2015 on Croatian).

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Apart from undergoing semantic strengthening processes, grammatical gender systems may also lose their grammatical function altogether and decay. Formal remnants of the former gender system may then be used for sex specification. This can be illustrated through developments that have taken place in the history of English. Old English had a tripartite grammatical gender system distinguishing masculine, feminine and neuter, just like German and Croatian (see Table 3). The high presence of grammatical gender distinctions across the various satellite types resembles the situation of Croatian more closely than that of German. Outside the noun phrase, third person singular pronouns, predicative adjectives and verbal participles showed gender inflection; within the noun phrase, attributive adjectives and demonstrative pronouns (which in Old English fulfilled the functions of both articles and relative pronouns) were inflected for gender (see Mitchell and Robinson 2007). Table 3.  Satellite types showing grammatical gender agreement: Old English and Modern English Configuration

Old English

Modern English

masc./fem./neut.

no grammatical gender

+ – + +

(+) – – –

+ + + – + –

– – – – – –

NP-external satellites 3rd p. sg. pronouns 3rd p. pl. pronouns predicative adjectives sg./pl. verbal participles sg./pl. NP-internal satellites attributive adjectives sg. attributive adjectives pl. articles sg. articles pl. relative pronouns sg. relative pronouns pl.

The decay of inflectional endings that started in the Late Old English period led to an increase in formal syncretism and, ultimately, to the loss of most inflectional endings. When grammatical gender agreement in inflections was no longer possible, this led to the complete erosion of the former grammatical gender system and a shift towards semantic gender assignment according to animacy and sex, with sex distinctions merely surfacing in third person singular pronouns. It is difficult to view the development shown by the English language as a matter of degenderisation. One would rather have to describe it as a substantial



A poststructuralist approach to structural gender linguistics

change in the structures that the language provides for gender representation. On the one hand, a grammatical gender system including a binary masculinefeminine distinction was lost and therefore led to gender neutralisation in many personal nouns and in all satellite types except third person singular pronouns. On the other hand, the semantically and pragmatically conditioned use of the third person singular pronouns (he and she) represents a shift towards a more strictly binary sex-based system, at least as far as pronominalisation is concerned. For example, while lexically female Old English nouns that were not grammatically feminine, such as wifmann ‘woman.masc’ or wif ‘woman.neut’, used to show masculine or neuter agreement in satellites, the Modern English forms woman and wife are invariably combined with female anaphoric pronouns, thus yielding a more gender-coherent picture linguistically. Siemund and Dolberg (2011, 524)1 find that in Old English (as opposed to Proto-Indo-European) nominal gender assignment as evident in agreement phenomena was subject to two major influences: (1) purely formal, grammatical gender assignment governed by the morphosyntactic behaviour of satellites, which is mainly relevant for inanimate nouns, and (2) semantic gender assignment due to the sex of the referent, which is restricted to animate nouns (see also Vezzosi 2008, 95–96). This dovetails neatly with Luraghi’s (2011) distinction between two types of grammatical gender development: gender systems from below, i.e. purely formal, morphosyntactic reflexes whose function is reference tracking vs. gender systems from above, i.e. lexico-semantically based systems with a classificatory function. This means that in the development from Old to Modern English, the classificatory aspect of sex-specification has taken precedence: a formerly largely grammatically based system has been formally reduced and stripped down to its semantic core. In some languages, the tripartite grammatical gender system has not been completely lost as in English, but was reduced to a two-gender system. Certain languages lost the neuter category (for example, the Romance languages, but also Latvian, Lithuanian or Welsh; Trudgill 2013, 80), thereby making the masculine-feminine binarism more clear-cut. In others, masculine and feminine were collapsed into a common gender class (e.g. in Dutch, Danish, Swedish), which ultimately disqualifies grammatical gender as a means of sex specification.

1. Note that Siemund and Dolberg (2011) use an uncommon and at times misleading terminology that is not adopted here. They call nouns whose grammatical gender corresponds to their lexical gender “referential gender nouns”. Nouns whose grammatical gender does not correspond to their lexical gender, by contrast, they call “lexical gender nouns”.

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6. De-essentialisation through analysis of the usage patterns of particular personal reference forms Finally, an analysis of the use of personal reference forms can also have a gender de-essentialising effect. One could argue that there are coherent, gender-binary norms according to which personal reference forms are commonly thought to be used. Such norms stipulate that forms that are grammatically feminine, lexically female or socially female (or several of these at the same time) are generally used to refer to female persons, while grammatically masculine, lexically male or socially male forms are generally used to refer to male persons. By extension, grammatically neuter, lexically and socially gender-neutral personal nouns are ideal candidates for generic reference. A look at how certain personal reference forms are used, however, is likely to show that in a substantial number of cases, linguistic gender representation is more complex and rather configured in less than coherent ways. A well-known example is the German noun Mädchen ‘girl’, which is already gender-incoherent when its contextual use is not taken into account, because it is grammatically neuter and lexically female. In terms of referential gender, one is probably safe to assume that the term is most of the time used to refer to female persons, but in some contexts this is not necessarily the case. For example, the idiomatic phrase Mädchen für alles lit. ‘girl for everything’, hence ‘person to do all kinds of jobs’, can easily be used for male referents as well. Besides this usage, the noun can be used to refer to men in a derogatory fashion when one wants to indicate that the referent’s behaviour is not ‘man-like’ (Markus ist so ein Mädchen ‘Markus is such a girl’). Such latter usages are also attested for the English noun girl. Hollmann (2009a, 302), for example, provides the following sample sentence: I agree that maybe Robben is a girl… More suited to ballet than football. In this sentence, the form girl is used to refer to male football player Arjen Robben in an attempt to highlight his supposedly atypical qualities for a footballer. A Croatian example of structural gender incoherence are numerical nouns like dvojica, trojica, četvorica, petorica, etc. (plus the form obojica ‘both’; see, for example, Kim 2010). These denote groups of two, three, four, five etc. male people. Despite their male lexical gender and notional plurality, these collective nouns are grammatically feminine and singular. This results in rather complex agreement patterns, requiring feminine singular agreement in all satellite forms except the finite verb, which stands in the plural (as a result of notional agreement): (7) Sva trojica su došla na vrijeme. Sv-a trojica su all-fem.sg group of three men.fem.sg aux.3.pl



A poststructuralist approach to structural gender linguistics

došl-a na vrijeme. come-fem.sg on time ‘All three men arrived on time.’

The participle and anaphoric pronouns also allow for semantically motivated masculine plural agreement. Besides mismatches between the grammatical and lexical gender of certain personal nouns, the number of gender-incoherent cases rises substantially if one takes referential gender into account. We have already seen this in the usage examples of Mädchen and girl above. But there are also more systematic referential “mismatches” that hold for many languages. For example, many languages with a grammatical masculine-feminine distinction generally possess groups of grammatically masculine or feminine epicene nouns that are lexically genderneutral (e.g. German Person ‘person.fem’ or Mensch ‘human being.masc’) and can easily be used to refer to female and male people, or mixed-sex and genderindeterminate groups of people. Another example are the widely attested cases of male or masculine generics, i.e. forms that are lexically male and/or grammatically masculine but are commonly not just used for male-specific reference but also for (pseudo-)generic and at times even female-specific reference. As feminine and female forms do not usually have the same referential potential, this results in a clear asymmetry in the usage conditions of the two types of generics. Finally, it is also a de-essentialising practice to show that the usage patterns of certain gendered forms is more complex than widely thought. For English, for example, it is often claimed that the choice of third person singular pronouns is determined by “natural” gender or referential gender (see, for instance, Siemund and Dolberg 2011; Vezzosi 2008, 103). Even though such a description may cover some cases of pronominalisation, it is clearly not applicable in all cases. For example, for most English personal nouns (like teacher or lawyer), it is impossible to specify their “natural” gender. Moreover, the referential gender of these forms can only be identified in contexts of specific reference. In generic constructions (a teacher, a lawyer), there is no referential gender value that could explain the choice of a male vs. a female pronoun. This means that at least five different factors can be responsible for pronominal choice in English: (1) lexical gender (girl – she; boy – he), (2) referential gender (this teacher – he; this teacher – she), (3) social gender (a lawyer – he; a nurse – she); (4) the normative prescription of generic he (a patient – he; a child – he); (5) reformed usage, depending on the political attitudes of the speaker (e.g. uses of generic she, splitted pronominal forms like he or she, or gender-neutral singular they). In grammatical gender languages with a masculine-feminine contrast like German, pronominalisation is largely affected by the same factors, even though grammatical gender plays an additional and highly prominent role (see Motschenbacher 2016).

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7. Conclusion The various types of linguistic analysis performed in this article could only scratch the tip of the iceberg. More detailed analyses are needed to draw a more sophisticated picture of the structural complexities associated with gender representation. Another important point is that such analyses ideally also need to be performed across language families and not just within the Indo-European language family, as has been done here. Such a wider scope can be assumed to have an even higher deessentialising power, because it is more likely to bring cross-cultural heterogeneity to the fore. Despite these limitations of scope, the analyses in this article show that the linguistic manifestations of gender are anything but a stable, self-evident, strictly binary or invariably coherent business. They rather draw our attention to the cultural shapedness of linguistic gender construction and its heterogeneity across languages, language types, time periods and usage contexts. A central insight from the linguistic fluidity of gender is that (language) change is an intrinsic part of the discursive materialisation of gender. For poststructuralist structural gender linguistics, this means that individual language users have a certain degree of influence on the shape of things to come by drawing on certain (alternative, less traditional) gender discourses, which then play a more prominent role in the competition of gender discourses at large. Especially referential gender is an important driving force for changes in gendered structures. When lexically, socially or grammatically gendered forms are used to refer to other groups of people than their gender value normatively dictates, this is likely to have consequences for the meanings and future uses of these forms, especially when this is done in higher frequencies and by more and more language users. For example, when the noun pilot is used more frequently to refer to female persons, this is likely to lead to a decrease in the strength of its male social gender bias. The introduction of new forms is, from a poststructuralist perspective, not always a desirable option. Alternative gender-neutral formulations are generally unproblematic for such an approach. The systematic introduction of feminine forms as counterparts to masculine forms, by contrast, can also be viewed critically, because it generally has the contrastive effect of rendering the meaning potential of masculine forms more male-specific (and less generic), thereby leading to a more strictly gender-binary configuration – an effect that Queer Linguists would typically find fault with (see Motschenbacher 2014). Of course, female gender specification also has its merits in terms of making women linguistically visible in domains that used to be largely male-dominated. However, a poststructuralist language policy would suggest a more contextualised procedure, i.e. it needs to be decided from context to context which linguistic configuration is considered more



A poststructuralist approach to structural gender linguistics

harmful by individual language users: female invisibility or polarising male-female difference thinking. Finally, the cross-cultural heterogeneity of gendered linguistic structures provokes a question that at the moment cannot be sufficiently answered, namely in how far the linguistic differences detected correspond to differences in the perception and conceptualisation of gender in the cultures concerned. Even though a lot of research remains to be done along these lines, it is interesting to note that two recent empirical studies seem to point into this direction. Wasserman and Weseley (2009) found that subjects who had read a passage in a grammatical gender language with a masculine-feminine contrast (French or Spanish) expressed more sexist attitudes than those that had read the same passage in English. Another study conducted by Prewitt-Freilino, Caswell and Laakso (2012) tested whether the degree of gender equality in a particular country is related to the genderrelevant structures that the dominant language in this territory provides. Such an effect was indeed found, even when other potentially influential factors on gender equality (such as geographic region, religious tradition, political system, overall development) were controlled. Countries in which a language with a grammatical masculine–feminine contrast is the predominant language overall demonstrate less gender equality compared to countries in which a language is spoken that does not have such a contrast or only distinguishes gender in third person pronouns.

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Mitchell, Bruce, and Fred C. Robinson. 2007. A Guide to Old English (7th edition). Malden: Blackwell. Motschenbacher, Heiko. 2008. “Structural linguistic gender categories and discursive materialization: A deconstructionist analysis.” Indiana University Working Papers in Linguistics 8(3): 21–46. Motschenbacher, Heiko. 2010a. Language, Gender and Sexual Identity: Poststructuralist Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/impact.29 Motschenbacher, Heiko. 2010b. “Female-as-norm (FAN): A typology of female and feminine generics.” In Language in its Socio-Cultural Context. New Explorations in Gendered, Global and Media Uses, ed. by Markus Bieswanger, Heiko Motschenbacher, and Susanne Mühleisen, 35–67. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Motschenbacher, Heiko. 2011. “Taking Queer Linguistics further: Sociolinguistics and critical heteronormativity research.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 212: 149–179. Motschenbacher, Heiko. 2012. An Interdisciplinary Bibliography on Language, Gender and Sexuality (2000–2011). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/z.177 Motschenbacher, Heiko. 2014. “Grammatical gender as a challenge for language policy: The (im)possibility of non-heteronormative language use in German vs. English.” Language Policy 13(3): 243–261. doi: 10.1007/s10993-013-9300-0 Motschenbacher, Heiko. 2015. “Some new perspectives on gendered language structures.” In Gender Across Languages. The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men. Vol. 4, ed. by Marlis Hellinger, and Heiko Motschenbacher, 27–48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:  10.1075/impact.36.02mot

Motschenbacher, Heiko. 2016. “A discursive approach to structural gender linguistics.” Gender and Language 10(2): 149–169. Motschenbacher, Heiko, and Marija Weikert. 2015. “Structural gender trouble in Croatian.” In Gender Across Languages. The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men. Vol. 4, ed. by Marlis Hellinger, and Heiko Motschenbacher, 49–95. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:  10.1075/impact.36.03mot

Nakassis, Constantine V. 2013. “Citation and citationality.” Signs and Society 1(1): 51–77. doi:  10.1086/670165

Nissen, Uwe Kjaer. 2002. “Gender in Spanish. Tradition and innovation.” In Gender Across Languages. The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men. Vol. 2, ed. by Marlis Hellinger, and Hadumod Bußmann, 251–279. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/impact.10.16nis Norde, Muriel. 2009. Degrammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/acp rof:oso/9780199207923.001.0001

Norri, Juhani. 1998. “Gender-referential shifts in English.” English Studies 79(3): 270–287. doi:  10.1080/00138389808599131

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Prewitt-Freilino, Jennifer L., T. Andrew Caswell, and Emmi K. Laakso. 2012. “The gendering of language: A comparison of gender equality in countries with gendered, natural gender, and genderless languages.” Sex Roles 66(3/4): 268–281. doi: 10.1007/s11199-011-0083-5 Schulz, Muriel R. 1975. “The semantic derogation of woman.” In Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance, ed. by Barrie Thorne, and Nancy Henley, 64–75. Rowley: Newbury House. Siemund, Peter, and Florian Dolberg. 2011. “From lexical to referential gender: An analysis of gender change in medieval English based on two historical documents.” Folia Linguistica 45(2): 489–534. doi: 10.1515/flin.2011.018 Silverstein, Michael. 2005. “Axes of evals: Token versus type interdiscursivity.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 6–22. doi: 10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.6 Thorne, Barrie, Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley (eds). 1983. Language, Gender and Society. Rowley: Newbury House. Trousdale, Graeme, and Muriel Norde. 2013. “Degrammaticalization and constructionalization: Two case studies.” Language Sciences 36(1): 32–46. doi: 10.1016/j.langsci.2012.03.018 Trudgill, Peter. 2013. “Gender maintenance and loss in Totenmålet, English, and other major Germanic varieties.” In In Search of Universal Grammar: From Old Norse to Zoque, ed. by Terje Lohndal, 77–108. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/la.202.07tru Vezzosi, Letizia. 2008. “Gender assignment in Old English.” In English Historical Linguistics 2006. Volume I: Syntax and Morphology, ed. by Maurizio Gotti, Marina Dossena, and Richard Dury, 89–108. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/cilt.295.08vez Waksler, Rachelle. 1995. “She’s a mensch and he’s a bitch: Neutralizing gender in the 90s.” English Today 11(2): 3–6. doi: 10.1017/S0266078400008166 Wasserman, Benjamin D., and Allyson J. Weseley. 2009. “¿Qué? Quoi? Do languages with grammatical gender promote sexist attitudes?” Sex Roles 61(9/10): 634–643. doi:  10.1007/s11199-009-9696-3

A hermeneutical approach to gender linguistic materiality Semiotic and structural categorisation of gender in Hong Kong Cantonese Julie Abbou and Angela Tse

Aix-Marseille University / Hong Kong Polytechnic University

While most Cantonese grammar textbooks draw on the assumption that gender is absent in this language, the fact, however, remains that the masculine/ feminine relationship – and its consequential social assignation – is indeed expressed in it. This study explores how and where gender is indexed in the linguistic materiality of Cantonese. To serve such purpose, an interdisciplinary framework is built at the crossroads of linguistics and gender studies towards a hermeneutical re-definition of gender as a semiotic form structuring power relationships. This framework leads to an investigation of gender from a contrastive perspective. A corpus of translated sentences from English to Cantonese displays significant “gender shifts” in the interlingual space, which makes gender marking in Cantonese visible in different linguistic levels. Keywords: Cantonese, English, gender shift, structure, semiotics, forms, grammaticalisation, contrastive, interlingual dynamics

1. Introduction This study aims at exploring possible answers to the following question: how does social gender linguistically work in Cantonese?1 Most of the Cantonese grammar textbooks draw on the assumption that gender is absent in this language. If this were an invincible fact, the current survey could have been given up here. Yet, the linguistic fact remains that the masculine/feminine relationship is expressed 1. We warmly thank Karim Hammou for his inspiring discussion and wise advice. We would also also like to acknowledge Virginia Yip for her useful reminders regarding the sensitive dimensions of gender in Cantonese. doi 10.1075/pbns.264.05abb © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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in Cantonese and this chapter explores how and where gender is indexed in the linguistic materiality of Cantonese. To address these questions, a two-faceted approach is chosen. First, we opt for an interdisciplinary framework which allows us a hermeneutical re-definition of gender at the crossroads of linguistics and gender studies – through this framework, gender can then be (re)defined as a semiotic form structuring power relationships. Second, we provide a distinct data collection method in order to make gender marking in Cantonese in different linguistic levels visible. In the following sections, the theoretical framework which has been built for this study is delineated with the intention of situating gender marking in Cantonese as a social, semantic and linguistic categorisation. Working on and with a so-called genderless language requires an understanding of gender as multi-dimensional dynamics which can be deployed simultaneously in language structures (i.e. gender as a formal opposition), in semiotic constructions (i.e. gender as a part of the making of signification) and in social contexts (i.e. the material consequences of what makes us men and women). Such an attempt to capture the different dimensions of gender poses questions about the definition of gender itself: when defining gender, are we discussing different but simultaneous dimensions of gender as an object? Or are we instead referring to different and concurrent acceptations of the term gender? Postulating these diverse uses of gender as a distinct but interrelated categorisation process is noteworthy. Therefore, it is proposed in this study that an examination of gender forms can serve as a tool to highlight the categorisational power of gender. This proposed framework relies on gender studies, linguistic typology, hermeneutical semantics, and contrastive linguistics. In order to study gender marking as a social, semantic and linguistic categorisation, the methodological blueprint of this study is as follows: to track in grammaticalisation the linguistic materialisation of the gender form as a semiotic category. The notion of periphery is then helpful here. If we consider a language structure as a set of potential and plastic categories (see Blache, Christiansen, Dahl, Duchier, and Villadsen 2014), to involve the periphery of a category is then to explore its plasticity. What matters in this research is how masculinity and femininity are possibly said, not how they are said i.e. to investigate the “likelihood” of gender in a genderless language. To do so we chose a contrastive and translational methodological approach in this study. The study of data obtained by inviting a sample of thirty bilingual speakers to translate sentences from English to Cantonese, two languages with different modes of gender marking, made apparent instances where gender appears and disappears in an interlingual shift. Through interlingual shift, we understand a contrastive move from a linguistic structure to another one. Therefore, the notion of periphery is employed here as a methodological tool to understand linguistic categorisation. In order to make the most



A hermeneutical approach to gender linguistic materiality

of the plasticity of a linguistic structure, written Cantonese has been selected to engage in this gender-linguistic adventure because it is a mildly normalised and emerging variety, whose uses fluctate rather drastically. This chapter thus pursues a dual objective: (1) it aims at formulating a theoretical framework for gender analysis in genderless languages and (2) it provides a description of gender in an understudied language. To achieve the above, the second section comprises a discussion of the theoretical frameworks used in various linguistic gender analyses with the aim of proposing our own reading of linguistic gender as a transversal element through linguistic structures, that is a hermeneutical reading of grammatical gender. Based on this hermeneutical reading, our methodology, which involves an inter-level and contrastive approach, is proposed in Section 3. The fourth and the fifth sections concern a presentation and discussion of the linguistic materiality of gender as described in the literature about English and Cantonese, including their sociolinguistic, lexical, morphosyntactical and metalinguistic elements. In Section 6, the outcomes of the translation survey are presented and discussed. Although the gender marking in the two selected languages are of different syntactical embedment (i.e. gender being more grammaticalised in English), the results show that gender marking in Cantonese affects different linguistic dimensions and can be represented by speakers’ own chosen strategies. The description of gender dissemination offers challenging yet insightful perspectives regarding our analytical tools, especially regarding the inflectional understanding of formal gender as well as the signifier/signified relation implied by a “morphology-first” approach of language. These perspectives constitute our concluding remarks.

2. Interplay between grammatical, semantic and social features of the gender categorisation There are two mainstream traditions in the study of gender and language. The first one, illustrated by Corbett’s works (1991, 2013), considers gender as a syntactic classification of lexicon which relies on linguistics as its core field. This approach draws on the etymological meaning of gender, as (lat.) ‘a kind, a sort’. Within this interpretation, the semantic dimension of gender is considered as secondary information, while its syntactical function is primary. The role of (linguistic) gender is therefore a contrastive opposition for parts-of-speech classification purposes. For example, in French, grammatical gender allows a semantic distinction between le livre (‘the book’ [masc.]) and la livre (‘the pound’, [fem.]). The second approach was launched a few decades ago by researchers such as Cameron (1990, 1992) under the label of “gender and language studies”, within

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which gender should be understood primarily as a social-semiotic construction either reflected in or constructed through language. In this view, (social) gender is understood as a categorisation process which allocates masculine and feminine features to individuals, a process in which language definitely has a role to play. Here, the semantic dimension of gender is primary and gender studies form the foundation of the approach. To this regard, Chevalier notes: For the ones who want to work on gender in its relationship with gender, there are two paths: either considering what gender studies owe to grammar, or studying what grammar owes to gender studies.  (Chevalier 2013, 3)2

The aim of the current study, however, is not to find out which one of the above two approaches is indebted to the other; rather, it is to explore what conceptual tools gender studies and linguistics may lend to each other, and what common ground they share to situate gender in language. Indeed, the two abovementioned standpoints on gender, exemplified by Corbett and Cameron respectively, draw on a distinction between what we may call an “intra-linguistic” and an “extra-­ linguistic” understanding of gender, that is, an interpretation of grammatical gender limited to the linguistic code vis-à-vis an understanding of grammatical gender involving social and linguistic relations. Pan and Tham (2007) evoke this distinction in terms of scales, labelling the intra-linguistic level as micro-linguistics and the extra-­linguistic level macro-linguistics, the latter being understood as a contextualised view on language. In this chapter, therefore, it is argued that working about gender in language requires one to work from and towards both microand macro-linguistics. Indeed, whatever approach is chosen, categorisation lies at the core of the discussion. Are linguistic gender and social gender shaped by an identical process of categorisation? To answer this question, an evaluation of the “intra-linguistic” dimension of gender at the outset is inevitable.. This intra-linguistic examination is then complemented by a hermeneutical analysis to establish a language understanding which simultaneously allows the explanation of the social, semantic and linguistic dimensions of gender and questions the linguistic structure with regards to the social structure. For this purpose, the insertion of a third dimension to the above intra- and extra-linguistic approaches, i.e. an inter-linguistic level approach, leads to a contrastive framework enabling the analysis of the linguistic materiality of gender as a social construction.

2. Original text in French: “Deux orientations s’offrent à nous si nous voulons étudier le genre dans ses rapports avec le genre : soit envisager ce que les études de genre doivent à la grammaire, soit étudier ce que la grammaire doit aux études de genre.”



2.1

A hermeneutical approach to gender linguistic materiality

Gender and classification systems

From a micro-linguistic point of view, gender is a matter of lexical classification. Grinevald (1999) argues that there is a continuum in the nominal classification, with at one end a lexical classification and at the other a grammatical classification; along the continuum gender falls into the grammatical pool, representing a sub-type of grammatical classification (see Table 1): Table 1.  Grinevald’s nominal classifications3 Lexical classification

Classifiers

Grammatical classification

Measure terms Class terms

Noun class Gender

However, Corbett (1991) and Kibort and Corbett (2008) consider gender as one of the two hypercategories of grammaticalised lexical classification besides classifiers, as shown in Table 2: Table 2.  Corbett’s grammaticalised lexical classifications Gender

Classifier

Morphosyntaxic feature (with agreement)

Morphosemantic feature (without agreement)

This proposal is nowadays the mainstream in typology, indicating that noun classes are a sub-group of gender, with the specificity that their semantic references are non-sex-based. Pursuing his investigation on gender, Corbett, in a later chapter on gender in The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (2013), offers a classification of 257 languages according to the presence and absence of gender in them. He distinguishes between languages without gender, with one, two, three, four, and five or more genders, validated by instances like Nigerian Fula which embodies around twenty genders in some varieties. Referring to an example of a four-gender language called Lak, a Northeast Caucasian language, Corbett stratifies the gender classification in that language into the following classes: (i) male rationals, (ii) female rationals, (iii) other animates which interestingly contains some inanimate members, and (iv) a residue gender which also includes a few animates. In whatever way one chooses to label the hypercategories − gender for Corbett or grammatical classification for Grinevald, a range of formal features can be displayed. To this regard, Grinevald (1999) juxtaposes grammatical classification with lexical classification and eventually comes up with the summary below (see Table 3): 3. Table adapted from Grinevald (1999, 110).

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Table 3.  Lexical classification and grammatical classification according to Grinevald4 Lexical classification

Classifier (a “hybrid” Grammatical classification lexical-grammatical system) (Noun class + gender)

not all the nouns various amount of classes

classify all nouns little number of classes

open system

closed system

not combined with other class

combination with other grammatical category (number, casuality…)

not assigned to a noun

marked on the noun

no agreement (once marked)

agreement system

one noun = one class

one noun can only be assigned to one class

differences from a speaker and register to another one

no speakers variation, no register variation

Aiming at a smaller-scale categorisation, Voisin (2014) alternatively highlights some differences between gender and noun classes based on three criteria: i. the semantic motivation (for gender, semantic motivation equals social gender, while semantic categorisation of noun class is much unclearer); ii. the mark on the noun itself (i.e. gender is not marked on the noun, while noun classes are); iii. the intrinsic feature of gender (i.e. a noun has one inherent gender, while in the noun class system a radical may carry different classes). Despite the interesting and formal definition of gender provided by the above typological distinctions and criteria, nonetheless, some problems remain. First, in many languages (e.g. Romance languages) – if not all languages with a gender classification built within their lexicons, gender works across linguistic levels and is thus often lexical as well as grammatical. In French, for instance, the noun chauffeuse (meaning ‘a low chair without arms’) carries a feminine grammatical mark, -euse, without being semantically motivated.5 While being marked on the noun, the feminine gender embedded in chauffeuse clearly plays the role of a grammatical classifier. This hybrid dimension of gender can be commonly found in the French language because a number of very productive morphemes in French (e.g. -ier, -eur, -teur) are grammatically sensitive to gender while being semantically 4. Table adapted from Grinevald (1999, 109). 5. Chauffeuse is also in use with a human reference acceptation (‘female driver’), where the feminin mark is semantically motivated. We consider this acceptation as synonymity and do not address the term in its human-referred meaning.



A hermeneutical approach to gender linguistic materiality

linked to inanimate referents and, most importantly, not taking part in a gender contrast. Many words carry such morphemes without having a masculine or a feminine form like saladier (‘salad bowl’, [masc.]) / *saladière (*[fem].), garçonnière (‘shag pad’ [fem].) / *garçonnier (*[masc.]), interrupteur (‘switch’ [masc.]) / *interruptrice (*[fem]). These examples show that the opposition between lexical and grammatical classification according to the mark of the noun does not provide a relevant criterion for a gender definition. Consequently, in the light of the hybrid role of gender which encompasses both lexical and grammatical marking, a crucial issue regarding the problematic designation of sex as the reference of gender arises. This issue concerns the arbitrary and motivated semantic reference of gender. Despite asserting that “there is always a semantic ‘core’ to the [gender] system, that is, there is an overlap between the nouns which take a particular set of agreements and some semantic features”, Corbett (2013) slots languages into sex-based and non-sex-based gender systems through developing a method of categorisation which is tantamount to the Saussurean distinction between the arbitrary and the motivated dimensions of language. Citing Guinean Fula as an example, Corbett notes: “[Gender in Guinean Fula] has a clear semantic core; however, sex is not a part of it: nouns denoting human males and human females are found in the same gender. Other genders overlap with semantic categories to a greater or lesser degree” (id.). He states that the association between gender and semantic category (sex, or rather social gender) is a matter of degree: “At one end of the scale, in sex-based systems gender may match the semantic category almost completely” (ibid.). For instance, in Tamil, a language spoken in Sri Lanka, it is almost always true to conclude that nouns denoting male humans are masculine, and vice versa. In Indo-European languages like French and Russian, however, while it is not entirely inaccurate to claim that nouns denoting males are typically masculine, a large proportion of masculine nouns do not denote males. Corbett hence suggests that for gendered languages, gender can be attached to nouns according to semantic or formal features. Gender in English, for example, is assigned by semantic features, (i.e. the major distinction is based on the model nurse/bishop rather than actor/actress). Further conclusions to the above statements can also be made. First, the sexbased criterion reveals a classical pitfall of linguists when examining gender. Social construction of gender is systematically erased, and the extra-linguistic world is rudimentarily perceived as biological or natural. The biological metaphor has been a temptation in the linguistic field for centuries, implying a naturalist vision of gender and sex which is in a clear opposition to a constructivist understanding of gender, such as what has been delineated in the gender studies of, for example, Scott’s (1986), among others. Paradoxically, most linguists remain ignorant about the contribution of feminist studies to the semantic dimension of gender. Linguistic

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studies based on a semantic conception of the extra-linguistic referent as natural, rather than a socially constructed set of significations, cannot but miss the paradigm of gender developed in social sciences and humanities. From this point of view, beyond the language structure only lies the wild world of Nature. Yet, as reiterated by Cameron, paralleling the proposition of Jakobson in 1971, “the concepts of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are infinitely detachable from anything having to do with ‘real’ sexual difference” (Cameron 1992, 82) due to the metaphorical function of language, while the sexualisation of gender, far from being natural, “was consciously constructed over centuries” (Burr 2012, 29) by grammarians, as demonstrated by Burr in her inspiring article about the (non-)concordance of sex and linguistic gender. Second, the definition of gender becomes ambiguous when Corbett (2013) states that “there is always a semantic core to the gender system”, but at the same time acknowledges the existence of languages with 20 genders. Lastly, among the 257 languages analysed by Corbett, 145 are classified as not having a gender system. Of course, we cannot contradict this statement from a syntactical point of view. However, as soon as we understand gender as a more complex object, we realise that, whatever the linguistic encoding of this distinction is, there is no society within which gender is not at stake. In other words, gender might be more or less grammaticalised, but it is always embedded in language. That is what Huddleston and Pullum (2008) argue when they propose that gender (which should be understood here as masculine and feminine relationship or opposition) is a matter of degree, and their Cambridge Grammar offers an interesting shift of view: gender is not more or less semantic-based, as stated by Corbett; rather, it is more or less grammaticalised. We then understand here that what is at stake is the definition of gender: whether it is primarily syntactical or primarily semantic (and, in fact, as this paper suggests, semiotic). Corbett’s definition of gender is certainly an “intra-linguistic” one, including gender in the broader linguistic feature of the syntactical classification of lexicon; its typological nature helps us define precisely the core of grammaticalisation and reveals the semantic segments where languages are grammaticalised. This definition, however, points towards another tension. Erbaugh, using classifiers in the broad sense of nominal classification, writes: languages with or without classifiers index very similar categories. The difference (…) reflects how overtly a particular language requires grammatical marking. Some languages mark categories such as number or gender more overtly.6 But careful comparative testing finds no languages-caused difference in ability to think about quantity or sex. (Erbaugh 2002, 54–55)

6. Our italics.



A hermeneutical approach to gender linguistic materiality

Although extra-linguistic gender is once again understood as sex, Erbaugh in the above quotation confirms that the variation of gender across languages is a matter of degree of grammaticalisation. This informs us about the process of formalisation, and of structuralisation of gender, as scalar. Yet, as noted above, a mere syntactical approach to gender in language is not sufficient if we intend to address simultaneously the grammatical, social and semantic aspects of gender. Indeed, whatever the degree of formalisation gender displays in a language, gender categorisation is as much linked to the social structure as to the linguistic structure. The relationship between social structure, linguistic structure and discursive practices embedded in the semantic dimension of gender are addressed in the following section. 2.2

Towards a hermeneutical reading of grammatical gender

If we intend to question both linguistic and social structures, we need to deal with the structuralist-only vision of gender. Indeed, although the institutionalisation of gender in language and society is beyond any doubt, the limitation of a structuralist paradigm prevents us from a complex comprehension of gender. Structuralism has brought an indubitable and groundbreaking emphasis on relations to all academic fields which embrace it. This focus on relations rather than terminology allows the abandonment of the realm of essence and substance. In linguistics, structuralism allows a contrastive comprehension of gender categories. However, this internal linguistic point of view implies a monosemic understanding of gender contrast. Once defined as a structuralised relation, the meaning of gender cannot be negotiated and the making of gender as a categorisation and as a power relationship is evicted. This is an internalist reading of language, which could be defined as functionalist:7 language is a stable system made for communication, a homogeneous code that has to be reduced by linguists to its core in order to discover its internal laws. If such a mechanist approach in linguistics brings apparently a very inoffensive political stake (as we are speaking of sound’s determination, instead of people’s determination), the pitfall of structuralism lies in the logic-based comprehension of a language, making it a code which rids itself of its speakers. As a result, the linguistic structure passes from a modelisation proposal to a proclaimed reality which has to be fulfilled by the speakers.8 7. We use here functionalist in the sense of Martinet (1970, 1999), not as defined by Mathiessen and Halliday (2009). 8. We have to note here that such a formalist understanding of the linguistic structure is nowadays more and more challenged, and formalists pay an increasing attention to uses and variations.

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Given the fact that the social and the linguistic structures of gender are not equivalent, how should researches go beyond a mechanist and monosemic conception of gender opposition while maintaining the emphasis on its relations with both society and language? In other words, how can gender be grasped in its simultaneous structural (i.e. relational) and semiotic dimensions? To answer this question, we believe that both structuralist and post-structuralist approaches to gender in studies pertinent to social sciences and humanities are helpful in order to find a common ground shared by linguistic and extra-linguistic structuralisms: categorisation and meaning making. In classical Chinese, the polyseme bian means ‘to discuss’, ‘to argue’ (as in 辯), as well as ‘to distinguish’, ‘to cut up’, or sometimes ‘to divide’ (as in 辨), using in the ‘blade’ radical刂 (Cheng 1997, 97). We find in this polyseme a hermeneutical understanding of language: meaning making is categorisation itself. That is, language structure is not a set of rules which lay out an extra-linguistic and pre-semantic world; rather, language and discourse are “the place of social life and human affairs” (Rastier 2001, 111), the place where we negotiate realms of masculinity and femininity and develop gender categories. This is also a site where this attribution can be solidified through structuralisation, both in language and in society. This is why we propose that a semiotic definition of gender allows the understanding of gender both in its social and linguistic dimensions. Such designation of gender as a primary semantic category meets the propositions by Violi (1987) and Scott (1988), from a linguistic and a historical perspectives respectively. To verbalise gender, therefore, is then a way to signify gender in reality. In Butler’s words, the power of categorising gender takes part in the making of intelligibility (1990). Here, Butler echoes Whorf: We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do. (…) we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.  (Whorf 1940, 212)

This semiotic approach challenges the canonical Saussurean linguistics with regards to the langue/parole (or discourse) opposition and to the arbitrary/motivated opposition. Within this positioning, we give significance to the world through gender and we structuralise this categorisation in order to institutionalise and grammaticalise it. The resonance between Whorf and Butler puts forward the following statement: the performative categorisation of gender not only happens in discourse but also in the language structure itself. In this view, structure (langue) and discourse are not in a causal relationship (whatever being the cause or the consequence) but rather in a co-construction dynamic in the light of a power-relationship and of



A hermeneutical approach to gender linguistic materiality

a normative process. Structure, in this sense, is then a solidification of one of the possible categorisation proposals. The hermeneutical (or, interpretative) framework also invalidates the ­arbitrary/ motivated dichotomy based on the refusal of a pre-semantic extra-linguistic world. From the hermeneutic point of view, linguistic gender is never motivated by a prelinguistic gender nor a biological sex, and the arbitrary dimension of gender is the result of gender formalisation and institutionalisation. Rather, gender semantics is embodied in a language structure. Diverting from the notion that language is a mere representation of reality, one can investigate how gender takes linguistic materiality in language and how gender is linguistically institutionalised, normalised, structuralised, and included in languages which are commonly considered as genderless. Again, we need to reverse our standpoint from a syntactical point of departure into a semantic one; informed by micro-linguistics, we subsequently need to turn towards macro-linguistics. By referring to Rastier (2001), we can therefore consider language as a repository of semantic forms and contents. Paralleling the fact that gender varies through space and time, linguistic arrangement of gender varies from one language to another. Linguistic marking of “doing gender” (West and Zimmerman 1987) occurs in every language, and this is precisely how Rastier defines what a linguistic form is: it is transposable in nature (Rastier ibid.), and this implies that if we want to catch a glimpse of the gender form in a language, we need to look at how gender forms are transposed from a language to another. What we are suggesting in this chapter is therefore not to look at what is contained in the feminine or masculine category, but to look at how sensitive the distinctive process is in different contexts and languages. However, gender in its social-semiotic understanding bears another form of specificity. Not only is gender a categorisation, it is also a bi-categorisation. He-Yin Zhen, a Chinese feminist in the early twentieth century, recognises in this bicategorisation the fundamental process of gender (Liu, Karl and Ko 2013). She uses the concept of nannü youbie to shed light on the distinction as a founding act of categorising and gendering the world. She considers “the marking of the difference, the act of making something distinct” (Liu et al. 2013, 53) being prior to the distinction itself. According to Zhen, who developed the concept in 1901, gender is primarily a categorising process moulding power-relationships. This categorising power is deployed similarly in the social assignation to masculinity and femininity and in the linguistic structure of gender. Echoing this, Butler, at the end of the twentieth century, speaks of a matrix of intelligibility: “an open system of signs by which intelligibility is insistently created and contested” (1990, 184). To summarize, in the two theoretical sections above, a linguistic portrayal of gender has been drawn grounded in five dimensions: (1) scalarity of gender

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grammaticalisation, (2) semiotic dimension as the primary dimension of gender, (3) structuralisation as a solidification of the gender categorisation process, (4) definition of gender as a form, that is, a transposable relationship, and (5) Zhen’s nannü youbie, the dichotomous distinction as a power-process founding the gender categories. In order to take into account these different dimensions of gender in our analysis, a dedicated methodology has to be devised.

3. Methodological consequences: An inter-level and interlingual approach The conclusion drawn from the previous section leads to the abandonment of the notion of language without gender proposed by Hellinger and Bussmann (2001, 2002, 2003), to distinguish between languages within which gender is grammaticalised and others whose gender is only a semantic expression. Such a view relies on an understanding of the dichotomy between arbitrary and motivated gender. But what would be a semantically motivated content without a linguistic form? To answer this, we should explore the interaction between different linguistic levels, such as morphology, lexicon, syntax and discourse, where gender functions from a semiotic perspective. We suggest combining all the linguistic levels in this analysis. We understand what makes Hellinger and Bussmann distinguish between languages with and without grammatical categories of gender, but we assume in this current study that this dichotomous distinction, i.e. syntax vs. other linguistic levels, is not useful for the development of a critical methodology of gender and of language studies beyond the level-by-level approach. On the contrary, the interplay between ideology and linguistic materiality makes language a space of reality negotiation (see Angenot 1982 for a detailed theorisation of this interplay). This positioning requires a consideration of the institutionalisation of gender in language as an inter-­linguistic levels continuum: linguistic gender is primarily a dichotomous semiotic notion (Violi 1987; Liu et al. 2013) more or less grammaticalised/formalised (Huddleston and Pullum 2008) depending on each language transposition (Rastier 2001). Furthermore, these notions of transposability and scalarity on a continuum lead us to a contrastive approach. The articulation between intra-linguistic and extra-linguistic understanding of gender as two simultaneous dimensions of the categorial processes of masculinity and femininity has been discussed above; such background has paved the way for the addition of an interlingual dimension to the two-faceted analytical framework. By transposing gender from one language to another, the potential variations of the masculine-feminine relationship can be revealed. This is an attempt to work on the plasticity of gender forms across languages.



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By comparing two “non-gendered” (or covert-gendered) but distant languages, i.e. English and Cantonese, we formulate the hypothesis that it is possible to describe in relation the linguistic embedment of the semantics of gender in Cantonese. English in the current study is chosen as a contrastive language because of the wide range of well-described literature on its gender marking system (see Section 4 below), but also due to the postcolonial context of Hong Kong, where both Cantonese and English are commonly used. Indeed, the interlingual shift between the two languages is a common practice among Cantonese speakers. In various literature, the comparison of gender roles in different languages mainly concerns the overt and covert dimensions of a category. The overt categories concern grammaticalised features, while the covert categories (the cryptotypes) are not explicitly coded in grammar or lexicon, but rather emergent only in syntax and various usage patterns in the language (see Moser 1997 for an example of the use of these categories to describe gender in Mandarin). According to our theoretical framework, we use the notion of more or less grammaticalised categorisation (therefore, more or less marked signs) to outline the structuralisation at stake rather than the implicit or explicit character of gender. This contrastive research was conducted first on the linguistic description of gender in grammar and linguistic studies about English and Cantonese. However, we were careful during the comparison because of the paradox it entails: to build common tools in order to measure differences. This paradox contains a risk which has already been outlined in Whorf ’s work: The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar, like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of IndoEuropean is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.  (Whorf 1937, 87)

This risk is actually a risk of grammatical colonialism, by using the tools of Western linguistics to describe non-Western languages. However, a globalised academic world with hybridised linguistic analyses renders it difficult and almost impossible to segregate “pure” Western language evaluation from the non-Western ones without re-essentialising the scholarly traditions as endogenous and homogeneous. Rather, the contrastive approach should lead to an acknowledgement of the domination interplaying between languages and between linguistic knowledge. From this perspective, we can question our analytical framework instead of adopting it at any cost. The inter-level approach serves as a safeguard in the contrastive work. Indeed, looking at different linguistic levels simultaneously reduces the risk of focusing on already described phenomena only. To complete this comparison, gender shifts from one language to another were observed through a translational process. Given the categorisation of gender

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being different in English and Cantonese, the interlingual dynamics (defined as the move from one language to another) outline the gender form variation in each of the two languages. Thirty bilingual speakers were invited to translate twenty English sentences into written Cantonese. During translation, participants needed to transpose gender information from English to Cantonese. For this purpose, they sometimes disambiguated gender information; that is, they might either have added gender information or simply shunned it by erasing gender details. These translational moves help capture the different linguistic designs of gender as a semantic category, in English and Cantonese. This resonates with Lado’s Transfer Theory (1957) which seeks to describe how speakers transfer habits from one language structure to a different one. In order to address linguistic plasticity, we also need to scrutinise the descriptions of standard languages (or grammars) as non-standard productions. For this purpose, we need to find linguistic productions which are less subject to normative pressure. Written Cantonese is a relatively (re-)emerging variety without standardisation, legal or cultural recognition; this language therefore embodies a characteristic of under-normalisisation. The advantages of working on Cantonese are further presented in the dedicated section below. Lastly, there are two points which require clarification. First, the objective of this study is not to evaluate or score languages according to sexism. Whether gender is a cryptotype or a grammaticalised linguistic issue does not make it easier to deconstruct or to subvert. Rather, this study is about identifying the variety of forms which gender can endorse across languages. Second, we are not proving the universality of gender. What is of interest, we believe, is not the outline of the universally deep-rooted patterns by means of variation. On the contrary, the variation reveals the construction of gender as a power mechanism penetrating every dimension of social life. Following the line of Whorf, we seek to “experience an interruption of phenomena intherto held universal” in order to see the emergence of a whole new order of significance (Whorf, quoted in Pan and Tam 2007). In view of the above, this study relies on two sets of data. First, literature about gender in Cantonese and English languages, especially relevant discussion in grammar textbooks and syntatical studies, is examined (Sections 4 and 5). This critical review of gender analyses within these two linguistic structures reveals the criteria and theoretical realms used for specific gender analyses in English and Cantonese. It also provides an insight into the debates framing these analyses. Second, a corpus-driven analysis is presented in Section 6 based on a survey regarding an English-Cantonese translation task. This part enables the juxtaposition of the syntactical literature with actual uses.



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4. Linguistic gender in English While the literature on Gender and Language is predominantly written in English, the scholarship concerning linguistic gender in English language structure remains scattered (see Silverstein 1985; Baron 1986; Corbett 1991), not to mention a feminist approach to the topic (Cameron 1992; Hellinger and Bussmann 2001; Romaine 2001; Motschenbacher 2010; Pauwels 2010), especially when compared with the multifarious works in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. We then believe there is a need to merge more tightly the study of the linguistic spaces and the study of the categorical power of gender in English. Corbett (1991) puts forward three spaces in terms of “levels”: i. semantic level: terms with a gender connotation or overtone: bishop, nurse, whore, handsome, cute, or wallet/purse. Here, gender is secondary semantic information; ii. lexical level: human-referred terms with a gender denotation: boy, mother, uncle, wife and composition. Unsurprisingly, most of these terms imply a relationship, while gender is the relation between masculine and feminine. Here, gender is primary semantic information; iii. morphosyntactical level: agreement phenomena such as pronominal anaphoric control: he, she and some derivations: actor/actress). Silverstein (1985) moves away from a linguistic level analysis and proposes an analysis by “dimensions” based on the different dimensions of language: i. structural dimension; ii. pragmatic dimension; iii. ideological dimension. Motschenbacher (2010, 64f), mixing a level and dimension approaches, suggests the following classification: i. ii. iii. iv.

lexical gender; social gender; grammatical gender; referential gender.

These different classifications of gender of the English language which incorporate social, or ideological, and structural dimensions are in favour of a hermeneutical reading of language. Hence, we argue here that an analysis of gender and language, and gender in language, will be benefitted if such a reading from a linguistic and feminist/gender perspective is adopted.

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One can read in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language that “the basis of the distinction between different sorts of name is not necessarily the sex of the referent” (Huddleston and Pullum 2008), as illustrated by the comparison of he/she/it with who/which, within which gender functions as a grammatical classifier in English. Unlike “gendered languages”, such as Romance languages, the grammatical role of gender in English is not to classify the entire lexicon but to distinguish between the animate and the inanimate, and the above demonstrates that gender in English encompasses a grammatical function. It also implies that, in the English language, the human/non-human feature is a primary signified, while gender is a secondary signified. The discussion above is presented in Table 4, within which gender is embedded in broader grammaticalised semantic processes: Table 4.  Morphosyntactical classifiers in English with semantic roles Singular

Plural

Human (animate) Masculine he/him/his

Non-human (inanimate) Feminine she/her/her

(Neutral) it/it/its

they/them/their

Well-known diachronic elements reveal that this grammaticality of gender in English are residual tracks of a past stronger grammaticality: Old English had three grammatical genders – masculine, feminine and neuter – and all inanimate nouns belonged to one of the three classes, sometimes for morphological reasons but often for no obvious reason.  (Curzan 2003, 12)

The famous “werewolf example” of wereman and wifman (see Cameron 1985) is a lexical mark of this past grammaticalisation.

5. Linguistic gender in Cantonese Since the late 1990s, the academic conversation on gender issues in Cantonese as a language has been expanding. Similar to the literature about English, studies of Cantonese are mostly dedicated to the representation of women and men in different contexts: business (Schnurr 2008, 2010), advertisement landscape (Fung 2006; Kang 2008), textbooks (Law and Chan 2004; Lee and Collins 2008; Yang 2011) or on the Internet (Kang and Chen 2012). To a lesser extent, there are also some works on the linguistic practices with regard to the speakers’ gender (Chan 1999). It is not surprising that languages whose gender is little grammaticalised are rarely described from a linguistic point of view and are rather studied as an issue



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pertinent to sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. However, as one of the assumptions given in our introduction, the linguistic forms are also a place for gender embedment. Some Cantonese grammar textbooks, therefore, inform how parts of speech are associated with gender. In this section, we draws on a major grammar reference targeting at learners of Cantonese, Cantonese: a comprehensive grammar by Matthews and Yip (1994). Before comparing the gender embedment in English to that of Cantonese, some sociolinguistic elements of the Cantonese language should be introduced in order to contextualise the following linguistic analysis. 5.1

Sociolinguistic elements of Cantonese

With more than 62 million speakers in the world (Lewis, Simons and Fennig 2014), Cantonese (also known as Yue or Gwongzau Waa) is mostly spoken in the south-eastern part of China, e.g. Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Guangxi and Macau, and the use of Cantonese in Hong Kong is chosen to be our exclusive focus. Ceded by China to the United Kingdom in the late nineteenth century for almost one hundred years, Hong Kong’s history in the twentieth century was quite separated from Mainland China. 1997, the year of Hong Kong’s handover to China, marked the commencement of a fifty-year transitional period before Hong Kong fully belongs to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Hong Kong is therefore nowadays a transitional, postcolonial and multilingual city. According to the Census and Statistics Department of Hong Kong government (2012), Cantonese has been the usually spoken language of 89% of the Hong Kong population for the past 20 years. This is one of the three official languages adopted by the government of Hong Kong besides English and Mandarin. Cantonese in Hong Kong is “clearly the most omnipresent [language] used in Hong Kong schools, media, government, business, and daily life” (Snow 2004, 1). Yet, Hong Kong “has not had an organisation formally assigned the job of monitoring or directing the development of Cantonese speech” (Bauer 1988, 285), which is still true in the twenty-first century. The language planning in Hong Kong consists mainly of maintaining a high standard of English and/or promoting Mandarin literacy, but nowhere it is on the agenda to promote Cantonese − it only functions as the major medium of instruction in some, but not all, primary and secondary schools. Cantonese is thus a non-institutionalised major language used by citizens in the Asian cosmopolitan city. Such a situation creates a singular relation between the languages in presentia. Poon (2004) speaks of a triglossic situation, within which English is the highstandard variety, while Mandarin and Cantonese are the low-standard varieties. Snow (2004) describes the Hong Kong triglossia as follows:

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– English – for international communication purposes – value = prestigious (vs. Cantonese and Mandarin) – Mandarin – for most of the Chinese written communication purposes – value = official, serious (vs. Cantonese) – Cantonese – for most oral interactions in Hong Kong and informal written communication – value = informal This informal status of Cantonese is the reason of the absence of standardisation. Yet, some linguistic descriptions, where we can find identification of gender, are available. 5.2

Lexicon: Relational terms and keys

Lexicon is the most noticeable site where gender is marked in Cantonese. There are of course several relational pairs primarily referring to gender: (1) a. 男 naam49 ‘man’ b. 女 neoi5 ‘woman’ c. 仔 zai2 ‘son’ d. 女 neoi5 ‘daughter’

Besides, “gender keys” such as 女 neoi and 男 naam can be used as a compositional prefix: (2) a. 女醫生 neoi-jisang b. 男醫生 naam-jisang c. 女老師 neoi-lousi d. 男老師 naam-lousi

‘female doctor’10 ‘male doctor’ ‘female teacher’ ‘male teacher’

Since the gender keys encode primarily gender information (man/woman [affix]), they can also be used as lexical items by themselves (man/woman [word]). On a lexical level, Cantonese is therefore very similar to English, with primary gendered terms referring to relationship and kinship, genderable terms by the addition of a gender prefix (e.g. ‘female doctor’ 女醫生), and a major part of the lexicon being unmarked. 9. Cantonese pinyin is given with reference to the Chinese Character Database of the Chinese University of Hong Kong http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-can/ 10. Yip suggests that such constructions may have appeared under Western language influence (personal communication 2013). See below for a designated discussion of this point.



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At the crossroad of lexicon and ideology, it is of interest to note that the egalitarian rhetoric and ideology in post-1949 China fought against feminine marks both in language and behaviour. For example, the oppositional pair 妻子/丈夫 qīzi/zhàngfu ‘wife / husband’ was replaced by a new term: 愛人 àirén ‘spouse’ or ‘lover’ in Mainland China. However, such linguistic interventions have never happened in Hong Kong. Rather, there has been a subversive reaction against this neutralisation process. For example, the term 同志 tóngzhì ‘comrade’ which was used during the Cultural Revolution in Mainland China in the 1960s–70s is today commonly used in Hong Kong and Taiwan for auto-reference in gay communities, and this new and subverted meaning has in turn impacted on its original use in Mainland China (Wong 2005; Kane 2006). 5.3

Morphology: Sentence particles

The lexical classification in Cantonese is of high complexity: there are quantifiers, measure words and classifiers of different kinds (e.g. sortal classifiers, general classifiers, verbal classifiers, nominal classifiers). According to Erbaugh (2002), these classifiers were originally semantic-based, but are nowadays formalised and endorsed several functions, such as classification, individuation, referentiality and relation (see Erbaugh 2002 for a detailed account of Cantonese classifiers). As stated by Grinevald (1999) and Corbett (1991), it is rare to find languages presenting both a classifier system and a gender/noun class system. However, as shown above, the total distribution of the lexicon within a gender system is only the extreme of gender grammaticalisation. In fact, a brief overview of the functions of certain sentence particles in Cantonese can sufficiently reveal that some classifiers have something to do with gender. Cantonese attaches sentence particles, which are nominal and adjectival suffixes, to gender-neutral or meaning-making terms to specify generic information or represent gender identities. Here are a few examples excerpted from the aforementioned grammar volume by Matthews and Yip (1994) which illustrates the marking of gender with sentence particles: (3) a. 佬 lou2 a colloquial suffix for masculine referents. e.g.: 鬼佬 gwai-lou ‘western male foreigner’ b. 婆 po4 a colloquial suffix for feminine referents. e.g.: 鬼婆 gwai-po ‘western female foreigner’ c. 仔 zai2 a suffix indicating smallness for masculine or generic terms. e.g.: 香港仔hoenggong-zai ‘Hong Kong people’ (generic meaning) 花仔 faa-zai ‘flower boy in wedding’ (masculine meaning) d. 女 neoi5 a suffix indicating smallness for feminine terms. e.g.: 花女 fa-neoi ‘flower girl in wedding’

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From the above examples, it can be seen that there is a morphologisation of lexicon to mark gender in Cantonese. In Grinevald’s terms, we are here facing a classifier system, within which gender can be added. Indeed, there are a number of sentence particles in this open system which are not assigned to nouns, and each noun may bear different sentence particles. Gender is therefore partially a grammatical object along the lexical axis of the continuum. However, the above statement has to be contextualised. The morphological and the lexical levels of Cantonese, which is predominantly a non-inflectional language, can easily overlap. To add the female key or sentence particle 女 before a character can either be a composition or an inflection. This written system allows to analyse the level of gender marking according to the number of compounds: – in 女仔 neoi-zai ‘girl’, the feminine key 女 is a compound, that is a lexical item, taking part in a compositional process – in 嫁 gaa3 ‘girl marrying someone’, the feminine part is included in the compound and therefore falls under an inflectional process, in the realm of morphogy. Moser addresses this issue in Mandarin when he discusses the limit of a compound: the principle of affixation functions differently in Chinese than in English. (…) Does the prefix nü ‘female’ in compounds like nüshen result in these being perceived psycholinguistically as analytical two-word phrases corresponding to the English ‘female god’, or as more tightly-bound chunks like ‘goddess’?  (Moser 1997, 16)

The number of compounds remains the sole criterion to distinguish between lexicalisation and grammaticalisation. 5.4

Syntax: The written pronominal system and its evolution

If the morphological realm gives more room to gender in Cantonese than in English, the syntactical space reverses the trend. Due to its isolating tendency, the Cantonese pronoun system contrasts with that of English which does not adopt inflections, neither for gender, case nor animated feature: “The pronouns have a single form for subject or object. There are no separate forms for the genitive (possessive) pronoun” (Matthews and Yip 1994, 80). Inflection, if it happens in Cantonese, concerns number only. However, despite this assertion, we can also read in Cantonese grammar that the second-person singular Cantonese pronoun nei5 (‘you’) could vary in gender when it is written (Matthews and Yip, op. cit). The most common character in use remains the masculine form 你 for referring to both genders. However, 你 and 妳



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(the second-person singular pronouns of male and female respectively) are commonly used in written Cantonese. The masculine/generic radical亻is replaced by the feminine radical 女, changing the pronoun from 你 to 妳. The character 妳 thus specifies the feminine gender of the second-person singular pronoun. Yip and Matthews (ibid.) also note a very rare phenomenon that a gender variation could also appear in the written form of the third-person singular pronoun. 5.4.1 Linguistic version of the tradition/modernisation opposition In order to explain such a graphical variation in an isolating language within the written system is largely minor in regard to the spoken system, a socio-syntactical discussion about the evolution of Mandarin and its meta-discourses is needed. In the course of the twentieth century, while experiencing some (violent) colonial encounters with the West, China was concurrently infused with a range of western ideologies such as socialism, liberalism, anarchism, evangelism, social Darwinism (see Cheng 1997; and Liu et al. 2013 for a more detailed account of this ideological explosion). These new upheavals happened on a controversial ground, particularly within the youth who were fighting against imperialism. The political divide was then weaved around the tension between modernity and tradition, interestingly embedding in a new era a progressive stance inherited from and influenced by the past conservative empire. This political embodiment was transposed and translated into the linguistic realm. On the modernist side, Mandarin was strongly depreciated because of its isolating features. These features were considered less evolved and less civilised than an inflectional language. The progressive New Youth movement perceived it as an impediment to modernisation: “Chinese intellectuals agonised over the nation’s sad fate and quite a few became convinced that one major, if not the sole cause, which prevented China from modernising itself was its language” (Lee 2008, 69). Simultaneously, the high complexity of its written system, which was seen as a sophisticated symbol of the Chinese tradition, was treasured and maintained by the conservative wing. The writing simplification reform originated from this debate. Starting with the New Youth movement in the early twentieth century, with the support from intellectuals such as Ba Jin (Snow 2004), Chinese language simplification was achieved by the Communist Party (Bourgeois 1978) in the 1960s, and the simplified form was added an emphasis on facilitating cultural and literacy access. Here is an example comparing traditional and simplified characters: (4) Traditional: 我到過美國 Simplified: 我到过美国 Mandarin Pinyin: wǒ dàoguo měi guó English translation: ‘I have been to America’

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It is important to note that Hong Kong and Taiwan do not share the communist history of Mainland China and have always been using traditional characters in reading and writing.11 Under the rule of the British government, the insistence on the use of Cantonese and traditional Chinese characters instead of Mandarin and simplified characters was even supported as a tool against China. The use of traditional characters may therefore not be an instrument to maintain Chinese tradition (as there is no such thing as a high variety of Cantonese in Hong Kong) but rather a colonial strategy of the British government and an identity marker of Hong Kong Chinese. 5.4.2 The Westernisation debate Beyond the simplification of the writing system, the traditional complexity and the isolating feature of the Chinese language led in the 1930s some intellectuals to pursue a modernisation of their mother tongue through westernisation: “A good [Chinese] vernacular language is a westernised one” (Fu Sinian, quoted in Peyraube 2001). The creation of a written feminine pronoun in this frame supported a will to westernise, or “civilise”, language and subsequently society by using the narrative of the liberation of women and identifying Barbary with the masculine domination as a measure.12 This colonial narrative still exists elsewhere nowadays – for example, it has been used to justify the western military intervention in Afghanistan. Another hypothesis of the appearance of this new written gendered pronoun, which is also linked to a Western influence, is the presence of Jesuits missionaries in China who described the inflectional grammar of Chinese using the analytical tools traditionally for Western linguistics. Regardless of whether such gender pronoun invention came from Chinese intellectuals, Jesuit missionaries or a Western linguistic and colonial ideology, this linguistic phenomenon is consensually known as “westernisation”. However, Peyraube (1999) makes a relevant point on the westernisation of the Chinese language. If the Chinese grammars since the Ma shi wen tong (1898) were indeed influenced by Western grammars (and among them the Port-Royal grammar), this influence concerned Chinese linguistics rather than the Chinese language itself. Through a study of the history of language, Peyraube proves that the so-called westernised forms were attested long before any regular contacts with the West: “the influence of Western languages on the emergence of new grammatical structures in Chinese from the second half of the nineteenth century was nearly inexistent” (2001, 25). The Westernisation of Chinese language was therefore more 11. Cantonese and Mandarin are two non-mutually understandable languages. However, they share the same scriptural system, respectively in traditional and simplified versions. 12. See He-Yin Zhen’s texts, edited by Liu, Karl and Ko (2013) for a precise description of the Chinese reception of Western narratives about women’s liberation.



A hermeneutical approach to gender linguistic materiality

of a language planning project than a syntactical evolution due to linguistic contacts. Yang Zijian has a similar observation: Chinese intellectuals, mindful to their mission to empower China with tools that will take the country to modernization, signified by military might and economic strength, have wasted no time in taking their cue from the West. [… they looked hard] to establish a Chinese linguistics system based on the Western model.  (Yang 2007, 4)

Starting from the Ma shi Wen tong, Indo-European linguistic theories [were] introduced in [Chinese Linguistics], in particular two significant grammatical categories that have no equivalent in Chinese: word and sentence, not to mention a string of other categories such as gender, number case, tense, aspect, voice, person, mood, noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, adverb.  (Yang id.)

Westernisation, as a language planning rather than a linguistic evolution, therefore resulted in gender marking in Mandarin. Kane notes that in the first half of the twentieth century, there were “attempts to introduce words such as yi (for ‘her’) or tuō (for ‘it’). But these attempts failed” (Kane 2006, 107). Such effort to visibilise women corresponded to a gender ideology which would be replaced in the second half of the twentieth century by a neutralisation strategy, following the Maoist egalitarian collectivist ideology of making “the woman a worker as others”, as the motto went. Supplying further illustrations of this attempt, Peyraube dates the appearance of distinctive characters for the third person singular pronoun from 1917: “It sounds likely that the graphic distinction between masculine 他 taa1 ‘he’, feminine 她 taa1 ‘she’ and neutral 它 taa1 ‘it’ is dated from 1917, as suggested by Wang Li (1947, 368)” (2001, 23). Moser dates it from the May Fourth Movement in 1919. It remains unclear if the change was introduced for egalitarian purposes (understanding the generic as primary masculine and therefore a need for women visibilisation) or a will to strengthen the gender order by remasculinising the masculine in contrast to the feminine (shifting thus from a gender-inclusive masculine to a gender-exclusive one). The pronominal gender variation in Chinese is therefore a relatively new morphosyntactical feature, specific to the written system. As for Cantonese, Egerod (1982, 803) writes that the generic morpheme khoey4 (or keoi5; a third-person singular pronoun) − but not the corresponding character 佢 − has a history spanning about three thousand years. Concerning the writing system, the third-person pronoun is precisely one of the differences Bauer (1988) identifies between written Cantonese and written Mandarin. Among a classification of the formation process of Cantonese characters, the third-person pronoun resulted from a character creation to represent a Cantonese morpheme, as shown in Table 5, quoted from Bauer (1988):

111

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Table 5.  Third person pronoun in Written and Spoken Cantonese (Bauer 1988) Cantonese character

Cantonese pronunciation

English gloss

Standard Chinese character equivalent

Putonghua pronunciation

佢

khoey.4

‘h’

他

ta.1

Hence, if this Cantonese morpheme has a three thousand-year history, if the spreading of written Cantonese is a relatively recent phenomenon, and if gendered pronouns appeared in written Chinese not until the early twentieth century, one can reasonably form the hypothesis that the gendering of the written pronominal system of Cantonese is posterior to the gendering of the Mandarin pronominal system. Therefore, what we are dealing with in this project is a recent gender distinction on a language evolution scale which is not necessarily a western importation and is still little spread. More recently, Moser has been concerned with the more frequent adoption of a rather new gendered second-person pronoun in Hong Kong and Taiwan. She condemns it as a de-genericisation, or rather a masculinisation of the generic pronoun: More and more people (mainly in Taiwan and Hong Kong) are beginning to use a relatively new character for the second-person singular 妳 (ni, ‘you [female]’) with the female radical (女) which is in opposition to the formerly gender-neutral character ni with the ‘person’ radical (你). Thus, the exact same gender inequality has been expanded to this case, as well. The character 你 now refers to either males or those of unspecified gender (or [plural]), whereas the character 妳 can only refer to females.  (Moser 1997, 12)

Hence, a historicised reading of syntax shows that English and Cantonese present reverse tendencies regarding gender grammaticalisation, with a late and light genderisation of grammar in Cantonese (especially pronominal system) and a gender loss in the English syntax. After this brief review of gender in English and Cantonese grammars, we can now turn towards gender marking in use in the light of interlingual shifts.

6. Gender translation: An English/Cantonese comparative survey 6.1

Corpus presentation

We have seen above that gender is present in different linguistic levels in Cantonese and English, with an opposite diachronic evolution. To pursue the investigation, thirty bilingual respondents who are native Cantonese speakers were invited to translate twenty sentences from written English to written Cantonese. As mentioned in Section 3, the translation survey was designed to observe the gender



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form in Cantonese. For this purpose, the English sentences devised for translation included various types of human-referred terms (nouns, pronouns, anaphora, sentence subjects or objects, genitives, singular and plural nouns, etc.), non-human animate referred terms, generic terms, etc. Deictics were also included to test their influence on respondents’ understanding of gender elements in Cantonese (e.g. I’m an actress). In order not to explicitly direct respondents’ attention to gender, decoy sentences without any gender information were included and the survey was plainly presented to the respondents as a study about English-Cantonese translation and sentence length. Prior to the presentation of the research outcomes, it is necessary to rationalise our choice of researching into the written form of Cantonese instead of the spoken one. 6.2 Written Cantonese: Contextualisation13 The spoken/written relation in Hong Kong is of high complexity. Indeed, most Cantonese speakers speak Cantonese, but Standard Chinese (i.e. the written form of Mandarin) is the “written variety of Chinese taught in Hong Kong schools and most often used in Hong Kong society” (Snow 2004, 2). However, if a Cantonese speaker simply reads aloud a sentence of Standard Chinese, communication could be impeded: some changes in grammar and wording are needed since Cantonese and Mandarin are two languages with considerable differences in terms of syntax and lexicon without shared understanding. This is therefore a very distinctive situation in Hong Kong, with speakers who mostly read and write in a language other than the one they actually speak. In other words, the primary written language of Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong people is not the primary spoken language of the community. Based on this situation, a “biliterate-trilingual policy” was launched in 1997. “Biliterate” stands for English and Standard Chinese literacy, while “trilingual” stands for English, Mandarin and Cantonese proficiency (Poon 2004). Yet, written Cantonese exists. According to Bauer, “written Cantonese and written Standard Chinese are two related but mutually-unintelligible written Chinese languages − just as the spoken languages (or dialects) are clearly-related but mutually-unintelligible” (1988, 249). They “coexist in a complex relationship that is both symbiotic (e.g., [Cantonese] borrows standard characters when necessary) yet separate: it gets its streak of independent development from spoken 13. We rely heavily in this section on the works of Snow (2004) and Bauer (1988), which are the major (and almost exclusive) studies available about written Cantonese. We have to, however, express reservations about Snow’s reference. Although it is indisputably a pioneer and groundbreaking work providing a relevant sociolinguistic overview on written Cantonese, it misses a solid analysis based on linguistic facts. We thus use this reference for its general information.

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Cantonese which is unintelligible with Putonghua [i.e. Mandarin]” (op. cit., 277). To write in Cantonese is then an attempt to bridge the lexical gap between Cantonese speech and written Standard Chinese. Written Cantonese is in fact a re-emergent variety. Snow observes, “since the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644), hundreds of inexpensive editions of books of verse using Cantonese have been published” (2004, 6). Today, one witnesses an important spread of written Cantonese since the 1970s, going hand in hand with an economic and cultural transition, characterised by the growth of the mass media and printing technology (Snow 2004) and the emergence of a Hongkongese identity (Ku 2001). In 1988, Bauer already mentioned a strong development of the written Cantonese conventions, which constitute a widespread use within a large Cantonese linguistic community. Snow (2004, 61) highlights the growth of: i. the use of Cantonese in mixed texts (using Cantonese and Mandarin) ii. the Cantonese literature iii. the different genres within it which it is possible to use Cantonese (generally related to oral literature). Through times, written Cantonese appears in various scriptural objects, such as wooden fish songs, love songs from the early nineteenth century, contemporary diary-format paperback novels, Cantonese opera transcripts which are still very widespread, cartoons, street and newspaper advertisements, newspaper articles, TV dramas and digital conversation (e.g. in ICQ, Whatsapp, email), to name a few (Snow 2004). This informal dimension of Cantonese echoes an important part of the Hong Kong population’s feeling which is more inclined to Hongkongese than Chinese – A 2012 South China Morning Post survey concluded that only 17% of the people in Hong Kong identified themselves as Chinese. The 1970s were the starting point when a majority of Hongkongers were born in Hong Kong, contrasting the previous generation which consists predominantly of immigrants from the Chinese mainland or other Asian countries. In such a context, to write in Cantonese brings a young and trendy overtone as well as a political gesture against the communist PRC government.14 From a linguistic point of view, written Cantonese heavily borrows words from English and syntactical features from Mandarin and has minimal stability (Matthews and Yip 1994). According to Matthews and Yip:

14. This statement seems to have been socially actualised in view of the recent events happening in Hong Kong in Autumn 2014 as a reaction against the potential intrusion of PRC in Hong Kong’s political reform. It is, however, too early to make any claim regarding Hong Kong’s identity shift and its influences on the use of written Cantonese in the city.



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written Cantonese is not very standardized in the sense of a widespread agreement as to which characters should be used to represent which words [although some dictionaries are published]. In fact it is not unusual for two or even more different characters to be in widespread use even for fairly common Cantonese words. (Matthews and Yip 1994, 57)

Yet, besides this outbreak of written Cantonese, a perception of Cantonese as a socially devaluated language emerges. When Cantonese is studied as a written language, Lo and Wong (1990) demonstrate that written Cantonese is perceived as a feature of popular media, and therefore, of a low standard, while written Standard Chinese is seen as a more prestigious press feature, which therefore represent a high variety. Snow assumes that Hong Kong speakers often perceive the distinction between written Cantonese and written Standard Chinese not as two different languages but as two distinct registers (Snow 2004, 62); Bauer chronicles the following story when he was conducting a study on Cantonese: I asked subjects to read aloud a story which had been written out in colloquial Cantonese with Cantonese characters used to represent Cantonese morphemes; most of the subjects performed this task without hesitation, but a few were amazed by this story and, with great seriousness, informed me that Cantonese was not a written language.  (Bauer 1988, 286)

In 2012 when the corpus of the current study was collated, the same reactions from respondents were encountered. A lot of respondents in our sample noted before starting the written translation task that Cantonese is a spoken variety instead of a written language. Some of them even filled in the questionnaires in written Standard Chinese despite being constantly reminded to respond in written Cantonese. When we asked the sample if the task was difficult, some responded that the task was manageable since Cantonese is their native tongue, while some reflected that it was interesting but challenging since they rarely wrote Cantonese. The under-normalisation and little stability of written Cantonese make it a particularly fruitful hub to test the plasticity of linguistic categories. The peripheral dimension of the language variety opens avenues for experimenting the potentiality of gender marking in the language. 6.3

Data analysis

First of all, the corpus shows important variations in translation from one respondent to another. Some of these variations embed mistakes. For example, a third-person pronoun was translated into a first-person pronoun, and some lexical items were wrongly transcribed, e.g. fisherman instead of fireman. This confirms the unfixity of written Cantonese, the absence of prescriptive tools and also the absence of norms

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at stake. Once mistakes are isolated, two other parts of speech are especially subject to variation, i.e. pronouns and possessive determiners, as shown in Tables 6 and 7. Table 6.  Pronoun variations Nature of pronoun

Number of occurrences

Number of form

1st pers. sg 1st pers. pl. 2nd pers. sg. / pl. 3rd pers. sg. feminine 3rd pers. sg. masculine 3rd pers. sg. animate 3rd pers. pl.

120 occurrences 58 occurrences 90 occurrences 119 occurrences 89 occurrences 11 occurrences 57 occurrences

1 form 1 form 5 forms 8 forms 6 forms 1 form 1 form

Table 7.  Possessive determiner variation Nature of determiner

Number of occurrences

Number of form

1st pers. possessor 2nd pers. possessor 3rd pers. sg. F. possessed / M. possessor 3rd pers. sg. M. possessed / F. possessor

30 occurrences 30 occurrences 30 occurrences 30 occurrences

1 form 3 forms 5 forms 4 forms

It is interesting to note that variations mostly occur in gendered characters. 6.3.1 Pronouns Second-person singular pronoun; ‘You are beautiful’. The standard second-­person singular pronoun 你 nei5 ‘you’ is most often used in the corpus. However, among other forms, the variation 妳 nei5, consisting of the feminine stem 女, appears twice in the translation of the sentence. These results are in accordance with grammar description and previous literature on linguistics (Moser 1997; Matthews and Yip 1994). In this case, the gender information is specific to Cantonese, as the source sentence in English does not offer any gender marking. The feminine version of the pronoun is therefore not hinted or constrained by the task which the respondents were expected to translate. We can thus deduce that this free variation reveals a potential grammaticalisation of the pronoun at the speakers’ convenience and their interpretation of the association between gender and some adjectives, like “beautiful” in this case. Third-person singular pronoun, Forms of keoi5. According to Cantonese grammar, the third-person singular pronoun 佢 keoi5 is a generic form. In our corpus, 75% and 80% of the respondents respectively translated the third-person



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feminine pronoun ‘she’ and the third-person masculine pronoun ‘he’ into the same Cantonese pronoun 佢. In this case, the translational process shows eradication of gender information. It is noteworthy that gender shunning is slightly more frequent for ‘he’ (80%) than for ‘she’ (75%). This implies that the generic facet of a pronoun is more easily associated with the masculine than the feminine, the latter of which needs more effort to be specified. These observations meet Michard’s hypothesis about French that the masculine semantically encodes primarily /human/ and secondarily /­male/, while the feminine encodes primarily /female/, and secondarily /human/ (1999). Moser (1997) draws the same conclusion for Mandarin. After studying a corpus of jokes in Chinese, he demonstrates that rén ‘person’ is a covert masculine lexical item: the unmarked generic takes the role of a generic, while the feminine, as marked, is restricted to women; and “‘persons’ are by large men and thus this is the female that is perceived as requiring a special marking” (Moser 1997, 13). 20–25% of the translation of English pronouns displays respondents’ individual strategies to maintain and/or highlight gender features. Such realisation illustrates the intrinsic possibility of adding gender to Cantonese pronouns which are normally not inflectional. We are witnessing here the plasticity of the pronominal category through potential realisation of gender in grammar. It has to be kept in mind, nevertheless, that such realisation occurred because of certain translation constraints and the unfixity of written Cantonese. What, hence, are the gendering strategies employed by the respondents to intentionally express gender information? Four strategies can be found in total: i. Some speakers removed the ‘person’ radical亻from the male/generic pronoun 佢 and affixed the feminine radical 女 to the phonetic component 巨 geoi6, generating a new feminine pronoun: 姖 geoi6. Interestingly enough, the character 姖, which is the name of a mountain in Mainland China, was transformed by some respondents for a new purpose: to explicitly indicate the feminine gender of a third-person singular noun. ii. Some respondents used Chinese (Mandarin) third-person pronouns: 她 taa1 [feminine] and 他 taa1 [masculine] to translate ‘she’ and ‘he’ respectively. iii. Other respondents chose lexicalised forms to translate the English pronouns. Examples are as follows: (5) 個女仔 go-neoizai  ‘this girl’ 女仔 neoizai ‘girl’ 佢女朋友 keoi-neoipangjau ‘his/her girlfriend’ 男仔 naamzai ‘boy’ 男嘅 naamge ‘this man’s’

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The data provided above indicate that, although the process of genderisation is triggered by the task, different possibilities regarding the marking and unmarking of gender and the ways of marking it emerge (that is, borrowing from Chinese, lexicalisation of feminisation by neologism). The results of the translation of second- and third-person pronouns show that the written Cantonese pronominal system potentially contains gender marks. The heterogeneity of strategies deployed by the respondents makes gender a prospective classifier. Anaphora: Tony, Jenny and the dog. We could see in the above examples that some pronouns are potentially “genderable” at the respondents’ convenience. What actually happens within an ambiguous anaphoric context, where gender information is relevant regarding the syntactical organisation of English, can be interpreted through the translation of the following sentence: Tony and Jenny are going to Macau. He wants to try the egg tart there, while she wants to do some sightseeing.

Twelve respondents out of thirty refused the available anaphoric options but rather chose a nominal resumption. This is the sign of reluctance to mark gender on the pronoun while maintaining gender information. The most common pattern of translation of the second part of the above sentence is equivalent in English to: ‘Tony wants to… while Jenny wants to’ which features the repetition of the two proper nouns instead of replacing them with pronouns. Seven respondents chose to ignore the gender information of the source sentence by using the same pronoun 佢 for the two anaphora. An English word-forword equivalent of the Cantonese translation would be ‘They wants to … while they wants to’.15 Nine in the sample alternately used nominal and pronominal forms in order to disambiguate the anaphoric distribution, rendering some versions of translation equivalent to ‘Tony wants to … while she / they wants to’ or ‘He/they wants to… while Jenny wants to’. In this case, the respondents avoided gender grammaticalisation (pronominalisation) while maintaining the semantic gender distinction. Only one respondent highlighted the gender of ‘Tony’ and ‘Jenny’ by means of the gendered pronouns 佢 and 姖 respectively. A majority of respondents adopted strategies to maintain the gender information, without resorting to anaphora. These strategies are lexicalisation or alternation between lexical and pronominal items. In this case, pronominal gendering is marginalised. In this sentence:

The dog is tired now because it played all day.

15. Here, we intentionally use the singular implication of ‘they’ to render the generic dimension.



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The anaphora concerns a non-human animate referent. Eleven respondents used 佢 as the translation of ‘it’. This result corroborates the findings of Chan (2001) who discovers that the pronoun 佢 encodes primarily an animate feature rather than a human or gender feature. With reference to Michard (1999) and Chan (2001), it therefore seems that the pronoun 佢 bears a semantic organisation relying on a primary vs. secondary meaning while having a central vs. peripheral meaning. Figure  1 represents the semantic repartition, with the biggest circle representing the primary meaning, and the darkest circle representing the most central meaning. Primary and central meanings are amalgamated through the generic dimension. Animate Human Masculine

Figure 1.  Semantic organisation of the pronoun 佢

6.3.2 Genitive The gender allocation in genitive marking was also investigated through the following sentence:

She is his friend.

Twenty-six out of thirty respondents (87%) erased the gender information in the translational process and made use of the “generic” implication of 佢 for ‘she’, and 佢, 佢個 keoi-go or 佢嘅 keoi-ge for ‘his’ (個 go3 and 嘅 ge3 encode the genitive), where no mark of gender appeared. Only one respondent marked the masculine by translating the genitive ‘his friend’ into 呢個男仔 neigo-naamzai, within which the two latter Chinese characters ­男仔 together mean ‘boy’ (a word-for-word transliteration equivalent would be: ‘they is the boy’s friend’). In three translated sentences, the feminine feature of the subject ‘she’ was maintained using either the invented pronoun 姖 or the written Standard Chinese feminine pronoun 她, or: (6) 個 女 仔 go- neoi zai [genitive] [female] [boy] ‘the boy’s girl’

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These results confirm the tendency of Cantonese to shun gender information in grammatical morphemes such as subject and genitive pronouns. It appears that in rare cases where gender was maintained, it was done on the nominative pronoun rather than the genitive. In the above example, we again witness a phenomenon that, whichever genderisation strategy is adopted, feminine identities are more frequently specified than the masculine.

Her boyfriend is an American.

Similarly, when dealing with ‘her’, 96% of the translation of the above sentence displays a neutral third-person mark 佢, with only one occurrence of an explicit feminine mark using written Standard Chinese 她. It should be noted that this sole occurrence does not come from the same respondent who also replaced ‘she’ with the same Standard Chinese feminine pronoun in the previous sentence. Regarding the translation of boyfriend, dissimilar to the previous example, twenty-five out of thirty respondents provided masculine forms in three variations: 男朋友 naam-pangjau, 男友 naam-jau or 條仔 tiu-zai, of which 男 and 仔 encode ‘male’). Therefore, in English, such a sentence displays two gender marks (her [feminine], boyfriend [masculine]), while in Cantonese only one gender mark can be seen (男朋友, ‘boyfriend’ [masculine]). The elimination of one gender mark could be explained by structural motives together with the social ones. On the formal side, this example and the previous one suggest a tendency of Cantonese speakers to mark gender on lexical materials rather than on grammatical materials such as pronouns; and when needed, to mark gender on nominative pronouns rather than on genitive pronouns. From a social point of view, a heteronormative context might lead one to think that the translation of boyfriend as 男朋友 implies a feminine possessor. We assume here that the degree of linguistic embedment of gender is not linked to the degree of gender strength in a given society. Gender lexicalisation is rather one of the possible modalities of doing/saying gender. However, as it happens, this grammatical unmarking of gender could represent avoidance of gender grammaticalisation as well as speakers’ belief in heterosexual social norms. The corpus, consequently, could be enriched in future by adding sentences such as His boyfriend is an American for translation to see how gender marking is achieved. 6.3.3 Nouns Respondents’ translation shows a huge variety of the interpretation of nouns. For example, there are 10 different translated versions of brother. This is due to a more sophisticated lexicon for kinship in Cantonese than in English, commanding the respondents to add information not specified in the English equivalent. Besides,



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similar to English, nouns of relationship such as father and brother do not carry grammatical mark of gender. Gender is lexically encoded at a primary level. American. 97% of its translation displays a neutral form 美國人 meigwok-jan with the use of a generic noun 人 jan4 referring to human, while only one respondent attached an aforementioned gendered noun 仔 to 美國 meigwok ‘America’, supplying 美國仔 meigwok-zai ‘American boy’ as the translation. Unlike the genitive cases studied above, the masculine feature here does not bring any semantic presumption related to another (feminine) referent, which indicates that the use of masculine does not serve as a disambiguation. In the sentence Her boyfriend is an American, the masculine feature of the referent has already been displayed in the translation of boyfriend, i.e. 男朋友. It can be seen here that the choice of this respondent has nothing to do with grammaticalisation or disambiguation. Guy. Conversely, it is intriguing to note that Cantonese strongly unmarks gender in the following sentence: He is a very nice guy. While there are two gender marks of a common referent in English, namely he and guy, twenty out of thirty respondents (67%) gave an ungendered translation in Cantonese. He is predominantly translated into 佢 (generic/masculine) and guy into 人 ‘person/someone’. There are only seven occurrences of the masculine form 男仔 in the translation of guy. This is again in agreement with the analysis that Michard coins for French (1999) in which she states that masculine terms primarily signify a generic feature and secondarily a male feature, whereas feminine terms first specify a gender information (female), and only means ‘human’ secondarily. Actress. It is observed that the case of actress is in opposition to other examples discussed above. In this English sentence with one gender attachment: This actress speaks loudly, nine respondents, which is close to one-third of the corpus, hid the gender information by giving 演員 jinjyun or 藝人 ngaijan, both of gender-­ neutrally meaning ‘performer/artiste’, as the translation, while 70% of them preferred affixing 女 to the neutral referents of ‘actress’: 女主角 neoi-zyugok ‘female protagonist’ and 女藝員 neoi-ngaijyun ‘female artiste’. These opposite choices which concern feminine referents again confirm Michard’s analysis: it is more difficult to erase gender information when referring to a feminine term, while it is easier to un-specify it for a male referent, where both masculine and generic forms can be used. Friend, writers, etc. Here, the contrastive analysis does not show any gender shift. Paralleling English, Cantonese does not add specific gender to these terms, regardless of which they refer to and whether there is gender information in other parts of the same sentence.

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Non-humans terms. Unsurprisingly, non-human referred terms like tea, book, dog, Coca-Cola, philosophy, Cantonese, Macau are totally devoid of gender, and these responses are again in favour of the lexical classifier hypothesis discussed in Section 2. 6.3.4 Articles/Quantifiers English-Cantonese translation requires switching English articles to Cantonese quantifiers, which are a kind of classifiers. The corpus shows that quantifiers in Cantonese are distributed according to a human/non-human and animate/inanimate distinction. In the survey, the English determiner this was translated into 個 go3 when respondents recognised human-referred terms in sentences, while the same determiner was translated into 本 bun2 and other matching quantifiers for non-human heads. Similarly, the definite article the in English was transposed to 隻 zek3 for the animate, but nil (ø) for the inanimate. There is therefore grammatical encoding of the (in)animate/(non)human feature. The distribution of the semantic features of quantifiers is summed up in Table 8: Table 8.  Semantic features of quantifiers Human this the a

Non-human animate

Inanimate

隻

本 ø

個 個

A more advanced analysis has to be done in future in order to provide more precise and accurate categorisation of semantic embedment in Cantonese morphosyntax. Is the animate feature, as Chan (2001) postulates, a primary semantic feature, or is it the human one which is the primary one? This is still worth further exploration, since the results would serve as a useful tool to understand against which semantic-syntactical backdrop gender spreads in Cantonese. 6.4 Analysis sum-up Though the huge variation of gender marking in written Cantonese and the exploratory dimension of our corpus make us cautious at times when summing up our findings, valuable implications can still be retrieved. We postulated the interlingual space as an observation room for gender form shifts; we formulated a hypothesis that gender transpositions would enlighten minor phenomena and reveal categorial plasticity. Such plasticity constitutes precisely the shape of the gender form.



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The English-Cantonese translation corpus exhibits the tendency of the unmarking of gender in Cantonese. That is, in comparison with English, Cantonese provides less gender information − gender information in Cantonese is, in most cases, lost or at least covert. This first conclusion allows us to conclude that in the two target languages which are commonly known to be genderless, different degrees of gender embedding can still be observed. But as soon as we look at the detail of this loss at an inter-level scale, we are able to notice that this “gender loss” concerns mostly the morpho-syntactical level but is often balanced by gendering at the lexical level. The gender form is in fact translated by means of a move through and across linguistic levels. In order to transfer gender from pronouns to lexicals, speakers of Cantonese employ different strategies. For example, while refusing anaphoric constructions, they resort to nominal resumption lexicalisation (see the Tony and Jenny example) and lexical combinations (see the Actress example); they sometimes make use of Standard Chinese or even draw on neologisms. In some exceptions, these strategies also allow the addition of gender information to words/sentences which are not present in English (see the American example). The implication here is that gender in Cantonese is rather encoded at a compositional level rather than a derivational/inflectional level (morphosyntactical). The form of gender is thus transposed through the different linguistic levels in the Cantonese language. Some peripheral marking of gender adopted by by the respondents of the study reveal that this tendency is not due to a morphological blockage of Cantonese. Indeed, pronouns are occasionally gendered by Cantonese speakers. If one could expect such a phenomenon for the second-person pronoun, it is more surprising for the third-person pronouns. A morphological gender is then linguistically possible, although not structuralised. This linguistic potentiality of gender is to be replaced in the context of the unfixity of written Cantonese due to its emerging feature. This periphery also reveals the strong interplay between syntax and the semantic cut-up of reality. The intrinsic tension between form and meaning reminds us that the study of gender in a language cannot afford to take for granted what is structural in a language and what is not. Linguistic structure has to be historicised, and this point has been illustrated through the emergence of a gender contrast for the second-person pronoun which is linked to certain language policy agenda. Finally, the corpus analysis has shown that both elimination and display of gender are not only level-sensitive, but above all gender-sensitive, according to the semantic cut-up of Cantonese. If the animate/inanimate opposition seems the primary one, it appears that the animate category is centralised around the masculine, assigning the feminine to the periphery. This is why the feminine needs to be specified more often than the masculine, and such observation proves that the amalgam of masculine and generic features also occurs in languages, within which gender is slightly grammaticalised.

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This analysis is to be supplemented by a broader corpus allowing a more thorough textual analysis. Indeed, by working on more extended resources, we could work, on the one hand, on the generic/masculine relationship and explore, on the other hand, if the emergence of feminine pronoun shifts the grammatical meaning of the generic pronoun from neutral to masculine. If it happens to be the case, a feminist perspective of such women’s visibilisation has to cautiously avoid the freezing of this new categorisation in a renewed essentialism. Additionally, a textual analysis would offer an opportunity to discuss at a rhetorical level the implicit and explicit features of gender (see the discussion of the “her boyfriend” sentence).

7. Conclusion It has been proposed in this chapter to examine gender in Cantonese at the crossroads of the linguistic tradition focusing on the syntactical features of gender and the dimension of gender studies which stresses the semantic dimensions of gender. We suggested a hermeneutical approach within which the linguistic structure involved is not a mere formal system but a process of solidification and institutionalisation of the gender categories in languages. This approach, combining corpus analysis and theoretical discussion, induces the portrayal of gender in a multidimensional way: a. b. c. d. e.

scalarity of gender grammaticalisation, semiotic dimension as the primary dimension of gender, structuralisation as a solidification of the gender categorisation process, definition of gender as a form, that is a transposable relationship, and nannü youbie, that is the dichotomous distinction as a power relationship founding the gender categories, as proposed by Zhen.

Based on these features, we outlined the need of identifying the gender form as an inter-linguistic levels continuum across languages, leading us to a contrastive approach between English and Cantonese. Such a semiotic definition of gender utilises language structure as a site where power-relationships are deployed. This statement implies that attention should be paid to structuralisation rather than the structure itself. For this purpose, we ought to take a historicised vision of linguistic structures. The first part of the study reveals to this regard that English and Cantonese present reverse tendencies regarding gender grammaticalisation, with a late and light genderisation of grammar in Cantonese (especially pronominal system), and a gender loss in English syntax. This structuralisation process could also be observed in the corpus. If English and Cantonese present different degrees of gender grammaticalisation, the



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transposition of gender forms actually appears by means of a move through different linguistic levels, from morphosyntax to lexicon. This move was apparently attributable to the structural and normative plasticity of the gender categories in written Cantonese, a particularly non-standardised variety. The data analysis of the translation survey also reveals that the gender elimination or display is gendersensitive. The animate category is centralised around the masculine, assigning the feminine to the periphery. In this way, feminine marks have to be more explicitly specified than masculine ones, which can conveniently be expressed through the generic form. This proves that the amalgam of masculine and generic features also occurs in languages whose gender is lightly grammaticalised. The strategies at stake to genericise the feminine or specify the masculine in Cantonese, though beyond the scope of this paper, would provide a fruitful insight into the negotiation of linguistic structure for political purposes.

Acknowledgement It is thanks to the support of VariAMU, an A*MIDEX project (n° ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02) funded by the “Investissements d’Avenir” French Government program, managed by the French National Research Agency (ANR), that this research could be carried out.

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Gender bias in Bantu languages The case of Cilubà (L31) Francis C. Ngoyi Tshimanga

Institut Supérieur Pédagogique de Mbujimayi

The use of the masculine as unmarked (Quirk 1968; Swan 1984; Pauwels 2003) in a covert gender language such as English (Baugh and Cable 1978; Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik 1985), has been singled out as the most prominent feature favouring discriminatory language (Sunderland 2006; Mills 1995). On the other hand, Bantu languages are said to be “genderless” (PrewittFreilino, Caswell and Laakso 2012, 269), what leads to the common view that they are sexism-free. This chapter aims to show that Bantu languages are also gender-biased, despite the lack of grammatical gender; and a case in point is Cilubà (L31), a Bantu Language spoken in the D. R. Congo. Accordingly, the chapter sets out to: (1) indicate and explore different areas of gender bias in this language; (2) reveal some gender ideologies constructed through different linguistic forms; (3) trigger language awareness, with a view to implementing gender-neutral linguistic habits. Keywords: gender indexing, gender ideologies, gender bias, bantu language awareness

1. Introduction 1.1

Typology and sociolinguistics of Cilubà

Cilubà (L31) is a Bantu language spoken in the D. R. Congo. It belongs to the Niger-Congo group in Greenberg’s classification (1966), and bears the label L31 in Guthrie’s typology (Kadima and Mutombo 1983, 32; ALAC 1983, henceforth). On the national scale, it is considered as a vehicular language alongside Kikongo, Lingala, and Kiswahili. Given the absence of an up-to-the-minute census, the number of its speakers cannot be stated with precision; but some sources approximate it to more than ten million (see Kabuta 2008). doi 10.1075/pbns.264.06ngo © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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The functional domain of Cilubà encompasses (1) the media, (2) education, where it is used both as subject and vehicular language, (3) administration, (4) religion, to mention but these (ALAC 1983; Bostoen 2003). Its distribution as a vehicular language mainly subsumes the administrative provinces of Kasai Oriental (Eastern Kasai) and Kasai Occidental (Western Kasai). Similarly, its progressive extension areas include the province of Katanga, especially large urban centres, and the capital city, Kinshasa (ALAC 1983), without being exclusively limited to these in a clear-cut way. Cilubà native speakers include, not only (1) the Balubà (in Eastern Kasai) – as the name tends to suggest – but also (2) the Luluwà and (3) the Bena Konjì (in Western Kasai). It is also used as a second language by ethnic groups speaking different mother tongues such as (i) Bakuba, (ii) Bakete (North), (iii) Bashilele, (iv) Bampende, (v) BaCokwe, (vi) Mbagani, (vii) Basalampasu, (viii) Balwalwa, and (ix) Babindji (western Kasai), and (i) Basongye, (ii) Bena Kanyoka, (iii) Bena Tubeya, (iv) Bakete (South), and (v) Bakwa Mputu (Eastern Kasai) (Lukusa 1993, 7). Its geographical domain being essentially the basin of the River Kasai, this language is often known as Cilubà-Kàsààyi or Lubà-Kasààyi in the linguistic literature, but the speakers themselves refer to it as Cilubà (Bostoen 2003, 31; Lukusa 1993). It comprises three major geographical varieties, each of which breakable further: (1) Cilubà cyà Mbuji-Mayi (L31a) (the Eastern Kasai variant), (2) Cyena-Luluwà (L31b) (or Cilubà cyà Kananga) (the Western Kasai variant), and (3) Cikwa-Luntu (L31c) (also called Cyena-Konshi) (Bostoen 2003, 32). Given a very high degree of mutual intelligibility among the speakers – a test commonly used to decide whether two varieties of speech should be considered as one or different languages (O’Grady, Dobrovolsky and Aronoff 1993, 308; Quirk 1968) – it is reasonable to consider these varieties as one language which I here refer to as Cilubà (L31). 1.2

Gender representations and bias in language: Theoretical and methodological considerations

The term gender can be understood in two ways: (1) a label for certain ways languages may subcategorize their lexicon, and (2) social distinctions drawn between men and women. To disambiguate this term, the term grammatical gender is used for the first meaning (O’Grady et al. 1993, 432) and social gender for the second one. This view is also held by Sunderland (2004, 14) who argues that “While one use of gender indicates particular grammatical properties of a language, the use of gender with which we are concerned here concerns humans and entails any differences between women and men being socially or culturally learned, mediated or constructed”. Another important distinction is usually made



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between gender in sense (2) and sex. Given a huge amount of theorizations of gender, I choose the one as developed by Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2003), a social constructivist approach. For Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2003, 10) “[s]ex is a biological categorization based primarily on reproductive potential, whereas gender is the social elaboration of the biological sex”. They pursue arguing that “gender builds on biological sex, it exaggerates biological difference, and indeed, it carries biological difference into domains in which it is completely irrelevant.” Put otherwise, sex is inborn while gender is not; that is, “[g]ender is not something we are born with, and not something we have, but something we do” (West and Zimmerman 1987). Similarly, Hornby (2010, 622) defines gender as “the fact of being male or female, especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences, not differences in biology”. In this regard, either males or females may perform a given role, but society intervenes to categorize such or such role as male- or femalespecific or exclusive and attach ideological value to each of these roles. Our concern here is the relationship between language and gender, which has been explored from different perspectives. Among these, O’Grady et al. (1993, 432) note: (1) differences in language use associated with the gender (or sexual orientation) of the speaker or addressee; (2) differences in language use associated with the gender (or sexual orientation) of the referent (person spoken about); and (3) efforts to alter the language with respect to ways gender is or is not encoded. Besides, regarding the overlap between the scholarship in gender and pragmatics, Christie (2010, 171) underlines two key trajectories of gender and language research: (1) that which asks how males and females use and interpret linguistic resources, and (2) that which asks how males and females are represented through linguistic resources. However, the present study focalizes on O’Grady et al.’s (1993) option (2) as well as on Christie’s (2010) option (2). That is, it looks at how males and females are linguistically represented or constructed and why. On the other hand, the term sexism may be defined in a variety of ways (Mills 1995, 83) including: (1) “the unfair treatment of people, especially women, because of their sex” or (2) “the attitude that causes this” (Hornby 2010, 1353). To narrow this phenomenon down to linguistic representation, the term sexist language is used. It is understood, in the dominance theory (Spender 1980), as a language that defines, trivialises and degrades women and renders them “invisible” (Sunderland 2006, 34). However, as this stands, the above definitions run afoul of (1) being monocular in restricting sexism to language about women (Mills 1995, 83), (2) viewing women in a totalizing way, and consequently, (3) ignoring the notion of “multiple positioning” (Lazar 2005) underlying the view that “identity is fluid and unstable” (Christie 2010, 172). A remedial view would be a binocular one,

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stating that both males and females may discriminate or be discriminated against. Thus, “[a statement] is sexist if its use constitutes, promotes or exploits an unfair or irrelevant or impertinent distinction between the sexes” (Mills 1995, 83). In sum, sexist language or gender-biased language is a type of language which discriminates against people on the basis of their sex or an unfair linguistic representation or construction of men or women. To study linguistic sexism in this chapter, I use functional linguistics in order to analyse Cilubà language in relation to its speakers’ ecological and social environment (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). Besides, I selectively draw on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to show that (1) linguistic choices are ideologically constructed and (2) contribute to the production and reproduction of gender ideology (Lazar 2005). I also draw on Lakoff (1993) and Lakoff and Johnson (2003) in order to (1) analyse Cilubà gendered metaphors, (2) peep into Cilubà speakers’ conceptual system, (3) grasp their way of viewing men and women, (4) and point out the hidden gender ideologies. From a critical point of view, ideologies are defined as “representations of practices formed from particular perspectives in the interest of maintaining unequal power relations and dominance” (Lazar 2005, 6–7) I also use Hurford, Heasley and Smith (2007) as well as Gee (2004) in order to analysed the situated meaning of gendered terms; Marmaridou (2010) helped to capture gender-based ideologies through presuppositions.This will help point out how human experience is constructed and how men’s and women’s personal and social relationships with the other people or the world around them are enacted (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004, 29) through this language. This stems from the fact that language, far from being neutral, is an ideological tool (Lazar 2005). Accordingly, its analysis may help unveil the underlying ideologies about gender in a given discourse community. To paraphrase Fairclough (2003), language is dialectically interconnected with social life, and that analysis and research must therefore always take account of it. As far as gender structure is concerned, the traditional Lubà society categorises men and women as two separate groups to which it assigns different respective roles and kinds of behaviour, although there are also gender-inclusive social roles. For example, hunting and forging are considered as exclusively male activities while housework and childcare are regarded as female-exclusive activities. However, farming and trading are considered as gender-inclusive activities. Besides, a man is not expected to dress, speak, walk, etc. as a woman does, and vice versa. On the other hand, a woman is not expected to propose marriage, to make sexual advances or to decide on the number of children, to mention but these. In the modern Lubà society, there is a change in gender expectations, at least, regarding jobs which are carried out after studies. That is, such jobs are expected to be assigned on the merit and not on a gendered basis. Despite this slight change in



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gender expectations, there is still gender differentiation, ranging from the performance of tasks to different kinds of social behaviour, to which different stereotypes of males and females are attached. Given that ‘gender is a social relation that enters into and partially constitutes all other social relations and activities’ (Lazar 2005, 5), including power relations, it is also important to address power structure in the Lubà society. Power is understood here in traditional terms as “the ability of one person to influence the behaviour of another” (Holmes 2005, 32). In the traditional power arena (i.e. political power in the traditional society), leadership is taken by men exclusively. That is, from the chief to the dignitaries, political power is exclusively held by men (See Mutombo and Malemba 2013, 79–112). This situation is still persistent in all Lubà lineages and clans. Be it within the domestic or the public sphere, women are excluded from important discussions and decision taking. In the modern Lubà society, the country’s constitution favours an egalitarian society where both males and females are allowed to run for any position, from the head of state to the chief of the village. Unfortunately, most high positions in the civil administration, army, courts, etc. are still held by men. Notwithstanding, power should also be understood as fluctuating. That is, there is a possibility for power to take different forms for an individual at different times (Sunderland 2004, 9). In Holmes’ words: power is dynamically constructed and exercised, both implicitly and explicitly, in different aspects of a specific interaction; different participants manifest power in different ways as they construct their own identities and roles in response to the behaviour of others.  (Holmes 2005, 33)

In the forthcoming lines, I will explore gender representation, construction and sexism in the lexis, syntax, and phraseology in Cilubà. Regarding data collection, my selection of a given item is first guided by the presence of a male or female-related term. Besides, more subtly gendered forms are collected thanks to my native language knowledge of both the item and its context of use. In both cases, items are selected on the basis of their overt or covert relevance to gender issues. Besides, to capture the meaning of each constituent of the item under discussion, I use literal translation followed by the literary translation which supplies the denotative meaning of the item. Finally, I analyse each of these items, alone or in contrast, in order to point out the gender ideologies or bias they convey or construct.

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2. Gender representation and bias in morpho-syntax This section addresses gender bias construction through syntax. The term syntax has been variously defined throughout different linguistic paradigms. For the present purpose, I roughly define it with Hornby (2010, 1515) as “the way that words and phrases are put together to form sentences in a language”. In this section, my discussion of sexism will be limited to semantic roles and class-prefixes. However, to make the analysis clear, it is paramount to sketch out the agreement system of Cilubà. 2.1

Grammatical agreement and gender in Cilubà

The concord system of Cilubà is mainly characterized by noun prefixes which command the agreement of the head noun with its dependent elements, within the noun phrase. The following example illustrates. (1) Ci-kàsù ci-ètu ci-nènè (7)-spade (7)-our (7)-big ‘our big spade’

As can be observed in (1), the class 7 prefix ci- in the head noun ci-kàsù (‘spade’) commands agreement of the other dependent viz. the possessive ci-ètu (‘our’) and the adjective ci-nènè (‘big’). Accordingly, Guthrie (1948) distinguishes two types of words: (1) “Independent Prefix (IP) words”, which control agreement of other words, and (2) “Dependent Prefix (DP) words”, whose agreement is controlled by the former. A further property of noun prefixes is that they may be either full-fledged or not (Ø-). In all, Cilubà attests an 18-class system, each class of which determined by a monosyllabic prefix (see above), also known as index or classifier (Burssens 1954, 51). These prefixes play various roles in the structure of the noun phrase or the sentence: (1) noun marking for number (singular/plural), (2) agreement marking of the noun with its dependents, and (3) semantic marking of the noun (Kalonji 1993; Lukusa 1993, 55). As can be noticed, the class-marking in Cilubà is both a grammatical and semantic classification of nouns (see Appendix 1 for a presentation of class pairing). As a grammatical classification, it marks the phrase structure in terms of agreement; as a semantic classification, it helps group nouns in terms of semantic categories. In the latter case, we distinguish (1) classes with some degree of homogeneity (e.g. classes 1 and 2 exclusively comprise nouns referring to human and superhuman beings) and (2) heterogeneous classes (e.g. class 7 comprises both animate and inanimate referents (see Lukusa 1993, 58–59). However, class prefixes do not mark nouns for grammatical gender, defined as:



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a grammatical classification of nouns, or other words in the noun phrase, according to certain meaning-related distinctions, especially a distinction related to the sex of the referent.  (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik 1985, 314)

Therefore, gender is a social or semantic reference in this language, but not a grammatical classifier. Addressing gender classification, Prewitt-Freilino, Caswell and Laakso (2012, 269) identify three gender-related groups below: (1) grammatical gender languages (or gendered languages), (2) natural [or social] gender languages, and (3) genderless languages. In languages in (1) (e.g. Russian), nouns are always assigned a feminine or masculine or sometimes neuter gender which is reflected on the other dependent forms such as adjectives and pronouns. Group (2) comprises languages such as English, where gender marking is limited to certain human- or animal-referred nouns and some pronouns such as she or he. This being the case, such a gender is social or extra-linguistic. Finally, in (3), there is complete lack of grammatical gender distinction in the noun system; this is the case of, among other linguistic groups, Bantu language families where Cilubà is found (see Prewitt-Freilino et al. 2012, 269). Most personal nouns are generally dual and epicene (i.e. they refer indistinctively to a male or female, without formal marking of gender) in Cilubà (e.g. muntu ‘person’), which is an advantage over grammatical gender and natural gender languages with regard to gender-neutral usage. Note that a gender-neutral usage is commonly viewed as a wrong short-cut because it is sometimes used to make women invisible. This occurs, especially, when it is used whereas gender highlighting is necessary (see Mills 1995). However, the distinction between masculine and feminine is not sexist in itself (as held by the materialist feminism stance). Instead, the relationship between feminine and masculine is sexist because it indexes the relationship between negative and positive values. Besides, this indexing both reveals and has consequences about how men and women are perceived and perceive themselves. In Cilubà, though, some forms show a semantic male-female distinction. This is the case of the bound roots -lùma ‘male’ and -kàjì ‘female’ which are generally attached to appropriate class prefixes (i.e. that of the head noun commanding concord), and may occur as head or modifier. To help cover a wide scope of gender representation and sexism in this language, I will have to work on a larger frame than the man/woman, viz. the male/female one. In Cilubà, gender-related terms occur both in the personal and non-personal categories. The former category comprises essentially kinship terms while the latter denotes animals and birds, as illustrated in Table 1.

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Table 1.  Table of gender-related terms N° Masculine

Feminine

Gender terms

Referents

Gender terms

Referents

1

Taatù/sha ‘father’

HUMAN, ADULT

HUMAN, ADULT

2

Taatù mukwabù ’fatherly uncle’ Tùùtù ‘elder brother’ Mànsèbà ‘motherly uncle’ Baya-X ‘X’s husband’ Nsongalùmà ’young man’ Mpumbu ‘male’ Mpàngà ‘male’ Cimpàngà ‘male’ Citàlà/ntàlà ‘male’ Katàlà ‘male’

HUMAN, ADULT/ YOUNG HUMAN, ADULT/ YOUNG HUMAN, ADULT/ YOUNG HUMAN, ADULT/ YOUNG HUMAN, ADULT/ YOUNG ANIMAL, ADULT/ YOUNG

Maamù/nyoku/nyina ‘mother’ Taatùmukaji ‘fatherly aunt’ yààyà ‘elder sister’

3 4 5 6 7

8 9

BIRD, ADULT BIRD, YOUNG

Maamù mukwabù ‘motherly aunt’ Mwadi ‘first wife’ Mushika/nsongàkàji ‘young woman’ Lukùngùlù ‘young female’ Cikuka ‘adult female’ Mukùmbù ‘young female’

HUMAN, ADULT/ YOUNG HUMAN, ADULT/ YOUNG HUMAN, ADULT/ YOUNG HUMAN, ADULT/ YOUNG HUMAN, ADULT/ YOUNG ANIMAL, ADULT/ YOUNG BIRD, ADULT BIRD, YOUNG

Notwithstanding, the personal – non-personal distinction just advocated is not neat, as the gender-marking terms said to belong to one category may, metaphorically or not, occur with nouns of the other category. However, male-female distinction does not surface in grammatical agreement (see Appendix 2), as shown in (2) below. (2) a. Mu-lùma u-ebe u-di mu-le (1)-male (1)-your (1)-is (1)-tall ‘Your husband is very tall.’ b. Mu-kàjì u-ebe u-di mu-le (1)-female (1)-your (1)-is (1)-tall ‘Your wife is very tall’

The term grammatical gender as used in the linguistic typology realm is rather restricted and refers to an arbitrary gender, found in languages such as French or German, whereby the gender of non-personal nouns is generally assigned on an arbitrary basis. For example, the French noun lune (‘moon’) and soleil (‘sun’) are respectively feminine and masculine while in German Mond (‘moon’) and Sonne (‘sun’) are respectively masculine and feminine (Baugh and Cable 1978; Corbett 1991 for further discussion). In view of the foregoing discussion, gender considered in a restrictive sense, as a syntactical agreement marker or classifier, does not



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exist in Cilubà. However, if gender is considered in a broader (social) perspective, it becomes relevant to speak about gender in Cilubà. It is in the latter sense that I use the term gender throughout this paper. 2.2

Semantic roles

Some direct transitive verbs in Cilubà describing marriage and sexual activities allow only the rule a [+male] noun +Verb +[+female] noun. That is, these verbs associate males with activity and females with inactivity. Among these verbs, the following are worth quoting: kusèla ‘marry’, kubàka ‘marry’, kubanjinja ‘house’, kwimicisha ‘impregnate’, kwenza ‘have sex’, kusanda ‘have sex with’, kulelesha ‘inseminate’, kubangila ‘court’, kuluma ‘inseminate’. (3) Mutombo mmusèla Mujinga. ‘Mutombo [+male] has married Mujinga [+female].’ (4) Mutombo mmwimìcìsha Mujinga. ‘Mutombo [+male] has impregnated Mujinga [+female]’

In Examples (3) and (4), Mutombo (agent) obligatorily has the feature [+male] while Mujinga (patient) obligatorily has the feature [+female], due to the properties of the verbs kusèla ‘marry’, and kwimicisha ‘impregnate’. In addition, the verbs in (3) and (4) are extendable by the addition of a reciprocal derivative -angan-, as in (5), which denotes reciprocity of the action in Cilubà. However, the active interpretation is always associated with a [+male] term in the subject territory. (5) Mbelu ne Cilumba mbasèlangàna. ‘Mbelu [+female] and Cilumba [+male] have married each other’

In this instance, the meaning is that both Mbelu [+female] and Cilumba [+male] are equally involved in marriage, since the positions of these terms can be exchanged in the structure above. Notwithstanding, only the male referent is implicitly perceived as agent. In addition, some of the verbs just addressed may also be extended by the addition of the passive suffix -ibw- with a [+human, +female] noun in the subject position but having the semantic role ‘patient’ or ‘theme’ as in (6), which corroborates the idea of the female spouse being acted upon. (6) Mbelu mmusèdìbwa kudi Cilumba. ‘Mbelu has been married by Cilumba’

In fact, agency associated with the husband in verbs describing marriage and those referring to sexuality reflects the related social practices in the Lubà society. Regarding marriage, the prospective wife may be chosen by the prospective

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husband himself or by his father. If the prospective father-in-law and her daughter consent, the prospective husband will have to give the dowry (i.e. money, goats, etc.) to the prospective father-in-law in order to conclude marriage (Mutombo and Malemba 2013, 68–75). It is the fact of giving the dowry which is generally known as kusèla ‘to marry’. Concerning sexuality, it is also husband initiated and not the opposite (Smal and Mbuyi n. d., 125).1 That is, it is normal for the husband to start or invite her wife to the sexual act and not the opposite (see the linguistic construction of this in Example (32d)). Finally, except for the case of sickness, the wife cannot reject her husband’s invitation to the sexual act lest she be fined in accordance with customs (e.g. she could be compelled to give a chicken to her brothers- and/or sisters-in-law). 2.3

Class-prefix

Since class prefixes are important in agreement, their study may also unveil unbalanced power between the sexes constructed through language via syntax. For example, some non-personal class prefixes (anaphors) are used to refer to a subject when comprising a term referring to a female being alone or used with another term, and not the opposite. (7) Bà-ka-mu-koma u-kàdi bi-umà ne mu-kàji bi-lekela (2)-Past-(1)-shun (1)-be (8)-dowry and (1)-wife (8)-abandon ‘He was shunned, and dowry and wife were abandoned.’

In (7), the non-personal prefix bi- (class 8) is used as coreferential with the subject byumà ne mukàji ‘dowry and wife’ whose components are non-personal and personal respectively. The prefix bi- (class 8) coreferential with bintu ‘things’. Actually, the construction in (7) is commonly rendered as in (8). (8) Bà-ka-mu-koma u-kàdi mu-kàji mu-lekela ne bi-umà (2)-Past-(1)-shun (1)-be (1)-wife (1)-abandon and (8)-dowry ‘He was shunned, and dowry and wife were abandoned.’

From (8) we can notice that the subject mukàjì ‘wife’ and its verb mulekela ‘abandoned’ bear the same personal class prefix mu- (class 1). Similarly to (7) above, in (9), a non-personal class prefix is used as coreferential with a female-related term. (9) Kwa – ka-baka mu-âna ci-wà-ka-baka n-nyin-andi Not-(2)-Past-marry (1)-child (7)-(2)-Past-marry (9)-mother-her ‘You did not marry the child but her mother’ 1. n.d: publishing date missing.



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In (8), the prefix ci- (class 7), a general prefix used as coreferential with the term cintu ’thing’, is used to refer to a female being as well. In fact, the term nyinandi ‘her mother’, which is [+human], should appropriately be referred to as u- (class 1) in the verb phrase uwàkabaka ‘whom you married’ as shown in (10) below. (10) Kwa – ka-baka mu-âna u-wà-ka-baka n-nyin-andi Not-(2)-Past-marry (1)-child (1)-(2)-Past-marry (9)-mother-her ‘You did not marry the child but her mother’

However, most Cilubà native speakers find the construction in (7) and (9) both acceptable and grammatical. The semantic agreement used here is justified by the stereotypical categorization of wives, children and other belongings as a man’s riches (Mpoyi 1987). This section was devoted to the discussion of gender bias in morphosyntax. It first sketched out the agreement system of Cilubà before addressing gender bias in semantic roles and class-prefixes. In semantic roles, gender bias was due to the construction males as agents and females as patients through the use of verbs describing marriage and sexuality. This situation is a copy of the related social practices where marriage and sexuality are male-initiated. Gender bias in class prefixes stemmed from the use of non-personal class prefixes as coreferential with a subject when comprising a term referring to a female being alone or used with another term, and not the opposite. The following section will address lexical gender representation and bias in Cilubà.

3. Systemic lexical gender representation and bias in Cilubà In Cilubà, lexical level gender representation and gender ideology affect essentially the substantive, a meronym for the two closely related classes, i.e. the noun and the adjective (Lukusa 1993). Gender bias in substantives is located within the naming system and cuts across the subcategories of proper-common, animate-inanimate, and personal-non-personal nouns. As stated above, it is assumed in this chapter that gender representation and gender ideology are not automatically linked. That is, referring to males and females through linguistic means is not sexist per se. However, sexism comes at stake when such representation assigns roles to males and females and attaches ideological value to each of these roles. That is, gender representation becomes ideological or discriminatory when it constructs a biased view of males and females. This implies methodological consequences: analysing lexical items per se for meaning can be insufficient if no consideration is made of their context.

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However, Mills (1995, 21) advocates the analysis in relative isolation of certain words concerning gender difference which seem to reflect an overall gender bias. Given that some Cilubà lexical items meet this criterion, I find their analysis as informative as any other carried out at an upper level, provided that the larger context of situation is given consideration. I consequently take interest in this section in lexical items per se analysis at a systemic level before to move towards lexical items in context analysis, at a rhetorical or discursive level analysis in the Section 5. 3.1

Personal proper names

By personal proper name is meant the name given to child when he or she is born. Such a name can be the name of an ancestor, a brother, a sister, a relative or a friend of the parents’, to mention but this. It is worth noting that the distinction first name/family name does not apply here. These personal proper names or given names generally fall into either the male or the female category. That is to say, with very few exceptions, one can say whether the addressee is male or female just by considering his/her name. The following categories of names – which may overlap – are commonly distinguished in the Lubà culture: (1) names denoting how the child was born, (2) names which denote parents’ fortune, (3) names showing parents’ misfortune, (4) names implying that the child was born thanks to God’s help, (5) names which are sex-specific, and (6) those which are dual (Mpoyi 1987, 51–52) and this information is indexed either morphologically within the name or by usage, but not gender. (11) Ngalula (12) Byumà ‘riches’ (13) Bipendu ‘insults’ (14) Butùmbì ‘glory’ (15) a. Kamwanya b. Kamwanya (16) Kalenga

The name Ngalula in (11) denotes birth circumstances. It is given to a male child born after at least three consecutive girls, or the other way round. The name Byumà in (12) means ‘riches’. It implies that the parents or the family in general had gone through happy times before the child’s birth. Conversely, the name Bipendu in (13) means ‘insults’, which implies that the parents experienced hard times before the child’s birth. Generally speaking, this name probably implies that the mother



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was insulted (e.g. for not having born a child); and this is an implicit gender bias. Example (14), Butumbi ‘glory’, considers the child as God’s achievement in parents’ lives. Names in (15a–b) refer to a man and woman respectively. Finally, the name Kalenga in (16) is dual and can be given to both males and females. However, it is important to note that these categories can overlap. For instance, the term Ngalula in (11) is dual and may be followed by a descriptive term mulùma ‘male’ or mukàjì ‘female’ to specify the bearer’s sex as in (17a) and (17b). (17) a. Ngalula Mulùmà (male Ngalula) b. Ngalula Mukàjì (female Ngalula)

However, although this practice is not generally accepted, it is common to name a male child after female parent or relative and vice versa. This occurs, for example when this child is thought to be the last in the restricted family. A child’s name is often combined with his/her father’s, especially in official documents. Therefore, the naming system may be said to be gender-biased as the following example illustrates. (18) Tshimanga (wa) Ngoyi

In (18), Tshimanga is the child’s name and the most important in his identity, wa ‘of ’ is an optional connective denoting possession, while Ngoyi is the father’s name. Instead of this order, the father’s name may sometimes be pre-posed to the child’s, with the connective omitted. In either case, only the father’s name is present in the child’s identity; which may imply the child’s assignment to the father (exclusively). Note that the distinction first/last name, as currently known in many Western countries, does not apply in a similar way to the Cilubà naming system. For example, with reference to (18) above, if X is Tshimanga’s child, s/he will be called X (wa) Tshimanga and not *X (wa) Ngoyi, and this keeps changing indefinitely. The mother’s name may occur similarly as in (19), but this is only the child’s occasional address form, especially in the mother’s family, as illustrated in (19) below: (19) Tshimanga (wa) Kapinga

In this example, Kapinga is the mother’s name. However, (19) above can be regarded as a transient form of address used by the mother’s family members. Besides, it is often perceived as conveying some negative overtone, since female relatives’ children have fewer privileges than male relatives’ counterparts. The construction Mwa X, meaning ‘X’s mother’ is generally used as a form of reference to mothers while the masculine counterpart Sha X ‘X’s father’ occurs only with the name Mbùyi ‘the firstborn of twins’. That is, the mother’s name is

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often abandoned for that of the child in the above configuration (Smal and Mbuyi n. d., 46). This changes the mother’s identity with a double-edged implication: on the one hand, it is an accolade to the mother; but on the other, it ties her to birthgiving and obscures her identity (see Mills 1995). Gender bias may be also noticed in lineage or group names. These emanate from three main sources: (1) patronymic,2 (2) nickname, and (3) toponymic (Mufuta 1968). Gender-bias may be located in the first two sources, patronyms and nicknames. For example, most eponyms of Lubà used in lineages and/or some villages’ names are male-based. Such names fit the construction Beena or Bakwà + X, with Beena meaning ‘people belonging to’, Bakwà ‘people from’ and X referring to the eponymous (male) hero. In the construction just discussed some names combine with Beena and some others with Bakwà meaning ‘X’s descendants’. (20) Beena Kalambayi ‘Kalambayi’s people/descendants’ (21) Bakwà Kalonji ‘Kalonji’s people/descendants’

However, some lineages within villages bear females’ eponyms, as a way of differentiating children belonging to different mothers but spouses to one man (Mpoyi 1987, 70–71 and 78). However, this way of identifying people by their female ancestry may be viewed negatively. (22) (Beena Nsana) Beena Mujinga ‘Mujinga’s descendants’

In (22), the term Beena Nsana ‘Nsana’s descendants’ refers to the whole village and implies that all members of this village descend from a male ancestor named Nsana while the term Beena Mujinga ‘Mujinga’s descendants’ refers to one lineage within the village whose ancestress bore the proper name Mujinga. Therefore, the term Beena Mujinga subcategorises the lineage as descending from a female ancestry. If in Faïk-Nzuji’s (1974) terminology, such people – most of which ancestors – whose names denote whole lineages or groups of lineages are known as “héros éponymes” (eponymous heroes), the heroic female characters seem to be generally downplayed. Once again, patriarchal ancestry and male chauvinism are to be recalled as an underlay to this situation.

2. Names or nouns formed after a person.



3.2

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Common personal names

By common personal names are meant names which refer to dignitaries in the traditional power arena, i.e. power organisation in the traditional Lubà society (village, clan, lineage, etc.). Albeit potentially dual or epicene, such names are largely used with an implied male orientation. And this, according to Mills (1995, 128), is due to the influence of history: “some words do indeed have a history of usage which leads people to interpret them in particular ways”. That is, given that only men held these titles, these have been used with male referents and this has led people to sustain that only men should hold such functions; which is still applicable in the traditional as well as modern power arenas since all political and economical higher positions are held by men (parliament, courts, army, etc.). Lazar’s argument regarding gender as ideological structure is worth quoting here: The prevailing conception of gender is understood as an ideological structure that divides people into two classes, men and women, based on a hierarchical relation of domination and subordination, respectively. Based upon sexual difference, the gender structure imposes a social dichotomy of labour and human traits for women and men, the substance of which varies according to time and place.  (Lazar 2005, 7)

To apply this to Cilubà, even jobs which are referred to with dual terms, are generally expected to be male. For example, the term in (23) is dual and refers to the ruling-chief. However, it presupposes male reference as witnessed by its modification by a female gender referring mukàjì ‘female’ as in Mukalenga mukàjì ‘chief ’s wife’ or ‘female chief ’, heard in the speakers’ speech. Such a modification implies that the job is an anomaly for women (see Quirk et al. 1985) just as male nurse would convey in English that most nurses are female; it perpetuates the view of the masculine as generic or unmarked: (23) Mukalenga ‘Chief ’

Example (24) refers to a dignitary who was entrusted with various responsibilities: commanding the army, ensuring and reinforcing security in the village, etc. (Kabuta 2008, 225; Munyoka 2011). (24) Mwadyanvità ‘Commander-in-chief ’

Moreover, some traditional dignitaries’ titles refer to a whole lineage (i.e. a group of extended families) (Mutombo and Malemba 2013, 62); but only males can and do act out these roles. This is the example of the dignitary Ntiità, alternatively called Ntwìtè or Ntììtè, whose essential responsibility consisted of dispensing traditional power to any chief (Mufuta 1968). In fact, although Cilubà speakers use

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the term Ntììtà mukàjì ‘female Ntììtà’ to refer to a woman belonging to the Ntììtà’s lineage, only males actually act this role. The term Ntììtà mukàjì ‘female Ntììtà’ exists in Cilubà, but the job itsef (i.e. enthronising the chief) is still carried out by men exclusively. This testifies to the traditional power arena being (1) genderasymmetrical and androcentric, and (2) kept so as safe as Fort Knox. Here, language both (1) reveals an androcentric conception of society and (2) takes part in the construction of this conception. Nonetheless, women did play some role in the traditional power setting – albeit restricted in comparison to men’s. Mention can be made of the term Inabànzà, which refers to a female dignitary, entrusted with settling some cases and keeping the chief ’s cane (Kabuta 2008, 11; Mpoyi 1987, 30). A careful study of the usage of this title reveals that women played the role of advisor to the chief, judge, power protector and trustee, the power being symbolized by the cane. Unfortunately, this function has almost disappeared in the traditional power arena nowadays. 3.3

Male as norm

Some lexical items construct the view of male as norm and consequently imply that the female is different from what is normal and often in a derogatory way. This is shown in the following examples, where the head noun occurs first, and overtly or implicitly denotes male. (25) Ø-taatù mu-kàjì (1)-father (1)-female ‘fatherly aunt’ (26) Cì-lùmà cì-kàjì (7)-male (7)-female ‘hermaphrodite’3 (27) Ø-Ntììtà mu-kàjì (1)-Ntììtà (1)-female ‘female Ntììtà’

3. Hermaphrodite: a person that has both male and female sexual organs or characteristics. In the Lubà culture and society, the term cilùmà cìkàjì meaning ‘hermaphrodite’ is also used to refer, in a derogatory way, to a male person who behaves, speaks, walks, etc. like a female person or does the jobs recognised as female (e.g. pounding, cooking, carrying basins of water, etc.). conversely, a female person who behaves like a male person or does the jobs regognized as male is generally appreciatively referred to as mwâna mulùma ‘man’ and not cilùmà cìkàjì ‘hermaphrodite’.



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The term taatù mukàjì ‘fatherly aunt’ (25) categorizes the person so-referred as ‘a father’ functionally (i.e. she can act on behalf of the father), but simultaneously highlights her sex, implying that fathers are ‘normally’ male. This is the case of a woman endorsing a male role. Furthermore, in (26) the male-referring term Cìlùmà ‘male’ is the head to which the dependent cìkàjì ‘female’ is added as a modifier. Therefore, the individual denoted is seen as being first male, and then female and not the reverse. Finally, the term Ntììtà mukàjì (27), used to refer to a woman belonging to the Ntììtà’s lineage (a lineage in a village entrusted with the chief ’s enthronization), shows that this job (i.e. the chief ’s enthronization), is normally carried by men (see Quirk et al. 1985). This section addressed gender representation and gender ideologies at the lexical level. It pointed out that gender ideologies and bias are constructed through personal proper names (i.e. given names) as well as common personal names (e.g. Lubà dignitaries titles). Among the gendered ideologies constructed and perpetuated, mention can be made of the following: political power is male-possessed, children belong to the father, heroism is male, and male is a norm. The next section will examine gender indexing and ideologies constructed through non-human-referred terms.

4. Lexis in discourse: Connotations of non-personal nouns Beyond lexical indexing, gender ideologies in Cilubà operate also on a discursive level through the presence of metaphorical gender for non-personal nouns (or non-human-referred terms). Indeed, gender is used to sort elements by assigning them positive or negative value. A rhetorical lens is therefore needed to unveil how gender articulates other values and to draw on how gender is ideologically fulfilled. To capture how gender ideologies operate in non-personal nouns, it is important to understand the notion of situated meaning (Gee 2004). Discussing meaning and context of use, Hurford, Heasley and Smith (2007, 3) argue that “speakers may mean different things on different occasions, even when using the same words.” Thus, they distinguish “speaker meaning”, i.e. what a speaker intends to convey; and “sentence or word meaning”, i.e. what a sentence or word means. Similarly, Gee (2004, 25) talks of utterance-type meaning task and utterance-token meaning task: the former task “involves the study of correlations between form and function in language at the level of utterance-type meanings” while the latter “involves the study of correlations between form and function in language at the level of utterance-token meanings”. By form is meant “things like morphemes, words, phrases, or other syntactic structures (e.g., the subject position of a sentence)” while by function is meant “meaning or the communicative purpose a form carries

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out”. Put otherwise, the former inquiry involves understanding meanings of linguistic forms without considering the context of situation. Conversely, the latter inquiry is concerned by “discovering the situation-specific or situated meanings of forms used in specific contexts of use”. In the next section I concentrate on some lexical items in Cilubà and undertake both inquiries with a view to finding out the relevance of gender-based ideology to the lexicon in this language. 4.1

Connotations of the masculine

Some masculine terms are often used with positive connotations but sometimes with negative ones. For clarity’s sake, I will group the terms into four structural patterns which are proper to Cilubà syntax: (1) Substantive1 + Connective + Substa ntive2 (2) Noun-Connective Blend + Substantive, (3) Substantive + Imperative, and (4) Substantive. (28) Substantive1 + Connective + Substantive2 a. Ba-lùma bàà N-pyodì (2)-male (2)-of (10)-fish ‘big fish’ b. Ba-lùmà bàà N-jìlù (2)-male (2)-of (10)-aubergine ‘big aubergines’ c. Ka-mànsèba enda wa X (12)-maternal uncle his/her of X ‘very like X’

The noun balùmà ‘males’, in (28a–b), connotes ‘big and nice’ while bakàjì ‘females’, which is left implicit for ideological purposes (Fairclough 2003), means the opposite. If some Cilubà speakers argue that male animals are bigger than female ones – which is not proven – the above male-related terms are ideologically loaded inasmuch as they even collocate with the term njilù ‘aubergines’, a vegetable (28b) with the connotation ‘big and nice’. That is, ‘male’ aubergines big aubergines are symbolically regarded as ‘male’ and small aubergines as ‘female’. In instance (28c), the construction kamànsèbenda wa X, with X standing for a plant name, is used to refer to a second plant which is more akin in species to X but lower in value than X. Note that the diminutive prefix ka- also contributes to the negative overtone. On this account, the term Kamànsèbenda wa lukùnda – which literarily means the ‘maternal uncle of bean’ refers to an inedible plant which is closer to but less in value than beans. Accordingly, the following implications emerge: (1) X is conceived of as [+male] similarly to mànsèba (maternal uncle); (2) kamànsèbenda



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wa X (X’s maternal uncle) is similar to X in some respects but less valuable than X; and (3) X’s side (i.e. father’s) is better than his/her mother’s side. In (29) the male-related term mulùma ‘male’ has the connotations ‘special’ or ‘most important’ in (29a), and ‘big’ in (29b). Besides, kalùma ‘male’ in (29c) conveys the connotation ‘hard’ or ‘strong’, with both positive and negative overtones, as suggested by the prefix ka-. It can be argued that the positive construction of males in (29a–b) implies the opposite for women. Conversely, as this term refers to an item of food, negative construction of ‘males’ hardness vs. positive construction of ‘females’ softness’ also results. That is, the softness of the thigh stands in contrast with the hardness of the drumstick. (29) Noun-Connective Blend + Substantive a. Mu-lùma di-tùkù (1)-male-of (5)-day ‘D-Day’ b. Mu-lùma mu-sùlù (1)-male-of (3)-stream ‘big stream’ c. Ka-lùma mu-kòlù (12)-male-of (3)-leg ‘drumstick’ d. Ka-N-pànga N-zevu (12)-(9)-male-of (9)-elephant ‘gaertnera parvicula’ e. N-pumbwa mu-cì (9)-male-of (3)-tree ‘a kind of aphrodisiac tree’

Some speakers of Cilubà consider the term kampànga ‘male’ in (29d) as derived from the verb kupanga ‘resist’. I opine on the contrary that this argument is untenable because the low tone [ ]̀ on à in the term kampànga nzevu testifies to its being a blend of the noun kampànga ‘male’ and the connective -a ‘of ’. Therefore, the term kampànga ‘male’ constructs the view of ‘male as strong and resistant’ given that the term in (29d) refers to a stiff wild tree believed to resist even an elephant’s push. In the same way, the term mpumbwa mucì in (29e), literarily meaning ‘male tree’, refers to an aphrodisiac tree. Thus, it also implies ‘strong’ or ‘vigorous’. Different utterance-token meanings, just pinpointed, are qualities which are highlighted for males, but implicitly denied to or downplayed for the counter-part. Note that the N- (i.e. nasal) in the internal structure of examples (29d and e) is the underlying form of the class 9 prefix in Cilubà (see Appendix 1).

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On the surface, it is graphologically realized as m- before bilabial or labiodental sounds (e.g. N-pumbwa → mpumbwa ‘male’) and n- before alveolar sounds (e.g. N-zevu → nzevu ‘elephant’). (30) Substantive + Imperative a. Ka-lùma di-bòmbà (12)-Man (I)-shrink ‘mimosa sensitive’ or ‘bryophytum zinkeri’

In (30a) above, the term kalùma ‘man’ refers to a kind of herb which shrinks slowly when touched. This context of situation helps us argue that the male-related term kalùma has a positive connotation as also shown by the appreciative prefix ka-. However this is not always the case, and gender ideology can give the opposite connotation as (31) shows. (31) Substantive a. Ka-lùma (chaff) (12)-male ‘hard grain of rice or beans’ b. Kalùma nè kakàjì ‘male and female’ c. Tu-mànsèbà (13)-maternal uncles ‘hard balls in porridge’ d. Ka-mànsèba (12)-maternal uncle ‘a freckle’ e. Ka-lùmyànà (12)-male ‘a whatchamacallit’

The term in (31a) refers to ‘a grain of beans/rice which has remained hard after cooking’. Thus, the situated meaning of (31a) is ‘male is strong and resistant’. If the locus is put on resistance, the equation male → positively resistant vs. female → negatively non-resistant obtains. However, from the point of view of the eater, the opposite equations will occur female → positively soft and useful vs. male → negatively hard and useless, tasty female vs. untasty male, and obedient female vs. disobedient male. The latter justifies the idiom kalùma kàà mulwosà ‘rice husk/chaff ’ which means ‘a good-for-nothing’ or ‘a useless person’. The idiom in (31b) is used in roasting maize to mean that ‘some of the grains are roast and others are raw’. In this context, the term kalùma ‘male’ stands for ‘raw’ and kakàjì ‘female’ for ‘roast’.



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The underlying gender ideologies are similar to those just pointed out for (31a). Besides, the idiom also conceptualizes the presence of both male and female as “a lack of harmony”. This stems from the fact that after roasting maize, all the grains are expected to become roast. As some are roast and others not so, this presents a lack of harmony into which gender considerations are projected. Put otherwise, this implies that an unexpected mixture of men and women is not appreciated. This also reflects the Lubà social life. That is, at public assemblies such as funerals, men and women often sit or sleep in two separate respective groups. Therefore, we have the ideologies males or females alone are harmonious vs. males and females together are disharmonious. The term tumànsèba (31c), literary meaning ‘small maternal uncles’ refers to undesired small hard balls in the porridge or similar food. This term is also ideologically loaded: (1) male → positively resistant vs. female → negatively nonresistant, (2) female → positively soft vs. male → negatively hard, and (3) father’s side → good vs. mother’s side → bad. Ideology (3) is often constructed through the utterances: “You resemble your motherly uncles” said to a child who has done wrong by a paternal relative. In the same context, maternal relatives often utter: “You resemble your fatherly uncles”, which implies the reverse equation father’s side → bad vs. mother’s side → good. However, the latter ideology is not lexicalized as in (31c). The noun kamànsèba ‘freckle’ (31d) refers to a black or brown spot on a human skin. The connotation is negative since the whole body is here considered as a beautiful whole, spoiled by a spot of a different colour. Given that this is considered as coming from the mother’s side, the ideology father’s side → good vs. mother’s side → bad obtains. Besides, since kamànsèba ‘freckle’ disturbs the body’s harmony, (31d) also constructs males as harmony disturbers. Finally, the word kalùmyànà ‘male’ in (31e) means ‘a whatchamacallit’ and refers to any item that one does not intend to name. The world then is conceptualized as male, through the idea that what is designated by default is male. This section discussed the connotations of masculine terms. It analysed essentially explicitly male-related terms with a view to pointing out their positive or negative construction of males and females. The following section is devoted to the analysis of explicitly feminine terms in order to point out their connotative meaning with regards to males and females.

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4.2

Connotations of the feminine

It is not uncommon to encounter non-personal nouns comprising a feminine term in which gender is connotatively at stake. Such terms may also have a positive or negative connotation, depending on the context. The following instances illustrate. (32) a. N-kùnda i-à ka-mààmù (10)-beans (10)-of (12)-mother b. Ci-mamu u-enda u-a Bu-kalenga (7)-mother (1)-Poss-her (1)-Con-of (14)-power ‘Parliament’ c. Mu-kùmbù u-à N-dàkalà (3)-female chicken (3)-of (11)-fish d. Ø-màdamà lààla (1)-wife sleep [imperative] ‘mimosa invisa’

The example in (32a) may also be reduced to the noun kamààmù ‘mother’ with the same meaning. It refers to a kind of red beans, actually appreciated for its taste but taking longer to cook. Therefore, the term conveys two contrasting meanings: one appreciative, resulting from its good taste (i.e. female is good), and another depreciative, deriving from its exceptional hardness in cooking (i.e. woman is abnormally hard). In (32b) the parliament is conceptualized as a mother. This stems from the consideration of the Congolese legal context of situation in which the Prime Minister should emanate from the parliamentary majority. However, as will be illustrated in sub-section 5.3. (instances (51) and (52)), parliamentarians are regarded as male. This shows that the source of power is viewed as female while power itself is constructed as male. The term in (32c) is composed of three words: the noun mukùmbù ‘young female chicken’, the connective wà (of) and ndàkalà ‘a kind of dry small fish’. Given that the feminine term mukùmbù, which generally denotes a young female chicken, qualifies ndàkalà ‘fish’, it conveys an appreciative connotation. That is, ndàkalà ‘a kind of dry small fish’, a less valuable foodstuff, is regarded as mukùmbù ‘young female chicken’, a more valuable foodstuff. Màdamà ‘my wife’ in (32d) is a loan word from French, now lexicalized in Cilubà, denoting a kind of herb (‘mimosa sensitive’), which shrinks progressively when touched. The person touching it utters the imperative Màdamà lààla ‘my wife, lie down’. In so doing, although in a jocular way, the speaker portrays the very herb as a female addressee (i.e. the wife) obeying the command to lie down from a male speaker (i.e. the husband). If we ask why the wife has to lie down, we will reach



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the conclusion that the husband is here inviting his wife to a sexual activity. This being the case, the term Màdamà lààla ‘my wife, lie down’ constructs coitus as male-initiated, as already pointed out earlier. 4.3

Masculine-feminine contrastive connotations

Sometimes, when there are both a feminine and masculine terms to denote some similar reality, the former is conceived as negatively loaded while the latter is positively so. Such a difference is due to the social meanings the speakers associate with the referent. (33) a. Ka-kàjì ka-kùlù (12)-female (12)-old ‘a boogyman’ b. Ci-lùma ci-kùlù (7)-male (7)-old ‘a boogyman’ (34) a. Ci-mungu mu-kàjì (7)-hyena (1)-female ‘second part of the dry season’ b. Ci-mungu mu-lùma (7)-hyena (1)-male ‘third part of the dry season’ (35) a. N-zaji u-a mu-àna mu-kàjì (9)-thunder (9)-Con-of (1)-child (1)-female ‘a female thunder’ b. N-zaji u-a mu-ana mu-lùma (9)-thunder (9)-Con-of (1)-child (1)-male ‘a male thunder’ (36) a. N-vulà u-a mu-adi u-à ba-kàjì (9)-rain (9)-Con-of (3)-cry (3)-Con-of (2)-female ‘slight rain but long-lasting’ b. N-vulà u-a mu-adi u-à ba-lùma (9)-rain (9)-Con-of (3)-cry (3)-Con-of (2)-male ‘heavy rain but short’

The terms in (33) refer to an imaginary evil being or spirit that is used to frighten children; but the feminine term kakàjì kakùlu, literarily meaning ‘old maid’ (33a)

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bears a diminutive connotation as conveyed by the class prefix ka- (Class 12) in contrast with the masculine cilùma cikùlu (33b), which bears the augmentative prefix ci- (Class 7). It is important to show that the prefixes ci- (class 7) and ka(Class 12) respectively often convey amplificative and diminutive senses with either appreciative and/or depreciative connotations (Burssens 1954). Actually, these appreciative or depreciative connotations are better clarified by the linguistic environment (i.e. what precedes or follows the term) or by the context of situation (e.g. the topic of discussion, paralinguistic signs made by the speaker, etc.). In (34), both terms refer to some part of the dry season which is generally cold and windy. However, (34a) denotes the first part of August when the weather is very cold and windy while (34b) denotes the period immediately after this when the intensity of cold and wind decreases (Kabuta 2008, 59). Similarly, both (35a and b) refer to the thunder but the former is worse than the latter. The view behind this ideology is the belief of the thunder as a magical phenomenon whereby a naked man or woman endowed with some supernatural power goes out in the form of fire to kill some guilty person. Reportedly, the damage is worse in the case of a woman (i.e. female thunder) than in that of a man (i.e. male thunder). In fact, a ‘female thunder’ is regarded as worse, more wicked or more violent because after killing a person, she cuts off his/her genitals and tongue and/or tears him/her to pieces, which a ‘male thunder’ never does. Conversely, if more damage is needed, the ‘female thunder’ is preferred to the male one. Finally, in (36) both expressions describe some kind of rain: (36a) refers to a slight rain but long lasting while the one containing a male-related term (36b) denotes a heavy rain but short (Kabuta 2008, 221). The term in (36a) conveys the view that women wail for long hours, which is applied metaphorically to rain. This has a positive or negative implication, depending on the cause of the wailing. If the cause of wailing is a funeral, a long-lasting crying is regarded as a sign of compassion. Therefore, women are constructed as being highly emotional. By contrast, if the cause is a quarrel, long lasting crying implies lack of courage. A similar view on (36a) is that it refers to house makers’ complaint over a long lasting rain since they could not go out and search for food. Although this view constrains women to the domestic life, it also positively constructs them as compassionate, willing to work hard and to feed their families. Therefore, they lament since their family is at stake. By contrast, (36b) implies that men do not cry for a long period. However, this implication may be either positive (i.e. men are courageous) or negative (i.e. men are less compassionate), especially at a funeral. In the same way, in the examples which follow, for two contrasting terms and referring to the same reality, the masculine conveys positive connotations while the feminine is negatively loaded.



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(37) a. Ci-anza ci-à ba-kàjì (7)-hand (7)-of (2)-female ‘left hand’ b. Ci-anza ci-à lu-bòku (7)-hand (7)-of (11)-arm ‘left hand’ c. Ci-anza ci-à bi-seki (7)-hand (7)-of (8)-legumes ‘left hand’ (38) a. ci-anza ci-à ba-lùma (7)-hand (7)-of (2)-male ‘right hand’ b. Ci-anza ci-a n-shima (7)-hand (7)-of (10)-shima ‘right hand’ (39) a. Di-bòku di-a ba-kàjì (5)-arm (5)-of (2)-female ‘left arm’ b. Lu-bòku (11)-arm ‘left arm’ (40) a. Di-bòku di-à ba-lùma (5)-arm (5)-of (2)-male ‘right arm’ b. Di- bòku di-à bu-kola (5)-arm (5)-of (14)-strength ‘right arm’

The terms in (37c) and (38b) contrast and refer to the context of family meal where the left hand is used to hold legumes or meat, and the right hand to cut and shape the paste nshìma (the staple meal in the area). Thus, (37c) and (38b) are respectively associated with ‘relative’ immobility and mobility: a parallel immobile female vs. mobile male is established; which, in turn, implies active male vs. passive female. The terms in (37b) and (39b) bear the prefix lu- (Class 11) which sounds depreciative in this configuration, making the very terms negatively loaded. On the contrary, the term in (40b), literarily glossed as ‘the strong arm’ (i.e. ‘male hand’ or right hand), conventionally implicates that the other hand (i.e. ‘female hand’ or left hand) is ‘weak’; thus the contrast strong male vs. weak female. Besides, the first is associated with good manners while the latter is associated with rudeness.

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Furthermore, a masculine term used as modifier often conveys positive connotation, contrarily to a feminine one as the following examples illustrate the phenomenon. (41) Di-teta di-à ba-lùmà (5)-exam (5)-of (2)-men ‘hard exam’ (42) Meeji à-à bâna bakàjì (6)-intelligence (6)-of (2)-children (2)-females ‘women’s thought’ (43) Wenza malu bu mwâna mukàjì ‘You do things as a woman’ (44) Wenza malu bu mwâna mulumà ‘You do things as a man’ (45) Kolesha mooyi udi mwâna mulùma ‘Chin up, you are a man’

The Examples (41) and (44) have positive connotations while (42) and (43) do not. In fact, (42) means ‘a hard or difficult’ exam, while (44) means ‘good behaviour’. By contrast, (42) may mean ‘stupid way of thinking’ while (43) connotes ‘bad behaviour’. Of course, given some contextual clues, both (43) and (44) may yield negative uptakes on the part of the listener depending on his/her sex. Finally, (45) implies that ‘a man should be courageous while a woman should not’. Similar expressions also occur in other languages such as the English Be a man! or be man enough and in French the Sois un home! ‘Be a man!’ which also imply that ‘men should be brave or courageous’. Conversely, *Be a woman! or *be woman enough and *Sois une femme! ‘Be a woman!’ do not occur, while the negative expression Don’t be such a girl! occurs and is male oriented. This section discussed gender indexing and ideologies as constructed through non-human-referred terms. It has pointed out both non-human male-referred terms and non-human female-referred term convey positive or negative connotations. However, non-human male-referred terms tend to convey more positive connotations than their counterpart. Besides, in general, the prototypical positive or negative value ascribed to males is implicitly denied to females, and vice versa. The next section will address gender bias constructed through metaphor, presuppositions, taboo and euphemism, and phraseology



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5. Rhetorical use of gender: The linguistic construction of gender stereotypes 5.1

Metaphors

Beyond connotations, gender bias is also constructed through metaphors. The latter have been explored from two major perspectives: (1) the traditional or classical view (considering metaphor as a matter of words, not concepts; metaphor as being based on similarity, and belonging to literary but not to everyday language, etc.) (Lakoff 1993; Lakoff and Johnson 2003, 244), and (2) the contemporary or conceptual view (Lakoff 1993 inter alia). The latter is based selectively on the following tenets: (1) the locus of metaphor is in concepts not words; (2) metaphor is, in general, not based on similarity, but on cross-domain correlations in our experience; (3) even our deepest and most abiding concepts such as time, events, causation, morality, and mind itself, are understood and reasoned about via multiple metaphors; (4) the system of conceptual metaphors is not arbitrary or just historically contingent, but shaped to a significant extent by the common nature of our bodies and the shared ways that we all function in the everyday world (Lakoff and Johnson 2003, 244–245). This subsection uses the latter approach and views metaphor as “the understanding of one concept in terms of another” (O’Grady et al. 1993, 219). Accordingly, it intends to delve into metaphors in order to (1) peep into Cilubà speakers’ conceptual system, (2) grasp their way of viewing men and women, (3)  and point out hidden ideologies. Following Lakoff and Johnson (2003), I will be using small capitals for the conceptual metaphor (i.e. the generalization), and outline different linguistic expressions illustrating it. However, due to space, I will limit the discussion to (1) orientational metaphors, especially me-first-­ orientation, and (2) some cases of ontological metaphors. me-first-orientation is part of orientational metaphors and concerned with how we position ourselves as central and others as peripheral (Lakoff and Johnson 2003). (46) Mukàjì mmukila mulamata ku cisèbà ‘wife is tail to a skin’

In (46) mukàjì ‘wife’ is the primary target whose primary source is mukila ‘tail’ – an appendage to the skin – while mulùma ‘husband’ is the implicit secondary target whose secondary source is cisèbà ‘skin’ – the centrepiece. Apart from such orientational metaphors, there are various other ontological metaphors including: woman/wife is husband/man’s food, man is a lion, and man is eater.

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(47) Mu-kàjì mu-le (1)-woman (1)-tall ‘a kind of cassava’ (48) Bânabakàjì ncyômba cibìshì; udi ne nzala wàvwa kucidya ‘Women are fresh cassava; let the hungry come and eat it’ (49) Mukaji ncyômba cya kudya bana balala ‘A wife/woman is cassava to eat while children are asleep’ (50) Juukà wêndà mandyùnda, ntambwa ‘Get up and boast, lion’

Example (47) refers to a variety of cassava (i.e. a food) which may reach three or more metres of height. It comprises: 1. implicit source cyômba ‘fresh cassava’, and target 1: mukàjì ‘wife/woman’. Similarly, (48) is a complex metaphorical expression with the following components: 1. source 1: cyômba cibìshì ‘fresh cassava’, target 1: Bânabakàjì ‘women’, 2. source 2: nzala ‘hunger’, target 2: sexual desire – left implicit, 3. source 3: kudya ‘eat’, and target 3: coitus – also left implicit. Instance (49) is also a complex metaphoric expression which may be parsed as: 1. source 1: cyômba ‘cassava’, target 1: mukàjì ‘wife/woman’, 2. source 2: kudya ‘eat’, and target 2: coitus – left implicit. Tapping into these linguistic metaphors reveals the following metaphoric concepts: (1) woman/wife is husband/man’s food, (2) sexual desire is hunger, man is eater and (3) coitus is eating. Finally, instance (50) is part of a rhyme sung by female members of a church at men’s funerals. It is a satirical apostrophe to the dead man, here metaphorically constructed as a lion. Therefore, the metaphor man is a lion emerges whereby attributes such as ferocity, strength, etc. are highlighted. This metaphor derives from the world is jungle metaphor, which in turn, implies the dyadic opposition strong (man) vs. weak (woman). We can then conclude that Cilubà speakers conceptualize males as central and females as peripheral; thus, the expression ‘male-first-orientation’ I would use to describe such language and culture. To use the world as a stage metaphor, men are conceptualized as being centrally located and acting and women as peripheral and acted upon. That is, these metaphors illustrate a hierarchical structure of gender whereby men are constructed as dominating and women as subordinated (see Lazar 2005, 7).



5.2

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Male vs. female stereotypical portrayal

The Table 2 presents, in a summary way, various stereotypical representations of males’ vs. females’ values in the lexicon as discussed in the previous sections. Table 2.  Table of male vs. female stereotypical portrayal N°

Male

Female

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

activity big and nice special, most important negatively hard and useless positively hard strong / vigorous raw /untasty/disobedient resistant (useless)/disharmony same species but more value positively resistant negatively hard and useless father’s side → good eater infertility less cold and windy male rain: heavy and short norm mobility good manners/politeness normal bad everything in the world courageous central lion

passivity small not special, less important positively soft and useful negatively soft weak cooked/tasty/obedient positively soft/harmony same species but less value negatively non-resistant positively soft mother’s side → bad food fertility colder and windier female rain: slight and long-lasting odd /derogatory / peripheral  immobility rudeness abnormal worse nothing in the world cowardly peripheral weak animal

This table supplies the male stereotypical representations in the left column and their female counterpart in the right column. For example, n° 1 reads: males are stereotypically associated with activity and females with passivity. Our last category which follows comprises terms whose ideological load is subtle and may be understood only with the understanding of presupposition and implicature.

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5.3

Gender presuppositions

The term presupposition has been used to cover a very broad category of semantic and pragmatic phenomena that have an essential bearing on the understanding of utterances (Levinson cited by Marmaridou 2010, 349). “It refers to propositions whose truth is taken for granted and without which the utterance cannot be assigned truth-value” (Marmaridou 2010, 349). They are defined in semantic terms relating, on the one hand, to the meaning of the proposition expressed and its negation and on the other hand, to the meaning of particular linguistic expressions. They are then also sensitive to contextual factors such as our knowledge about the world as the following examples show. (51) Ba-cì-pwìta mu-nwà N-fwankà (2)-(7)- sip (1)-smoke (9)-smoke ‘Parliamentarians’ (52) Ba-kulumpa bà-à N-peesà nè ma-bàlà (2)-elders (2)-of (10)-material and (6)-baldness ‘Senators’ (53) Makayabù àà cikunda vùùla dibàyà (Salt fish of old person take of your blouse) ‘big salt fish’

Example (51) literally means ‘the sippers, smokers of cigarette’. This term presupposes male referents when referring to parliamentarians. Reference is made to the Lubà traditional life context where serious matters were exclusively deliberated on and settled by men smoking during the process. On this account, Smal and Mbuyi (n.d., 24) write: “When there are serious matters to discuss, we organise a ‘round table’ within the family or clan; but our wives are ruled out of it or do not have anything to say” (my translation). In the same way the term in (52) denotes ‘senators’. However it is a compound noun whose head is the noun bakulumpà ‘elders’ and the dependent the connective phrase bàà mpeesà ne mabàla ‘of material and baldness’. Although the term mpeesà ‘material’ denotes a mixed item of clothing, the term mabàla (baldness) denotes male referents, hence implying that only men can be senators. By contrast, (53) conveys depreciative meaning and implies female referents. This meaning is elicited by the presence of the term dìbàyà ‘blouse’, denoting a female article of clothing. This term evokes women’s stereotypical behaviour (i.e. taking off their blouses) at a delicious meal. Therefore, it conveys a satirical overtone (i.e. women are greedy). To conclude, (51) and (52) refer to inclusive social roles by using implicitly male terms while (53) stereotypes a negative social behaviour as female-exclusive.



5.4

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Taboo and euphemism

Hornby (2010, 1518) defines the term taboo as “a cultural or religious custom that does not allow people to do, use or talk about a particular thing as people find it offensive or embarrassing” and a taboo word as “a word that many people consider offensive or shocking, for example because it refers to sex, the body or people’s race”. On the contrary, euphemism is “an indirect word or phrase that people often use to refer to [something] embarrassing or unpleasant, sometimes to make it seem more acceptable than it really is” (Hornby 2010, 500). Fowler (cited by Mills 1995, 117) similarly views euphemism as the use of “a mild or vague or periphrastic expression as a substitute for blunt precision or disagreeable truth”. As a matter of fact, euphemisms and taboo are to be considered as two sides of the same coin because, as shown by Fromkin and Rodman (1983, 267), euphemisms are stimulated by the existence of taboo words or taboo ideas; that is, “a euphemism is a word or phrase that replaces a taboo word, or that is used in the attempt to avoid either fearful or unpleasant subjects”. Cilubà makes no exception to taboo and euphemisms. For example, be it in insults or not, mentioning the name of genitals, or any other intimate body part, is regarded as taboo in general. Despite the fact that insults use terms referring to both males and females, mentioning a woman’s intimate body part is generally regarded as worse than mentioning a man’s one. That is, nouns denoting intimate female body parts are more taboo than those referring to male counterpart. This accounts for the fact that an insult to the mother is often perceived stronger and worse than that to the father. A common Cilubà saying testifies to this view: ‘Wêwa mupendà mààwù, ndi ntula bilàmbà’, which means: ‘If you insult my mother, I will take off my clothes’. In fact, in the Lubà society, taking off one’s clothes in a quarrel is regarded as the strongest protest which is generally followed by a long fight. This reaction testifies to the generally held view that the mother has a sacred status in her children’s eyes. But this, in turn, may be a bias against males. On the other hand, where there is a term to express male experience, there is none for the female counterpart. For example, parents of both sexes acknowledge that they tell their male children to call their penis cîshi ‘insect’ or kanyunyi ‘little bird’, while no term is used for girls. Some of my female students I interviewed mentioned the term mpùta ‘wound’, which is negatively connoted because referring to an injury to the body. This lexical gap also contributes to sexism, as Mills (1995, 122) points it out: “The problem of lexical gaps in the language is part of a greater linguistic problem – the problem of not being able to express yourself within the discourse structures available to you”. To conclude, taboo and euphemism as discussed in this section refer to sexuality. Given that the latter is a taboo subject in the Lubà culture, people resort to

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euphemism in order to talk about it. Notwithstanding, it is more talked about from the male perspective that from the female one. This assertion is confirmed by the scarcity of euphemistic terms referring to female genitals. 5.5

Gender representation and bias in phraseology

Gender-based stereotypes are also witnessed and constructed through proverbs. These are special phraseologisms in that the gendered ideologies they construct are reinforced, stemming from the consideration of the proverb as conveying agelong wisdom, truth, and morals (Mieder 2004, 3). For consistence sake I will discuss them around three axes: (1) authorship as male, (2) the use of the masculine as generic and (3) the use of the generic as masculine. (54) a. Bakaaku/Bankambwa/Bakulu(mpa) bambila ne… ‘Our grandparents/ancestors/elders said that…’ b. (Kwetu) bambìla nè… ‘At ours they said that…’ c. Bataatu bambìla nè…. ‘Our (fore)fathers said that…’ d. *Bamamu bambìla nè… *‘Our mothers said that…’ (55) Kalùma kàbò nkantu kubyanza ‘the male of them is the rich one’ (56) Kalùmankàyà kafwila mputà wa ha mongo ‘The lonely man died of wound on the back’

Superficially, one would consider (54 a–b) as gender-neutral given the use of dual terms. However, reference is made to male elders as witnessed by the acceptability of (54c) and the unacceptability of (54d). Therefore, the generic forms are used as masculine and consequently assign the Cilubà proverb authorship to men exclusively. In addition, instance (55) can be glossed as ‘The most important of them is the rich one’. Here the term kalùma ‘man’ is used with the connotation ‘important’, which is implicitly recognized to men. In (56), the term kalùmankàyà ‘lonely man’ is masculine but it refers to both men and women. In fact, the proverb shows that loneliness is not a good thing because if one is wounded on the back, self-medical treatment will be impossible. It may be glossed as ‘it takes two to do something’ or ‘many hands make light work’. These two examples show that masculine and generic are narrowly associated, supporting the “male as norm” view.



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6. Conclusion This chapter was an endeavour to explore gender-based ideologies and sexism in Cilubà. Before embarking on the analysis of gender representation and sexist language in the lexis, morpho-syntax, and phraseology, the chapter briefly presented the language under analysis as well as its morphosyntactic system. In mopho-syntax, gender ideology is constructed through transitivity and prefixal agreement. In the first case, verbs describing marriage and/or sexuality in Cilubà construct men as agents and women as patients, the opposite not existing. In the second case, non-personal prefixes are used, instead of personal ones, to command agreement where a female human-referred term occurs as head. At the lexical level, gender bias was identified in both personal and nonpersonal terms. It stems from the interpretation of dual terms as masculine, the positive construction of men as good, strong, special, resistant, and so on; and the negative construction of women as bad, weak, to mention but these. Notwithstanding, some lexical items may be ideologically double-edged, depending on the perspective taken. Finally, sexism is also constructed in discourse through metaphors such as: male-first-orientation, man is a lion, and wife/woman is husband/man’s food and through presuppositions, implicatures as well as in taboo and euphemism. Phraseologisms, and particularly, proverbs construct symbolically the view of male as generic and generic as male, assigning proverbial authorship to men exclusively. To conclude based on the identification of various areas where sexism occurs in Cilubà, it will be possible to draw on linguistic and contextual resources to favour and enhance gender-sensitive language.

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Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 2003. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press. doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226470993.001.0001 Lazar, Michelle M. (ed). 2005. Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Gender Power and Ideology in Discourse. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Lukusa, T. M. Stephen. 1993. An Autosegmental Approach to Cilubà Nominal and Verbal Tonology. PhD dissertation. Lancaster: Lancaster University. Marmaridou, Sophia. 2010. “Presupposition.” In The Pragmatics Encyclopedia, ed. by Louise Cummings, 349–353. New York: Routledge. Mieder, Wolfgang. 2004. Proverbs: A Handbook. Westport; London: Greenwood Handbooks. Mills, Sara. 1995. Feminist Stylistics. London; New York: Routledge. Mpoyi, Mwadyamvita. 1987. Lwendu Lwa Baluba. Difundulula Diibiidi. Kananga: Imprimerie Katoka. Mufuta, Kabemba P. 1968. Le Chant Kasàlà des Lubà. Paris: Julliard; Association des Classiques Africains. Munyoka, M. C. Andrien. 2011. Analyse structuro-sémantique des parémies zoophytonymiques lubà (L31a). PhD dissertation. Gent : Universitet Gent. Mutombo, H. M. Daniel, and N. Gilbert Malemba. 2013. Histoire et Culture des Peuple d’Origine Nsànga-Lubangu. Travaux et Recherches. Kinshasa: CELTA. O’Grady, William, Michael Dobrovolsky, and Mark Aronoff. 1993. Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction 2nd edition. New York: St. Martin’s Press.



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Pauwels, Anne. 2003. “Linguistic Sexism and Feminist Linguistic Activism.” In The Handbook of Language and Gender, ed. by Janet Holmes, and Miriam Meyerhoff, 550–570. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. doi: 10.1002/9780470756942.ch24 Prewitt-Freilino, Jennifer L., Andrew T. Caswell, and Emmi. K. Laakso. 2012. “The Gendering of Language: A Comparison of Gender Equality in Countries with Gendered, Natural Gender, and Genderless Languages.” Sex Roles 66: 268–281. doi: 10.1007/s11199-011-0083-5 Quirk, Randolph. 1968. The Use of English, London: Longman. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Essex: Longman. Smal, Guy A., and Joseph W. Mbuyi (n. d.). Femme Congolaise Réveille- Toi...! Liège: Desoer. Spender, Dale. 1980. Man Made Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sunderland, Jane (ed). 2006. Language and Gender: An Advanced Resource Book. London: Routledge. Sunderland, Jane. 2004. Gendered Discourses. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. doi:  10.1057/9780230505582

Swan, Michael. 1984. Basic English Usage. Oxford: O.U.P. West, Candace, and Zimmerman, Don H. 1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender and Society 1 (2): 125–151. doi: 10.1177/0891243287001002002

Appendixes

Appendix 1 – Singular–plural pairing in Cilubà This table indicates class pairing for number in Cilubà. It presents, from left to right, the class pairs, the prefix pairs, examples, and glosses. Class pairs

Prefix pairs

Examples

Gloss

1/2

mu-/baØ-/bamu- /midi-/maci-/bin-/nlu-/nka-/tubu-/ma-

muledi/baledi mamu/bamamu mucì/micì dibèjì/mabèjì cikàsù/bikàsù mbùjì/mbùjì lukàsù/nkàsù kàbwà/tùbwà bukalenga/makalenga

‘parent/parents’ ‘mother/mothers’ ‘tree/trees’ ‘leaf/leaves’ ‘spade/spades’ ‘goat/goats’ ‘hoe/hoes’ ‘dog/dogs’ ‘kingdom/kingdoms’

3/4 5/6 7/8 9/10 11/10 12/13 14/6

Appendix 2 – Concord of variable forms This table illustrates grammatical concord in Cilubà. It starts with the class number followed by the class prefix with other dependents’ prefixes counterpart.

164 Francis C. Ngoyi Tshimanga 1

2

Class Cl. Pref.

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Major Cl. Pref

VP

PP

I

Bound PF

FPF

Con.

Demonstrative (a) Near (b) Reminders

(c) Far

wa/bàà wa/yà wà/yà dyà/àà Ø/àà àà/àà cyà/byà Lwà/Ø lwà/yà kàà/twà Ø/twà bwà/Ø bwà/yà bwà/àà kwà/Ø pàà/Ø kwà/Ø mwà/Ø

ewu/aba ewu/eyi ewu/eyi edi/aa Ø/aa aa/aa eci/ebi elu/Ø elu/eyi aka/etu Ø/etu ebu/Ø ebu/eyi ebu/aa eku/Ø apa/Ø eku/Ø emu/Ø

awu/abo awu/ayi,o awu/ayi,o adi,adyo/ao Ø/aa ao/ao aci/abi = acyo/abyo alu/Ø alu/ayi,o aku/atu Ø/atu abu/Ø abu/ayi,o abu/ao aku/Ø apu/Ø aku/Ø amu/Ø

wàwa/bààba wàwa/yàya wàwa/yàya dyàdya/ààa Ø/ààa ààa / ààa cyàcya/byàbya lwàlwa/Ø lwàlwa/yàya kààka/twàtwa Ø/twàtwa bwàbwa/Ø bwàbwa/yàya bwàbwa,ààa kwàka/Ø pààpa/Ø kwàka/Ø mwàmwa/Ø

meme/twètu wa/bàà wèwe/nwènu wa/bàà

ewu/aba ewu/aba

awu/abo awu/abo

wàwa/bààba wàwa/bààba

Other roles (singular-plural pairing) 1/2 1/4 3/4 5/6 ø/6 6/6 7/8 11/ø 11/4 12/13 ø/13 14/ø 14/4 14/6 15/ø 16/ø 17/ø 18/ø

MU/BAØ/BAA+ N/N-Ø /Ø MU/MIDI/MAØ/MAMA/MACI/BI-CII/BII+ LU / Ø LU/NKA/TU-KAA/TUU+ Ø/TUBU / Ø-; BUU+ BU/NBU/MAku / ØPA / Ø- (+) KU / Ø- (+) MU/Ø- (+)

mu/bamu/mimu/midi/maØ/mama/maci/bilu / Ølu/mika/tu Ø/tubu / Øbu/mibu/maku / Øpa / Øku / Ømu / Ø-

ù/bàù/ìù/ìdì/àØ/àa/àcì/bìlù / Ølù/ìkà/tùØ/tùbù/Øbù/ìbù/àkù/Øpà/Økù/Ømù/Ø-

u/bàu/ìù/ìdì/àØ/àà/àcì/bìlù / Ølù/ìkà/tùØ/tùbù/Øbù/ìbù/àkù/Øpà/Økù/Ømù/Ø-

mu/bà-mu/ì-ù/ì-dì/à- Ø/à-à/à-cì/bì-lù/Ø-lù/ì-kà/tù-Ø/tù -bù/Ø-bù/ì-bù/à-kù/Ø-pà/Ø-kù/Ø-mù/Ø-

N/tu u/nu-

u/bàu/bà-

-N/tùku/nù-

-YE/BO -YE/YI -U/YI,O -DI,/O -Ø/O -U/O -CI/BI–CYO/BYO -LU/Ø -LU/YI -KU/TU -Ø/TU -BU/Ø -BU/YI -BU/O -KU -PU -KU -MU

yêye/bôbo yêye/yôyi wôwu/yôyo dyôdi/ôo Ø/ôo ôo / ôo cyôci/byôbi lwôlu/Ø lwôlu/yôyo kôku/twôtu Ø / twôtu bwôbu/Ø bwôbu/yôyi bwôbu/ôo Kwôku Pôpu Kôku Mwômu

B. Speech roles: Speaker(s) and Hearer(s) 1st 2nd Where: Cl.: Class I: Infix

mu/bamu/ba-

Cl. Pref.: Class prefix PP: pronominal prefix

FPF: Free pronominal form PF: Pronominal form

VP: Verbal prefix PP: Pronominal prefix

The representation of gender in Bajjika grammar and discourse Abhishek Kumar Kashyap Sun Yat-Sen University

In this article I present a description of grammatical gender in Bajjika, a minority language of the Eastern Indo-Aryan family spoken in a small region in the northern part of the north Indian state of Bihar. Grammatical gender in Bajjika is expressed in the nominal forms, definitive particles, and verbal agreement. Although the morphology of Bajjika verb-agreement is one of the most elaborate in Indo-Aryan languages, the formalization of gender in the verbal morphology is very simple; the gender of only the second person honorific and the third person honorific referents in the subject function is encoded. The definitive particle receives gender marking when it is added to an adjective. In this article, I identify and describe different areas of Bajjika grammar where gender is encoded. Based on the analyses of excerpts from natural discourse, I also observe an interesting tendency in terms of (written and spoken) modebased neutralization of gender in Bajjika discourse. While the masculine and feminine genders of the second and third person “honorific” referents are consistently encoded in the verb-agreement in the spoken mode, in the written mode it is neutralized. We may then witness a potential neutralization of gender in terms of a diachronic change in the Bajjika grammar. Keywords: gender, grammatical gender, lexical gender, Bajjika, Bihari language, Eastern Indo-Aryan, language change

1. Introduction Human beings use language for discussing and describing entities and the experiences that they encounter in their day-to-day life, interact socially with different groups of people and share feelings, ideas, information, so on, with them. And when they do so, they take into consideration various factors and devise linguistic strategies for differentiating one group from the other. Gender is one of the factors for such categorizations, as shown by the research in disciplines such as sociology, doi 10.1075/pbns.264.07kum © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

166 Abhishek Kumar Kashyap

anthropology, as well as linguistics and its sub-disciplines such as grammar (e.g. Upadhyay 2009), sociolinguistics, and discourse studies (see Fisher 1958; Bergvall 1999; Eckert 2000; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992; Rojo 2006). Therefore, gender is found to be a salient feature in grammar of many languages. For instance, in many languages of the Indo-Aryan family (Masica 1991), on which this paper focuses, gender plays a major role in determining nominal and verbal agreements, e.g. in Hindi and Punjabi (see Cardona and Jain 2003, and chapters therein). However, as in the case of other phenomena and the linguistic devices encoding the phenomena, the formalization of gender has notable variations in Indo-Aryan languages. In some of these languages, gender is said to be non-­ existent, while in others the linguistic strategies encoding gender are not uniform. Therefore, the questions whether a language has “gender”, how many genders a language has and how they are expressed are energetically debated in language studies (Comrie, Stone and Polinsky 1996; Comrie 2005). These questions hold particular significance for a language that has received little attention as far as the documentation of its ethnic and linguistic properties is concerned, as we have effectively no knowledge about the representation of gender in that particular language, both in relation to linguistic typology as well as theories of language. We find this gap with regard to most Indo-Aryan languages since grammatical gender, to my knowledge, is one of the least attended phenomena in the linguistic investigations focused on this language family. This paper on the study of gender in Bajjika could be extremely significant, both for the language under review as well as for Indo-Aryan languages in general. In particular, I am concerned with the expression of gender in Bajjika, an Eastern Indo-Aryan language spoken in the northern part of the north Indian state of Bihar (Kashyap 2012, 2014, in press; Kashyap and Yap in press) and different linguistic resources available for expressing it in the grammar of Bajjika. In other words, I explore the areas of grammar where gender can be encoded and the strategies that the speakers use when they do so. The description is based on the analysis of a selection of texts from the Corpus of Written and Spoken Bajjika.1

1. I began compiling this corpus in 2006 and over the past ten years have collected a good range of written and spoken texts. The spoken data comprise 29 hours of audio- and videorecording (recorded between 2006 and 2014) and include casual conversations among family and friends at home, at sports events, and during social occasions such as wedding ceremonies, and interviews recorded in the Vaishali and Muzaffarpur districts. The written texts include 18 issues of a monthly Bajjika newspaper published between 1990 and 2001, one novel, one epic on the mythological story of Lord Ram and his battle with Ravan, and numerous short stories and folk songs. The newspapers include various texts types, e.g. news reports, media interviews, editorials, advertisements, children’s stories, short stories, sarcasm, letters to the editor, and



The representation of gender in Bajjika grammar and discourse 167

The paper has the following structure. Section 2 provides the background details on the demography of Bajjika and the areas of grammar which allows encoding gender in Indo-Aryan languages. Section 3 describes the gender phenomenon in Bajjika and explores different linguistic strategies used for encoding gender in that language. In Section 4, I analyse three excerpts from texts of different registerial nature. Based on analyses in Section 4, a few observations with regard to language change are made in the conclusion (Section 5).

2. Background 2.1

The Bajjika language and community

Bajjika is a minority language spoken in a small region comprising eight districts known as Bajjikanchal (Bajjikāncal) in the northern part of the north Indian state of Bihar, about 20 kilometres north of Patna (the capital city of Bihar) and across the Ganges (Kashyap 2014). The maps of the Bajjika speech community are given in Figure 1 and Figure 2 below: Figure 1 points to the districts where Bajjika is spoken as a first language; Figure 2 shows the map of Bajjikanchal and other speech communities by which Bajjikanchal is surrounded. The exact number of Bajjika speakers is not clear as there is no languagebased survey in this region, nor has this language been reported in the censuses of India. Although researchers have devised different ways to estimate the number of speakers, they do not reach a consensus and the figures range between 10 million to 20 million speakers (see, for example, Arun and Sharma 2008). According to my research, the number of speakers using the language as their first language, for all functional purposes and in all situational and cultural settings, was at least 11,461,932 in 2001 (see Kashyap 2014 for details). An officially confirmed report comes from Nepal, where, according to the Government of Nepal (2012), Bajjika was spoken by 793,418 speakers (i.e. 3% of the population of Nepal) in 2011 (see Yadava 2003 for its status in 2001 Census of Nepal). Genetically, Bajjika is an Indo-Aryan language within the ‘Bihari’ sub-group of the Eastern Indo-Aryan (see Kashyap forthcoming for details). When Grierson opinion columns. The transcription of audi- and video-recorded spoken data is still in progress and the written texts are in the digitization phase. This corpus is designed according to their registererial properties (register in the sense of functional varieties of language (Halliday 1978; Matthiessen 1993, 2015)) with a purpose to facilitate, in addition to the description of general linguistic phenomena, the description of the language according to functional variation (e.g. Matthiessen and Kashyap 2014; Kashyap and Matthiessen forthcoming).

168 Abhishek Kumar Kashyap

Bajjika speaking districts

Paschim Champaran

Uttar Pradesh

NEPAL

Purbi Champaran Sitamarhi Gopalganj Sheohar Madhubani Siwan

Muzaffarpur Saran

Supaul

Bhabhua

Bhojpur

Patna

Jahanabad Rohtas Aurangabad

Kishangani

Darbhanga

Vaishali Samastipur Buxar

Araria

Saharsa

Begusarai Nalanda Sheikhpura

Madhepura

Khagaria

Purnia Katihar

Munger Bhagalpur Lakhisarai

Nawada Jamui Gaya

Banka

West Bengal

Jharkhand

Figure 1.  The districts of Bihar that forms the Bajjika speech community (Kashyap 2014, 212)

Figure 2.  The map of Bajjikanchal and the other speech communities in its surroundings (Kashyap 2014, 213)



The representation of gender in Bajjika grammar and discourse 169

(1883–87, 1968[1903]) described the languages of Bihar a century ago in his monumental Linguistic Survey of India, he identified three dialects of what he called the Bihari languages: Bhojpuri, Maithili, and Magahi (or Magadhi).2 In the later debates over the languages of Bihar in 1960s onwards, researchers (e.g. Tiwari 1964; Arun 1972, among others) claimed Bajjika to be a language distinct from Bhojpuri, Maithili, and Magahi, and since then the exponents of Bajjika have been pleading and working tirelessly towards obtaining it the status of an official language; however, to date Bajjika has not been conferred a language status by the federal or the state government. In the published literature not many references to this language are found, except passing mentions in a few studies, e.g. Masica (1991) and Burghart (1993) , in which Bajjika is shown either to have no status, or to be a dialect of Maithili (see Lewis, Simons and Fennig 2013). However, in recent years, researchers have begun to describe the grammar of Bajjika and compile dictionaries (e.g. Kashyap 2012, forthcoming; Kashyap and Yap in press; Kumar 2003, 2009; Arun and Sharma 2008). Given these new developments and scholarly efforts, the language is getting to be known outside the boundaries of its speech community. 2.2

Gender in Indo-Aryan languages

The languages within the Indo-Aryan family seem to be diverse in how and to what extent they formalize gender in linguistic forms. Masica (1991) observes an interesting pattern of reduction in the expression of gender as we spatially move from one part of the Indo-Aryan languages region in India to another. Geographically speaking, “[t]here is an obvious decline in the strength of gender from west to east” in modern Indo-Aryan language regions (Masica 1991, 220); i.e. as we move from the western part of India (where the languages spoken are all of the Indo-Aryan family) to the eastern part, the intensity and strategies of encoding grammatical gender in the languages are reduced. This makes the diversity in encoding gender in Indo-Aryan languages fairly systematic in the sense of whether or not they encode gender and how many genders these languages have. In the Bajjika language (which is located in the north-eastern part3) the strategies of encoding grammatical gender are considerably fewer. 2. Here the term dialect is not in the sense of standard vs. non-standard; rather it is in the sense of different speech forms mutually unintelligible. 3. In the day-to-day conversation as well as local socio-political discourse, a general distinction is made between the northern part and the southern part of the country. This distinction is primarily based on the language spoken in the respective part. In the northern part the languages

170 Abhishek Kumar Kashyap

There is a maximum of three genders – masculine, feminine, and neuter – found in Indo-Aryan languages; all the languages combined, they have the following eight grammatical categories in which gender is encoded: nominal forms, certain verbal forms (e.g. verb-agreement), adjectives, adjectival modifiers, postpositions, certain particles, possessive pronouns, and in some cases also adverbs (see Masica 1991; Cardona and Jain 2003 and descriptions of languages therein), although in no one language all these grammatical categories are deployed as far as the expression of gender is concerned. Sanskrit, the oldest Indo-Aryan language, had all the three genders expressed in nominal forms and the corresponding verbal forms (Cardona 2003). The three genders were retained in the Middle Indo-Aryan languages like Pali and Prakrit (Oberlies 2003). They are still found in the languages on the far western region, e.g. Marathi (Pandharipande 2003) and Konkani (Miranda 2003). However, as we move towards the east, the number of gender is reduced to two – masculine and feminine, e.g. in Punjabi (Bhatia 1993; Shackle 2003), Bhojpuri (Verma 2003), and Mathili (Yadav 1996, 2003). And as we reach extreme east, the languages are found to have no gender distinction at all, for example, in the case of Bangali and Asamiya (Dasgupta 2003; Goswami and Tamuli 2003). Thus an utterance detached from its context offers no clue for interpreting the gender of interactants or a referent, unless it contains a noun which has a lexical gender such as in mother, father, girl, and boy.4 The only resource to trace gender in these languages with no grammatical gender is the discourse context. The case of Hindi, the official language of the Republic of India, is different in this regard. Hindi is spoken in a large area in the north, central, and western parts of the country, including the states that have a local major language (e.g. Maharashtra where Marathi is a local major language). Hindi is described as having two genders, i.e. masculine and feminine. They are expressed through nominal form, verb declension, adjective, genitive case marker, and certain pronouns (Shapiro 2003; Kachru 2006). In Hindi every noun is interpreted to have masculine or feminine gender (see Section 3.4) and in the sentence, it is either the subject, or the object that controls gender-specific verbal-agreement. Thus, Hindi spoken are mostly Indo-Aryan and this entire region is dominated by Hindi; in the southern part, on the other hand, the languages are all Dravidian. Bihar (where Bajjika speech region is located) is a Hindi speaking state and, therefore, referred to as the northern part of India. As the entire Hindi dominated part of India is referred to as north India, Bihar is also included. It is clear, however, from the map of India that Bihar is spatially closer to northeastern part such as West Bengal and Assam than far northern states such as Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab. 4. See Motschenbacher (2016) for the distinctions between lexical, grammatical, referential gender in other languages such as English and Croatian.



The representation of gender in Bajjika grammar and discourse 171

seems to be an exception to Masica’s (1991) observation about the representation of gender relative to geographical location of a language. The reason for this gap in Masica’s finding is probably that Hindi is spoken in about half of India and is no more assigned to a particular place; but in view of its primary base in Delhi, Utter Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh, Hindi also validates Masica’s observation. The Bajjika speech community is located in the eastern part (but not in the extreme east) in the geographical sense of Masica. Predictably, it is not very rich in terms of resources available for encoding gender. These resources are the focus of the sections that follow. In Section 3.1, I identify the areas of Bajjika grammar where gender is encoded and in Sections 3.2 through 3.4 the focus will be on the description of each category that allows encoding gender, as identified in Section 3.1.

3. The expression of gender in Bajjika grammar 3.1

Dispersal of gender in Bajjika grammar

We have noted above that in Indo-Aryan languages gender is encoded in a number of grammatical forms, including verb-agreement, nominal forms, adjectives, adjectival modifiers, postpositions, certain particles, possessive pronouns, and sometimes also adverbs. We have also noted that in no one language of the IndoAryan family all these categories are recruited for encoding gender. In the case of Bajjika, the expression of gender is limited to the following three categories: noun, verb-agreement, and definitive particles. The overt morphological and syntactic expressions are not very elaborate and, at the same time, are very irregular (see Sections 3.2 and 3.3). As in any other language, gender can be interpreted in the Bajjika language in terms of extra-linguistic reference (or lexical gender) as well as its manifestation in grammatical forms. A critical question that has been debated in the literature on this topic is whether or not a language has gender (see Corbett 1991, 2006; Masica 1991). It is, therefore, imperative for us to address this question with regard to Bajjika before we move on. To some extent, however, the question seems irrelevant. In principle, every language will have gender as long as the speech community has an organized social structure, and the speakers of the language talk about and describe phenomena such as social issues that relate to male and female members and where gender is somewhat central. At least the language will have lexical gender, if not grammatical gender. For example, it is difficult to imagine that nouns such as mother, father, man, woman and many other terms of kinship relationship in a language will not distinguish male and female genders. So, when

172 Abhishek Kumar Kashyap

a Bengali speaker says tomar mā tumāke ḍākchen ‘your mother is calling you’, we know that mā ‘mother’ in the nominal group tomar mā ‘your mother’ refers to a female member and the gender here is obvious, even though we have no clue if the possessor tomar ‘your’ is male or female. The relevant question, in fact, is whether a language has grammatical gender or not: while every language, in principle, should have a natural gender, as in the nouns of kinship relationship exemplified above, a language may not have gender expressed through grammatical forms. We have noted above that Asamiya and Bengali are two such examples. As mentioned before, Bajjika has both social gender in a closed set of lexical nouns and gender expressed through grammatical forms. In the nouns where gender is semantically inherent, as in caccā ‘uncle’ and cāci ‘aunt’, phonological pattern and morphological endings give the useful indications (see Section 3.2). Here I am reminded of a Bajjika version of Hindi nursery rhyme that I as a Bajjika native used to recite to my niece and in which gender is encoded in the verbal form: machri jal ke rāni hae ‘Fish is the queen of water.’ jiban okkar pāni hae ‘Water is her life.’ hāth lagaibu, dar jataw ‘If you touch her, she will get frightened.’ bāhar nikālbu, mar jataw ‘If you take her out (of water), she will die.’

We do not know whether machri ‘fish’ in this nursery rhyme is male or female, because there are no distinct forms to distinguish gender in fish and the speakers of Bajjika do not consider a need to distinguish it (see Section 3.2 for details). However a verbal inflection -u (shown by bold in third and fourth lines of the rhyme) makes reference to a female addressee (Kashyap 2012). If this rhyme were sung to a boy, the corresponding verbal inflection would have been different. That means that the speakers of Bajjika make gender-based distinction in verbal morphology (Section 3.3). The conclusion, thus, is that Bajjika has gender and it is dispersed in more than one areas in its grammar, though the dispersal is not as elaborate as in Hindi in which gender can be encoded in a number of grammatical forms (see Shapiro 2003). As noted earlier, Bajjika allows gender to be encoded in three components in the overall systems of grammar, i.e. nominal forms (or lexical nouns), verbalforms in the form of verb-agreement, and definitive particle. That is, gender in the Bajjika language is expressed morphologically and syntactically (i.e. grammatical gender) as well as by invariant nominal forms (lexical gender discussed above).



The representation of gender in Bajjika grammar and discourse 173

Further, gender in this language corresponds to sex differentiation or referential gender. Therefore, gender and sex in this paper will be used synonymously i.e. the word masculine will be synonymous to male and the word feminine to female. The lexical nouns that distinguish gender include, proper name of human beings, mythical beings, heavenly bodies with mythical personification, terms for kinship reference, forms of address, nouns referring to some common professions in which Bajjika speakers are engaged, and animals (see Appendix 1). Some noun classes do not distinguish gender at all. They are listed in Appendix 2. 3.2

Gender in nominal forms

The names of human beings are inherently gender-specific. Each name refers to either a man or a woman. It is rare to find a proper name used for a human being that is ambiguous for reference to gender. And the speakers of Bajjika can understand if a name refers to a man or woman. Phonological patterns provide useful indications in this respect. By reading the final sound of a name, one can predict whether the name refers to a man or a woman. Most names ending with the vowels /i/ and /ā/ refer to the proper name of a female referent, whereas the names ending with a consonant refer mostly to a male referent. For example, the proper names Nagendra (pronounced as /nagindar/), Manoj, and Jhunjhun, all ending with a consonant sound, refer to men, while Taregani (/taregni/), Dhanvanti (/­dhanwanti/), Lata (/laṭā/), and Champa (/campā/) refer to women. Note that in some Indo-Aryan languages, e.g. Punjabi, the first name is not gender-specific, but a particular last name is. For example, the first name Rabinder in Punjani can refer as much to a man as to a woman, but the last name Kaur (the whole linguistic sign) is gender-specific and refers to a woman. In Bajjika, the last name does not indicate gender, except a closed-set of female names such as Kumari (/kumāri/) and Devi, which some women, irrespective of caste and class, use as a last name. Other last names such as Thakur (/thākur/), Mishra (/misir/), and Mahto, can refer to both male and female human beings, especially in the event that nowadays women (especially of the higher caste and middle class families) change to their husband’s family name after marriage. In the past, there was no such trend of changing the name among the women of Bajjikanchal for a number of reasons, such as the lack of education or the absence of employment opportunities. Therefore, they used Devi as the last name after marriage, irrespective of their caste and social class, while Kumari used to be, and still is, the maiden last name of a girl and Kumar the last name of a boy. In recent years, however, women have started to take employment in government and corporate offices and needed to distinguish between first and last

174 Abhishek Kumar Kashyap

names. This has made them aware of the distinction between their first and last names (or given name and surname) and its official and social relevance. They go out for work and meet new people of diverse social groups and talk about themselves, their familial, social and ethnic backgrounds. This has led to their wish to manifest their identity by changing to husband’s family name, especially if they belong to a higher caste and have high social prestige. Evidently, changing to the husband’s family name allows them to declare their social status, as family name in most Indian communities carries the person’s ethnic identity, which, in turn, also reveals his or her social status with respect to caste, religion, and economic class. Even a man can have a proper name that ends in /ā/ or /i/ but the masculine name (i.e. a name that refers to a man) that ends in /ā/, usually (but not always) has a corresponding feminine variant that ends in /i/ referring exclusively to women. Moreover, the pair of the two nouns is etymologically related as the feminine variant is a derivative of the masculine form (see Muchnik (this volume 2016) for a similar phenomenon in Hebrew). For example, Munna (/munnā/) and Raja (/rājā/) refer to masculine referents; their variants, with /ā/ replaced with /i/, Munni (/munni/) and Rani (/rāni/) are female referents. There are though exceptions; for example, the names Dhorhai (/ḍhorhāi/) and Chulhai (/culhāi/) end in /i/ and they refer to a man while having no corresponding feminine variant. The explanation for such exceptions is that names such as Dhorhai and Chulhai are random names with no etymological or semantic basis. Therefore, they do not have feminine variants. Such names, to some extent, validate Bloomfield’s (1933, 280) observation in relation to gender in European languages that “there seems to be no practical criterion by which the gender of a noun in German, French, or Latin could be determined”, even though Bloomfield’s observation does not apply to other noun classes of Bajjika. Proper names of most mythical characters are also used by many Bajjika speakers to name their children. Indeed mythological stories in Bajjika are adapted from Sanskrit texts and in the original stories, mythical beings are either male or female. In the Bajjika version of the stories, this sex distinction is retained; thus, gods and goddesses are described as male and female. In fact, the mythical beings are also described to have human-like physical properties but with extraordinary power. Some gods are re-incarnated and arrive in the mundane world with a purpose to accomplish specific tasks. The language therefore differentiates the same kind of lexical gender as it does with regard to normal human beings. When a human bears the name of a mythical character, there is a one-to-one match between the gender of the mythical being and that of the human being who takes that name. For example, Parvati (/pārvati/) is the name of the wife of Lord Shiva (one of the trinity in the Hindu mythology), Lakshmi (/lakśmi/) is the name of the wife of Lord Vishnu (another God in the trinity), and Sita (/sitā/) the wife of Lord Ram (/­rām/). The names Parvati, Lakshmi, and Sita, therefore, are given to a



The representation of gender in Bajjika grammar and discourse 175

woman and not to a man, whereas the names Shiva (/siv/), Vishnu (/visnu/), and Ram are given to a man and never to a woman. If one wants to use a feminine mythical name for naming one’s male child, one adds a masculine element to the feminine name. For example, names such as Lukshmi and Sita can be developed into Lakshmikant (/lakśmikānt/) and Sitaram (/sitārām/), respectively, where -kant and -ram bear masculine gender. The patterns described above with regard to proper names of human beings also apply to the names of mythical figures. Most /i/- and /ā/-final names of mythical beings denote feminine gender. This gendered morphological distinction is true for the following noun classes: kinship terms, forms of address, selected professions, and some animals. Most kinship terms distinguish gender morphologically and follow a very simple pattern like those explained above for proper names. The nouns of kinship relationship that end in -ā are masculine, e.g. caccā ‘uncle (father’s brother)’, bābā ‘grandfather (i.e. father’s father)’, nānā ‘grandfather (i.e. mother’s father)’. Those that end in -i are mostly feminine for example, cāci ‘aunt’ (i.e. caccā’s wife)’, dāi ‘grandmother (i.e. father’s mother)’, nāni ‘grandmother (i.e. mother’s mother)’ (but see -oi in Appendix 3). Usually, a kinship term referring to males and ending in -ā has a corresponding term for a female referent that ends in -i, e.g. kakkā ‘uncle’ vs. kāki ‘auntie’, maosā ‘the husband of mother’s sister’ vs. mausi ‘mother’s sister’. A few masculine forms are derived from feminine terms by adding -oi, for example, bahnoi ‘sister’s husband’ from bahin ‘sister’ and nandoi (also nanadosi) ‘husband’s sister’s husband’ derived from nanad ‘husband’s sister’.5 Many kinship terms are also used as forms of address; the lexical gender of the term makes the gender of their referents obvious, e.g., caccā ‘father’s brother’, cācci ‘the wife of caccā’, bābā ‘grandfather’, dāi ‘grandmother’ nānā ‘grandfather (mother’s father)’, and nāni ‘grandmother (mother’s mother)’. In addition, a number of unique forms of address are used for certain kinship relationships, e.g. mehmān used for the son-in-law, dulhin used for the ‘daughter-in-law’, and bhauji used for the ‘wife of one’s elder brother’ (see Kumar 2009, Chapter 4 for details). As for trade names, certain suffixes (e.g. -ni, -in, -ain, āin: see Appendix 4) are used for deriving the corresponding feminine nouns from the masculine nouns. The nouns of masculine gender reference are the basic form, from which nouns of feminine reference are derived through derivational morphology. The examples include terms of kinship relationship, certain professions, and female member of caste names. The list of kinship terms is given in Appendix C and the caste-based 5. In Bajjika, distinction is made between different brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, e.g. the brother of X’s husband, the brother of X’s wife, the husband of X’s brother or sister; the sister of X’s husband, the wife of X’s wife’s brother, and so on. There is a unique term for each of these kinship relationships.

176 Abhishek Kumar Kashyap

professions with gender distinction in Appendix 4. A few examples of gender distinction through morphological markings are given below: masculine feminine māhṭar ‘teacher’ māhṭarni dākṭar ‘doctor’ dākṭarni porphesar ‘professor’ porphesarāin

‘lady teacher’ ‘lady doctor’ ‘professor’s wife’

The celestial bodies present interesting instances of marking gender differentiation in many languages and cultures where they are personified and have human-like sex-differentiation. For example, in the Dyirbal language of North Queensland, the moon is personified as the sun’s husband in mythological stories and is assigned the masculine gender while the sun is assigned the feminine gender (Corbett 2006, 751). The moon has a special place in the languages and cultures around the world in this respect. Different languages assign the moon gender differently, the Bajjika culture being no different in this regard.6 In Bajjika (and perhaps also in other Bihari languages), the moon is personified to be male. The author, as a Bajjikanchal native, has grown hearing this Bajjika rhyme (in which moon is the central character) and singing it himself to infants: channā māmā āre āwa ‘Uncle moon come here.’ nadiyā kināre āwa ‘Come on the bank of river.’ cāni ke katori me ‘In the bowl (made) of silver.’ dudh bhāt lele āwa ‘Bring milk and boiled-rice.’

The moon in this rhyme is treated as an uncle (channā māmā), a child’s mother’s brother, which implies a masculine gender being assigned. This is consistent with Sanskrit texts that have mythological origin since the moon in the Hindu mythology is represented as a male character, i.e. as the son-in-law of Prajapati Daksh who is believed to be the son of Lord Brahma and, therefore, a demigod. But the light that the moon emits in night, e.g. in a full-moon night, is depicted as feminine and we describe: cāndni rāt ‘moon-lit night’. The word cāndni can be used as an adjective, as in cāndni rāt ‘moon-lit night’, as well as a noun, as in barā 6. Though the demography of Bajjika includes the followers of Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism, the Bajjika culture is very largely Hindu-dominated culture. The followers of the other two religions are in extreme minority. The cultural and religious practices and mythological stories found in the Bajjika language is pervaded by practices of Hinduism and stories from Sanskrit texts.



The representation of gender in Bajjika grammar and discourse 177

manohar cāndni hai ‘the moonlight is beautiful’. The affix -ni in cāndni (a feminine noun derived from cannā or cān by adding -ni, a grammatical device mentioned above) denotes feminine gender and there is no corresponding masculine form of it, because the word refers to a non-human entity. Thus cāndni can be a woman’s name but not a man’s name, while cānd and other related nouns referring to a heavenly body, e.g. bhurukbā, can be a man’s name but not a woman’s name. This word cāndni is used in a specific variety of Bajjika, i.e. in the speech of educated speakers who are good at Hindi and frequently use Hindi words in their Bajjika speech. The original Bajjika equivalent of cāndni, that is ijoriyā, is an adjective and, as is the case with other adjectives of Bajjika, has no gender. When used as a proper noun, ijoriyā is a female name. The heavenly bodies with mythical personification, e.g. suraj ‘sun’ and sani ‘Saturn’, are masculine; those without personification are not differentiated for gender. The same principle applies to other natural entities: the natural entities with mythical values are considered either male or female, e.g. agni ‘fire’ and bāyu ‘air’ are considered masculine and dharti ‘earth’ and rivers such as Ganga (/gaŋgā/) ‘the Ganges’ and Budhi Gandak (/burhi ganḍak/) are feminine (Appendix 1). Note that they are all borrowed from Sanskrit texts and there is no morphological consistency to distinguish gender in them. The heavenly bodies and natural entities which are not mythically personified, e.g. taregan ‘star’ and luk ‘meteorite’, have no gender, not even lexical gender (Appendix 2). As listed in Appendix 2 of the Appendix, the absence of gender distinction is also found in all inanimate objects, the non-human animates other than selected animals, e.g. insects and other small creatures, plants, and creepers. An interesting pattern is observed with regard to the gender of animals and insects. The animals of everyday use are distinguished for gender, while those that are of no use (or have not been used in the past) in the Bajjika community are not distinguished for gender. For instance animals such as gāy ‘cow’ and bhãisi ‘buffalo’ are the only source of milk in the present time for all dairy-related items, e.g. in different kind of sweets, pudding, yogurt, making tea, and also drinking it after meal at night.7 The cow’s milk has a special role besides its use in dairy products: the cow’s milk (but not the milk of a buffalo or a nanny goat) is used for a special item called canāemrit offered to God in some rituals. So these animals ̃ ‘bull’ and bhãisā are distinguished from their male counterparts, bael ‘ox’ or sārh ‘bull’, respectively and they have gender. 7. Drinking a glass of milk after meal in the night is considered a sign of prosperity (of course, together with other attributes). Likewise, the quantity of milk in tea is considered an indication of several cultural perceptions. The tea prepared with a high proportion of milk (with water) not only indicates that the offerer of tea (i.e. host) is well off, but also that the guest who is offered that good quality tea is taken in high esteem by the host.

178 Abhishek Kumar Kashyap .

In the distant past, the milk of bakri ‘nanny goat’ was part of regular diet in Bajjika culture, especially the poor people who did not afford to have a cow or buffalo nor could they afford to buy cow’s or buffalo’s milk for regular consumption. Goat milk is also still used to perform one cultural activity in Bajjikanchal: the first meal given to a new-born baby is the milk of nanny goat (bakri). The baby can have mother’s milk or other food only after s/he has been given at least a spoonful of nanny goat’s milk.8 Thus, because of its use in the cultural lives of Bajjikanchal, bakri (a feminine gender) ‘nanny goat’ is distinguished from bakrā ‘billy goat’ by the morphology: -i in bakri refers to the feminine gender and -ā in bakrā refers to the masculine gender. Similarly, ghorā ‘horse’ and ghori ‘mare’, were (and still is, though very rarely) used in carriages like carts; gadahā ‘donkey’ was used (but not anymore) for carriage by a special caste called dhobi ‘washerman’ (Appendix D) in some villages. Therefore, ghorā/ghori ‘horse/mare’ and gadahā/gadahi ‘donkey/mare’ are distinguished morphologically by -ā and -i for the male and female gender, respectively. Moreover, some animals are used to make compliments or to verbally insult. Thus gadahā ‘donkey’ and gadahi ‘mare’ are metaphorically used with reference to a human being to mean an ‘idiot/fool’. In that case, gadahi ‘mare’ refers to a woman and gadahā ‘donkey’ to a man. Thus in metaphors, animals are used for referring to human being, emphasizing on bad or good features of the human beings. First the animals are distinguished to have a masculine or feminine gender and then human beings are equated with them either in the form of compliments or of insult. Another example are harin ‘deer’ and hirni ‘deeress’; these two animals are perceived in the culture as having very beautiful eyes. Reference to hirni’s eyes are metaphorically used for complimenting a woman for her beautiful eyes. Reference to chuchunnar ‘mole’ (masculine) and chuchunari (feminine), e.g. ‘s/­he is a chuchunnar/chuchunari’ will be a derogatory remark to insult (or abuse) a man or woman, respectively. 3.3

Verb-morphology

A verbal group in Bajjika can be composed of the main verb, negative particle, modal, aspect marker, auxiliary, tense morpheme, and agreement morpheme; of these, the negative particle, modal, and aspect marker are optional elements (Kashyap 2012; Kashyap and Yap in press). The system of verb-agreement in Bajjika is one of the most elaborate and indeed one of the most complex in

8. Of course, if nanny goat’s milk is not available for some reasons, which is very unlikely, the baby can have mother’s milk. But, traditionally, the culture recommends nanny goat’s milk as a baby’s first meal.



The representation of gender in Bajjika grammar and discourse 179

Indo-Aryan languages; gender is encoded in the system of verb-agreement. I will, therefore, focus on this particular encoding in the verbal group and let aside a discussion of the ‘complexity’ involved in the agreement paradigm.9 The paradigm of verb-agreement allows to simultaneously encode two participants (traditionally known as subject and object), case making on the nominal constituent, honorific degrees and spatial distance (proximate vs. remote), as well as gender; they all can be encoded at the same time. While the morphology of person agreement is exceptionally rich (see Kashyap 2012), that of expression of gender in the agreement paradigm is depleted since expression of gender is restricted to the indicative mood only (Table 1). There is no way to express gender in the imperative mood. The second person pronoun in Bajjika has four levels of honorification: nonhonorific (nh), honorific (h), mid-honorific (mh), and high-honorific (hh) (in order of increasing degree of honorification), but the expression of gender is restricted to the second person of honorific (h) status. Similarly, the third person pronoun distinguishes between forms of non-honorific and honorific status, but the expression of gender is limited to the third person pronouns of honorific (h) status. Bajjika verbal morphology does not allow encoding gender of a first person referent (i.e. the speaker). Table 1.  Single agreement in indicative and imperative moods10 Indicative mood

Imperative mood

Copular prs 1

Non-copular pst

-i

fut

prs

pst

fut

-m/b

-il-e

-l-i

-m/b

2mh

-u

2hh 2h male

-a*

2h female

-u

2nh

-e

3nh

-e

3h male 3h female

-an -in

-i

jā-le

ge-l

jā-i

-jāo

-a

-b-a

-al-a

-l-a

-b-a

-a

-b-u

-al-u

-l-u

-b-u

-ø/e

-b-e

-al-e

-l-e

-b-e

-l-ak

-i

-as

-ihan

-al-an -al-in

-l-an -l-in

-ihan

-i

-ø/o

* Note: Bold face denotes the morpheme that refers to male/female gender

9. See Kashyap (2012) and Kashyap and Yap (in press) for a fairly detailed description of verbagreement of Bajjika. 10. See Appendix 5 for a list of abbreviations used.

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Furthermore the system of verb-agreement with reference to gender in Bajjika verbal morphology takes into account three grammatical components: construction type, tense and mood. However, as Table 1 shows, the expression of gender in verb-agreement is not regular across tenses or construction types. In the copular constructions, the present tense, (1a), and the future tense, (1b), allow encoding gender in the verbal morphology, but the past tense does not allow such encoding. In the non-copular constructions gender can be encoded in all three tenses, but not equally: the second person honorific subject allows the expression of gender in all three tenses, whereas the third person honorific does not allow gender encoding in the future tense. (1) a. tu nimman matāri hat-u, 2h/nh good mother cop.prs-2h.f nimman putoh hat-u. good daughter-in-law cop.prs-2h.f

‘Your are a good mother, a good daughter-in-law.’

b. ā nimman sās-o hoi-b-u and good mother.in.law-also cop-fut-2h.f

‘And (you) will also be a good mother-in-law.’

c. ‘ho jogindar kenn-e hat-a? voc Jogindra which-dir cop.prs-2h.m

‘Hey Jogindra, where are you?’

The morpheme expressing gender is the same in both copular and non-copular constructions and all tenses, wherever applicable: -a refers to the second person masculine addressee, as in (1c), -u refers to the second person feminine addressee as in (1a) and (1b); -an refers to the third person masculine referent, as in (2a), and -in denotes the third person feminine referent, as in (2b).

(2) a. dosrā din bhinsare jiratiā ā sāheb jogindar ke durā par gelan ā gaddah kaelan ‘ho jogindar kenne hata?

dosrā din bhinsare jiratiā ā sāheb jogindar ke second day in.morning servant and master Jogindra gen

durā par ge-l-an ā gaddah ka-el-an – front.yard loc go-pst-3h.m and call do-pst-3h.m ‘ho jogindar kenn-e ha-t-a? voc Jogindra which-dir be.prs.2h-m

‘The next day early morning the servant and the master visited Jogindra’s house (lit. front-yard) and shouted – ‘hey Jogindra, where are you?’



The representation of gender in Bajjika grammar and discourse 181

b. hatin agrāit, beṭā je nikal gelain ha. hat-in agrā-it, beṭā je nikal gel-ain ha. aux.prs-3h.f show.off -prog son go.out asp-3h aux.prs

‘She is showing off because her son had done exceptionally well.’

Essentially, the copular constructions allow masculine and feminine gender to be encoded in the second person honorific and third person honorific addressees in the present tense scenarios, as exemplified in (1) above, but they do not allow such encoding for the third person referents in the future tense (Table 1). In the non-copular constructions, in contrast, the gender of the second person honorific and third person honorific referent is encoded in the present and past tenses; in the future tense, the gender of third person referents cannot be encoded at all. Another constraint is with regard to mood as mentioned above: while the gender can be encoded in the indicative mood, the grammar of Bajjika does not allow encoding it in the imperative mood. 3.4

Particle

There are a number of particles in Bajjika which are endowed with interesting experiential, interpersonal, and textual functions. One of those particles, the definitive particle (i.e. one that marks ‘definiteness’ in the nominal element) can encode gender (see Kashyap in press). There are three forms: -kā, -bā and -ā, each determined by the semantic category and the phonological shape of the noun. When added to an inanimate object, it makes reference to a specific object. For example, when a mother instructs her son to bring a loṭā (a type of container used at home in Bajjika community) in (3a), she does not mean a particular loṭā; rather it is an unspecified, general loṭā. But when the definitive marker is added to it, (3b), the reference is made to a specific vessel. (3) a. loṭā le ā-wa. container take come-2h ‘Bring a loṭā (i.e. a container used for storing water).’ b. loṭ-bā le ā-wa. container-def take come-2h ‘Bring the loṭā.’

When added to nouns used for referring to a human being, the particle does not allow gender encoding of the referent. Its function in the role of nominal suffix is rather more related to interpersonal meanings: the nominal forms with definite suffix have the implications of familiarity as well as derogatory connotations.

182 Abhishek Kumar Kashyap

When added to an adjective, it allows gender encoding, or in other words, it has a masculine or a feminine reading, similar to gender encoding in every adjective of Hindi. Indeed, in Hindi (and also in several other Indo-Aryan languages like Punjabi), every noun is assigned a specific gender, which is expressed morphologically. A noun, human or non-human, animate or inanimate, has either masculine or feminine gender assigned to it. For example, laṛkā ‘boy’ (masculine), laṛkī ‘girl’ (feminine), bhāt ‘boiled-rice’ (masculine), roṭi ‘chapatti’ (feminine), mũch ‘moustache’ (feminine), and so on. An adjective, both in attributive use (i.e. as a nominal modifier) and predicative usage, takes the gender of the noun. For example, acchā laṛkā is a ‘good boy’ and acchī laṛkī is a ‘good girl’. The gender encoded in the adjective acchā (masculine) and acchī (feminine) corresponds to the masculine and feminine gender of laṛkā ‘boy’ and laṛkī ‘girl’, respectively. In general, this pattern of gender marking in adjectives is missing in Bajjika. As noted earlier, gender in some Bajjika nouns is mostly lexical, as in chãorā ‘lad’ (masculine) and chãuri ‘lass’ (feminine). When we add an adjective before these nouns, the adjective remains unaffected by the lexical gender of the noun, as in the examples given below: larikā ‘boy’ larki ‘girl’ nimman larikā ‘good boy’ nimman larki ‘good girl’ gor chãorā ‘fair (color) lad’ gor chãuri ‘fair (color) lass’

But the adjective takes the lexical gender of the noun when the particle marking definiteness is added, as in the following examples. Note that the forms derived from adj-def combination have an attributive use as a nominal modifier only and no predicative usage. lamkā mardābā ‘the tall man’ lamkī maugi ‘the tall woman’ gorkā chamrā ‘the fair he-cobbler’ gorki chamainiā ‘the fair she-cobbler’ kariakkā chãorā ‘the dark lad’ kariakkī chãuri ‘the dark lass’

In such cases, the particle adds specificity to the nominal group. The expression lamkā mardābā ‘the tall man’ does not mean ‘any tall man’, but ‘a specific tall man’. Thus in this sense, besides marking the gender distinction, this particle also serves the function of specifying the referent in the same way as the definite article the does in English.



The representation of gender in Bajjika grammar and discourse 183

4. Gender in spoken and written discourse – A variation in mode In the preceding sections I have described the expressions of gender in Bajjika grammatically as well as lexically. I have shown that Bajjika offers resources for encoding gender in nominal forms, in verbal forms, and in the definitive particle, although not all can encode gender equally. Of these, the verbal forms are the most salient because they are always explicit, while the nominal elements can remain implicit in natural discourse. Moreover, as the pronominal system of Bajjika does not show gender marking, the importance of verbal forms is then especially significant, as shown in the Example (1a) above. In (1a) even if the pronoun tu ‘2h/nh’ does not make a gender distinction, the agreement suffix -u renders the feminine gender explicit. Recall that the gender distinction in Bajjika verbal morphology is restricted to ‘honorific’ (h) status, both in case of the second and third person referents. While in the case of the second person, the pronoun tu does not distinguish between honorific and non-honorific addressees, the morphemes within the verb-agreement clearly distinguish between the addressees of honorific (h) and non-­honorific (nh) status (see Kashyap 2012). Indeed, verb-agreement is very significant for reference to gender in Indo-Aryan languages. Therefore, whenever the grammatical marking of gender in Indo-Aryan languages is discussed, the discussion of verbal-­agreement becomes imperative (see Masica 1991; Cardona and Jain 2003). In this section, I am concerned with the description of gender marking not in individual utterances and grammatical or lexical forms, but in larger excerpts of text (i.e in discourse). The analysis of these excerpts will show that gender encoding in written Bajjika is strikingly different from the one in spoken mode. In the spoken language gender in verb-agreement, wherever the grammar allows, is always expressed.11 In the written mode, in contrast, a large number of texts are found where gender is neutralized in the verb-agreement. This can be associated with the style of individual writers and I do not draw a hasty conclusion in this paper about its potential motivation. Rather, I present here the analyses of three excerpts from two registers of written texts, i.e. the preface to a book and a short story. Through the analysis, I show that in written discourse the authors choose rather not to make a male/female distinction and thus prefer to neutralize the gender. The first two excerpts, Excerpt 1 and Excerpt 2, come from the same source, i.e. from a preface to Bajjika Ramayan by Arun (2003), an epic depicting the story of the battle between Lord Ram and the devil king Ravan, while the third excerpt is extracted from a short-story. For the ease of reference, the three excerpts are given a unique name. 11. I do not include here excerpts of spoken texts because of the lack of space.

184 Abhishek Kumar Kashyap

Excerpt 1.  Rām ke Kathortāi 1. bhalā jekrā pābe lā rām bhagirath bhalā jek-rā pā-be lā rām bhagirath bhalā rel-dat get-inf for Ram Bhagirath 2. paryatn kake samundar banhbaelan, paryatn ka-ke samundar banh-ba-el-an, effort do-conv ocean tie-caus-pst-3h.m  ‘For finding whom, Ram did such a hard (lit. Bhagirath-like) work and got (a bridge) built on the ocean.’ 3. rāban ke mare jaisan asambhav kām kaelan, rāban ke mār-e ja-isan asambhav kām ka-el-an Ravan gen kill-inf rel-like impossible work do-pst.3h.m ‘(He) did as difficult (lit. impossible) work as killing Ravan.’ 4. kae ber mirtu ke mũh me jājāke kae ber mirtu ke mũh me jā-jā=ke how.many time death gen mouth loc go-rdp=conv 5. dunno bhāi baclan du-nno bhāi bac-l-an, two-incl brother save-pst-3h.m ‘Both the brothers escaped several times from the mouth of death.’ 6. ohi sitā ke mile par u o-hi sitā ke mil-e par u 3nh-emph Sita.f gen meet-inf loc 3nh 7. kaise etnā nisthur ho gelan kaise etnā nisthur ho ge-l-an how this.much cruel happen asp-pst-3h 8. ki sitā ke coṭāh bāt kah-kahke ki sitā ke cotāh bāt kah-kah-ke rel Sita gen injured talk say-rdp-conv 9. birahdagdh hirday par nun lagābe laglan? birah-dagdh hirday par nun lagā-be lag-l-an? separation-full.of heart loc salt apply-inf asp-pst.-3h.m ‘On meeting that Sita, how did he become so cruel that he hurt the alreadyanguished heart of Sita by saying things that further grieved her?’

Excerpt 1 (“Rām ke Kathortāi” text) is taken from Awadheshwar Arun’s the preface to his Bajjika Ramāyan that narrates the mythological story of Lord Ram’s battle with and victory over the devil king Ravan. This text depicts the author’s opinion on Ram’s behaviour with Sita at the end of the war. The background of the text is the following. Sita was abducted by the devil king and therefore had to



The representation of gender in Bajjika grammar and discourse 185

stay away from her husband Ram for an extended period. As Sita was away from Ram and lived as a captive of Ravan in his Kingdom, Ram asks Sita to go through Agniparikśā, a chastity test that required her going through real fire to prove her chastity. The mythological belief is that if Sita’s satitva ‘chastity’ was intact, she would come out of the fire safe. The author in Excerpt 1 finds Ram’s demand unjust and expresses his surprise at Ram’s post-battle behaviour with Sita. In this excerpt Ram is the main character and throughout the excerpt he has been assigned the grammatical function of Agent and Subject and a reference to his (inherent) masculine gender made by the use of -an, a verb-agreement morpheme for male referents, e.g. in lines 2 and 3. When Ram and his brother (dunno bhāi ‘both brothers’ in line 5) are made Agent/Subject of the clause in line 5, their masculine gender is still shown in the verb by the corresponding morpheme (i.e. -an). This pattern is consistently maintained throughout the text. But, interestingly, whenever a reference to a female character is made in the text (see Excerpt 2, taken from the same text), we find a hint of gender-neutralization in the text. We will see that in Excerpt 2 the reference to feminine gender is not made by the morpheme of feminine gender reference in the verb-agreement. Excerpt 2.  Bajjika Ramayan ke Prernā 1. bajjkā ramāyan bajjikā bhāsā me likhal bajjkā ramāyan bajjikā bhāsā me likh-al Bajjika Ramayan Bajjika language loc write-pst 2.

pahilā ramāyan mahākābya hae. pahilā ramāyan mahākābya h-ae. first Ramayan epic be.prs-3nh ‘Bajjika Ramayan is the first epic (on Ramayan) written in Bajjika.’

3. ekkar racnā ke prernā ek-kar racnā ke prernā 3nh-gen construction gen inspiration 4. mā ̃ kāli delan mā̃ kāli de-lan mother.f Kali give-pst.3h.m ‘Mother Goddess Kāli gave (me) the inspiration of its creation.’ 5.

bāki bhāsā ke cunāo ham apne kaili. bāki bhāsā ke cunāo ham apne ka-il-i. but language gen selection I self do-pst-1 ‘But the selection of the language I made on my own.’

6. ekrā racnā se bajjikā bhāsā ek-rā racnā se bajjikā bhāsā 3nh-dat construction abl Bajjika language

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7. ke sāhitya-bhanḍār bharat, ke sāhitya-bhanḍār bhar-at, gen literature-store fill-fut ‘With its creation the richness (lit. storage) of the literature of the Bajjika language will increase.’ 8.

aisan biswās hae. aisan biswās h-ae. such faith be.prs-3nh ‘Such is (my) faith.’

In Excerpt 2, the author describes the story of how he began to work on Bajjika Ramāyan and attributes the source of his inspiration to Goddess Kali. He makes a reference to mā ̃ kāli ‘mother Kāli’ in line 4, where he addresses the Goddess Kāli as mother. Kali is one of the mythical beings in the Hindu mythological stories of ancient Sanskrit texts. Obviously, ‘Mother Goddess’ is a reference to a female being and the semantic gender attributed to her is feminine. As discussed in Section 3.3 above, the grammar of Bajjika makes gender distinction in the honorific third person reference in the forms of verb-agreement, where -an refers to a male third person referent, as for reference to Ram and is brother in “Rām ke Kathortāi” text (Excerpt 1) above, while -in refers to female third person referent (see Table 1). Therefore, the default person-agreement morpheme used for reference to Mother Goddess Kali will be -in ‘3h.feminine’, but the author decides to use -an (line 4) instead of -in. The author in this text neutralizes the masculine and feminine genders by the use of invariant morpheme -an for reference to both male and female characters in the Excerpts 1 and 2. In both Excerpts 1 and 2, the characters discussed are mythical beings, but the phenomenon of gender neutralization is not confined to any one class of referents (i.e. mythical being in the present case), rather it is consistently found in quite a large number of texts in written mode, irrespective of the referent’s category, as we will see in Excerpt 3 below. Excerpt 3.  Malkini 1. mālik das din pahile ta māiji mālik das din pahile ta māi-ji master.voc ten day before ta mother-h 2.

se hamrā bhẽṭ bhel rahe. se ham-rā bhẽṭ bh-el rah-e. abl 1-dat meet happen-pst aux.pst-1 ‘Sir, I met the mistress (lit. mother) ten days ago.’



The representation of gender in Bajjika grammar and discourse 187

3. hamrā dekhke u gadālo kaelan ham-rā dekh-ke u gadāl-o ka-el-an 1.dat see-conv 3(f) shout-also do-pst-3h.m ‘Having seen me she shouted (my name).’ 4. ā nimman se u bāto-cit kaelan ā nimman se u bāt-o-cit ka-el-an and good abl 3(f) talk-also-rdp do-pst-3h.m ‘And (she) also talked (with me) well.’ 5. hammar hālcāl puchlathin. hamm-ar hāl-cāl puch-la-thin. 1-gen condition-rdp ask-pst-3h ‘(She) also asked my well-being.’ 6.

o din ta unkā kuccho na hoit rahain. o din ta un-kā kucch-o na ho-it rah-ain. 3nh day ta 3h-dat some-also neg happen-prog aux-3h ‘That day she did not have anything (unusual).’

7.

ekābaeg isab kaise ho gelain? ekābaeg i-sab kaise ho ge-l-ain? suddenly 3nh-pl how happen asp-pst-3h ‘How did all this happen suddenly?’

Excerpt 3 (“Malkini” text) is taken from a short story. This excerpt depicts a part of conversation between a mālik ‘master’ and a servant. The servant comes to know that her malkini ‘mistress’ (i.e. ‘mālik’s wife’) is ill. The servant had seen the mistress just about ten days ago when she looked absolutely well. So, when he hears about her illness, the servant is socked at this news and asks mālik about her well-being. In this excerpt, we find several references to the mistress: māiji ‘mother’ (line 1), u ‘s/he’ (lines 3 and 4); but there are two particularly interesting references that attract our attention: the references to the mistress in the verb-agreement in lines 3 and 4,12 where the unmarked choice of verb-agreement morpheme for the reference to mistress should have been -in, a morpheme for female referent, as mentioned earlier. The author, however, chooses to use -an, which is a morpheme 12. Note that throughout this excerpt the mistress’ health is being discussed and frequent reference to her is made. But I specifically point to the lines 3 and 4 where the mistress is the nominative subject. In Bajjika, subjects can be in nominative case or dative case and they are known as nominative subject and dative subject, respectively (Kachru, Kachru and Bhatia 1976; Kashyap 2012). The dative subject does not allow encoding gender, while nominative subject does. Therefore, our discussion here is limited to nominative subject in lines 3 and 4.

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for referencing a male referent. Obviously, the author does not mean a male referent here by selecting -an; he refers to the female referent about whom he is talking. As it is a carefully written text, apparently the choice of a typical male-referent morpheme for a female referent is not random; it is indeed very carefully selected. We could then hint at an intention to neutralize gender. Thus, we see in the analyses of three excerpts, Excerpts 1 through Excerpt 3, that the authors of Bajjika texts use agreement marking in the verb to refer to mythical characters (e.g. Kali in the Excerpts 2), semi-mythical characters (i.e. Ram in Excerpts 1),13 and typical human beings (Excerpt 3) but they neutralized the masculine–feminine gender distinction that Bajjika verbal morphology allows. This strategy is found not only in the texts written by the two authors discussed in this section, but also in the works of other authors who have been writing in Bajjika (see, for examples, the collection of stories by Vilās (1996, 1997)). In the future research on the representation of gender in Bajjika discourse, therefore, we need to quantify the encoding of gender in Bajjika written and spoken discourse, which may yield interesting findings and help us better understand the pragmatics of use of gender in the Bajjika language and speech community.

5. Conclusion and discussion In this paper I have described a particular aspect of Bajjika, an Eastern Indo-Aryan language, which is seldom described and therefore nearly unknown to most part of the world – the expression of gender in the Bajjika the grammar and natural discourse. I have shown that Bajjika distinguishes masculine and feminine gender in nominal forms, verbal forms, and definitive particle, though gender is not encoded equally in all these categories. Gender in the Bajjika language has a direct correlation with social gender: the categories masculine and feminine gender correspond to the biological male and female sex distinctions. This is precisely the reason why lexical nouns creates a taxonomy for groups of animate beings whose sex is obvious on the one hand and for those whose sex cannot be easily determined (e.g. in the case of insects) on the other hand. Bajjika speakers make gender-based distinction in the nominal forms representing human beings, the mythical beings with human personification, and selected animals. However other animate beings like plants and insects are not distinguished for gender. In the verbal morphology, gender is encoded only 13. Sita and Ram are considered mythical characters; both Sita and Ram are described as a human incarnation of God Vishu and Goddess Lukshmi, respectively, but the author of Bajjika Ramayan considers his characters not as gods and goddesses, but as ordinary human beings with extraordinary powers.



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for reference to addressees and third person referents of ‘honorific’ status and other forms of addressees; third person referents remain indistinguishable in this respect.14 An interesting finding of this study corresponds to the mode of discourse: the expression of gender in verbal forms appears different in the written and spoken discourses. In spoken texts, e.g. casual conversation, gender in consistently encoded in the verbal forms. In the written texts examined in this paper, in contrast, gender is seldom expressed in the verbal forms. In other words, in the written texts the encoding of gender in the verb is neutralized. What does, then, this neutralization mean? Studies show that the three-gender system of Old Indo-Aryan languages reduced to two-gender in most modern Indo-Aryan languages (see Masica 1991; Cardona and Jain 2003 and chapters therein), e.g. Hindi-Urdu and Punjabi, and no-gender system in some languages, e.g. Bengali, Oriya, and Asamiya. Is the neutralization then an indication to a diachronic change that the language is undergoing and a subsequent loss of inflections that mark gender in this language? This is a question to be explored in the future research. However, in view of the diachronic tendency in Indo-Aryan languages, it will not be surprising if Bajjika loses grammatical expression of gender in the future. Upadhyay (2009) has observed a reversed pattern in Nepali, a language that is geographically and genetically very close to Bajjika. The speakers of Nepali obligatorily encode gender in verb-agreement in the written mode but many speakers neutralise gender in the spoken mode. Though in reverse order, these developments seem to be part of the same continuum and give a useful indication to interesting diachronic changes that we might see in these languages in the years to come. As far as Bajjika is concerned, the investigation of the neutralization of gender in written and spoken discourse of Bajjika – in which particular context authors/speakers neutralize gender and if the neutralization hints to a diachronic change in the language – remains a priority of my research on this language.

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Kashyap, Abhishek Kumar and Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen. Forthcoming. “The Representation of Motion in Discourse: variation across registers.” Language Sciences. Kumar, Abhishek. 2003. “A Study in the Transitivity of Bajjika: Verbs and Verb-endings.” CIEFL Bulletin 13(2): 1–18. Kumar, Abhishek. 2009. Mood, Transitivity and Theme in Bajjika in Typological Perspective: A Text-Based Description. PhD dissertation. Sydney: Macquarie University. Lewis, M. Paul, Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2013. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Seventeenth Edition. Dallas: SIL International. Online version: http://www. ethnologue.com. Accessed: 31 March 2013. Masica, Colin P. 1991. The Indo-Aryan Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matthiessen, Christian M. I. M. 1993. “Register in the Round: Diversity in a Unified Theory of Register Analysis.” In Register Analysis: Theory And Practice, ed. by Mohsen Ghadessy, 221–292. London; New York: Pinter. Matthiessen, Christian M. I. M. 2015. “Register in the Round: Registerial Cartography.” Functional Linguistics 2(9): 1–48. Matthiessen, Christian M. I. M., and Abhishek Kumar Kashyap. 2014. “The Construal of Space in Different Registers: An Exploratory Study.” Language Sciences 45: 1–27. doi: 10.1016/j.langsci.2014.04.001 Miranda, Rocky V. 2003. “Konkani.” In Indo-Aryan Languages, ed. by George Cardona, and Dhanesh Jain, 729–766. London; New York: Routledge. Motschenbacher, Heiko. 2016. “A poststructuralist approach to structural gender linguistics. Initial considerations.” In Gender, Language and the Periphery. Grammatical and social gender from the margins, ed. by Julie Abbou and Fabienne Baider, 65–88. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Muchnik, Malka. 2016. “Trying to change a gender-marked language Classical vs. Modern Hebrew.” In Gender, Language and the Periphery. Grammatical and social gender from the margins, ed. by Julie Abbou and Fabienne Baider, 25–46. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Oberlies, Thomas. 2003. “Aśokan and Pāli.” In Indo-Aryan Languages, ed. by George Cardona, and Dhanesh Jain, 161–203. London; New York: Routledge. Pandharipande, Rajeshwari. 2003. “Marathi.” In Indo-Aryan Languages, ed. by George Cardona, and Dhanesh Jain, 698–728. London; New York: Routledge. Rojo, Martín L. 2006. “Gender and Political Discourse.” In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. by Keith Brown, 742–749. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Shackle, Christopher. 2003. “Punjabi.” In Indo-Aryan languages, ed. by George Cardona, and Dhanesh Jain, 581–621. London: Routledge. Shapiro, Michael C. 2003. “Hindi.” In Indo-Aryan Languages, ed. by George Cardona, and Dhanesh Jain, 250–285. London: Routledge. Tiwari, Siyaram. 1964. “Bajjikā Bhāśā aor Sāhitya [The Bajjika language and literature].” Paper presented in Bihār Rāśtr bhāśā pariśad kā trayodaś wārśikotsav held in Hyderabad, India. Upadhyay, Shiv R. 2009. “The Sociolinguistic Variation of Grammatical Gender Agreement in Nepali.” Journal of Pragmatics 41: 564–585. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2008.06.006 Verma, Manindra K. 2003. “Bhojpuri.” In Indo-Aryan Languages, ed. by George Cardona, and Dhanesh Jain, 515–537. London: Routledge. Vilās, Rām. 1996. Satbhaiā. Muzaffarpur: Swastik Prakāśan. Vilās, Rām. 1997. Gharbās. Muzaffarpur: Swastik Prakāśan. Yadav, Ramawatar. 1996. A Reference Grammar of Maithili. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruy ter. doi: 10.1515/9783110811698 Yadav, Ramawatar. 2003. “Maithili.” In Indo-Aryan Languages, ed. by George Cardona, and Dhanesh Jain, 477–497. London; New York: Routledge. Yadava, Yogendra Prasad. 2003. “Language.” In Population Monograph of Nepal. Kathmandu: Central Bureau of Statistics. Online (Accessed: March 28, 2013).

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Appendices Appendix 1 – Gender-distinguishable noun categories with examples Category I

Name of human being

II

Mythical being

III

Examples

Heavenly bodies with mythical personification IV Heavenly bodies with mythical personification V Kinship term: morphologically unrelated VI Kinship term: morphologically derived VII Address form VII Title IX Profession X

Animal

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Masculine

Feminine

amit ‘Amit’ sures ‘Suresh’ bisnu ‘Vishnu’ saṁ kar ‘Shankar’ suraj ‘sun’ sani ‘Saturn’ agni ‘fire’ bāyu ‘air’ bahin ‘sister’ matāri ‘mother’ caccā ‘uncle’ māmu (also mama) ‘uncle’ mehmān ‘a son-in-law’ jijāji ‘a sister’s brother’ sri ‘Mr.’ dākṭar ‘doctor’ māhṭar ‘teacher’ bāgh ‘tiger' bael ‘ox'

amitā ‘Amita’ taregani ‘Taregani’ lakchmi ‘Lakshmi’ durgā ‘Durga’ – – dharti ‘earth’ gangā ‘Ganges’ bhāi ‘brother’ bāp ‘father’ cāci ‘aunt’ māmi ‘aunt’ dulhin ‘daughter-in-law’ bhauji ‘a brother’s wife’ srimati ‘Mrs.’ dākṭarni ‘‘lady doctor’ māhṭarni ‘lady teacher' bāghin ‘tigress' gāy ‘cow'

Appendix 2 – Examples of nouns where gender cannot be distinguished Categories

Examples

taregan ‘star’, luk ‘meteorite’, bhurukbā ‘Venus’, satbhaiā ‘a collection of seven stars’ II Inanimate objects ghar ‘house’, baelgari ‘bullock-card’, kemāri ‘door’, chailā ‘wood’ III Non-human animates Plants and creepers: dhān ke per ‘paddy plant’, gohum ke per ‘wheat plant’, cameli ke per ‘plant of jasmine’, lattar ‘creeper’ other than animals Insects and other creatures: ciũṭi ‘ant’, sāp̃ ‘snake’, machri ‘fish’, macchar ‘mosquitoes’, kirā ‘insect’ I

Heavenly bodies



The representation of gender in Bajjika grammar and discourse 193

Appendix 3 – A selection of kinship terms Masculine

Gloss

Feminine

Gloss

beṭi cāci nāni dāi bhauji mausi māmi jaidhi

daughter aunt (wife of father’s brother) mother’s mother father’s mother brother’s wife mother’s sister wife mother’s brother daughter husband’s brother

Morphologically related: /ā/ → /i/ beṭā caccā nānā dādā bhaiyā maosā māmu jāut

son uncle (father’s brother) mother’s father father’s father brother mausi’s husband mother’s brother son of husband’s brother

Morphologically related, but with no change in final phoneme: /i/ → /i/ samdhi bhāi

son/daughter’s father-in-law brother

samdhini bhaujāi

son/daughter’s mother-in-law elder brother’s wife

Morphologically related but with not fixed pattern sasur nanadoi / nandosi phupphā sārh sārhu dulhā damād bhāi

husband/wife’s father husband’s sister’s husband

sās nanad

husband/wife’s mother husband’s sister

phuā’s husband wife’s brother wife’s sister’s husband husband daughter’s husband brother

phuā sarhoj sāli mehrāru beṭi bhābho

father’s sister wife’s brother’s wife wife’s sister wife daughter man’s younger brother’s wife

Appendix 4 – Gender distinction in caste-based professions1516 Caste

Masculine

Feminine

caste of priest caste of cobbler caste of potter caste of merchants [the name of a caste]15 caste of ḍoli-carrier16 caste of washerman caste of scavenger caste of gardener caste of ṭikulihār

panḍit camār kumhār baniyā dusādh Kahār̃ ḍhobi ḍom Māli ṭikulihār

panditāin camain kumhain baniyāin dusādhin kahār̃ in ḍhobin ḍomin mālin ṭikulihārin

15. Dusadh (/dusādh/) is the name of a caste with no particular profession assigned to it. 16. The term ḍoli refers to a special closed chair made of wood in which a bride is carried from her parent’s house to her husband’s house after wedding. Doli was used until about 40 years ago in Bajjikanchal, but with the advent of motor cars and other new means of transportation, the use of doli has gone out of practice.

194 Abhishek Kumar Kashyap

Appendix 5 – Abbreviations 1 first person 2 second person 3 third person abl ablative asp aspect aux auxiliary caus causative conv con-verb cop copula dat dative def definitive dir direction emph emphasis f female fut future tense gen genitive

h honorific hh high-honorific incl inclusive inf infinitive loc locative m male neg negative nh non-honorific pl plural prog progressive prs present tense pst past tense rdp reduplication rel relative voc vocative

The lexical paradigm based on sex distinction and the semantics of its constituents in English and Belarusian Maryia Turchynskaya

Minsk State Linguistic University

The basic idea developed in the paper is that the constituents of the lexical paradigm based on sex distinction may share other common characteristics apart from such core semantic features as ‘male/female’ ‘animate’ ‘being’. A complex contrastive analysis of the paradigm under investigation in English and Belarusian reveals a wide spectrum of perceptual, physiological, psychological and behavioural gender-based attributes profiled in the meanings of its members in both languages studied. The research makes it obvious that characteristics based on gender may accompany different nouns denoting animate beings of opposite sex and, therefore, have systematic character. Keywords: lexical paradigm, profiling, meaning, semantic feature, pragmatic component, sex distinction, Belarusian, English

1. Introduction1 One of the central vectors of contemporary linguistic research is the study of language meaning as a complex combination of features which represent different aspects of knowledge about a particular category (Evans and Tyler 2007, 17). Within the framework of this approach, the meaning of a lexical unit is seen as a “dynamic” entity consisting of a basic semantic core and variable components (Kharitonchick 2009, 113). These variable components become prominent or remain latent depending on a particular utterance situation (Bolinger 1965, 562; 1. I would like to thank Prof. Zinaida Kharitonchik for her creative ideas, encouragement and help. I am also indebted to the editors of the volume Fabienne Baider and Julie Abbou for their invaluable comments on earlier versions of this paper. All shortcomings remain my own. doi 10.1075/pbns.264.08tur © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

196 Maryia Turchynskaya

Langacker 2008, 39; Börjesson 2014, 20). For example, in such sentences as Be a man now! or Don’t behave like a woman! a speaker appeals to a certain knowledge which words man and woman activate. Therefore the meaning of a word is not limited to such core features as ‘an adult female human being’ for woman and ‘an adult male human being’ for man (CLCB), but embraces other pragmatically determined constituents which become apparent in different contexts (e.g.: to play the woman vs. to play the man; as feebly as a woman vs. as strong as a man) as well as in the process of derivation (manly – womanly; manhood – womanhood etc.).2 Since our research is premised on the idea that there exists “no pure entirely pragmatics-free semantics” (Borg 2012, 513), we firmly believe that these specific features in the semantics of the abovementioned words are of socio-pragmatic origin and, what is more important, can be shared by other words with /sex/ marker in their semantics (e.g. mother ‘a female who has given birth to offspring’ vs. father ‘a male parent’; ewe ‘a female sheep’ vs. ram ‘an uncastrated male sheep’ (CED) etc.). The aim of this research is to verify the hypotheses that pragmatic characteristics proper to the lexical items analysed (1) can be gender-based and (2) are opposite for the nouns referring to male and female living beings.3 To do so we study the role of pragmatic components of the lexical paradigm based on sex distinction in two typologically different languages:4 English and Belarusian. The languages chosen for this contrastive research represent not only typologically 2. The problem of semantics/pragmatics distinction has been one of the debatable points in linguistics for many decades (for example, Lyons points out at least 8 possible lines of their differentiation (Lyons 1987, 157)). From the perspectives of modern cognitive approach these two aspects of word meaning are considered to be inseparable components with no distinct borderline between them (Recanati 2012, 136; Cruse 2000, 19). As “the very same piece of conceptual content may belong either to ‘pragmatics’ or to ‘semantics,’ depending on the word” (Jackendoff 2002, 288) it seems reasonable to claim that “semantics and pragmatics form a gradation” in which “toward either extreme of the scale lie phenomena that are indisputably either semantic or pragmatic” (Langacker 2008, 40; Langacker 1987, 159). We do not aim to dwell upon this problematic issue of modern linguistics (Bach 1999; Carston 1999; Bianchi 2004; Evans 2009, 9–12; Kamp 2013), but, due to the fact that the elements of meaning researched in this investigation are contextually determined and are not a part of denotative components usually reflected in dictionary definitions, we consider them to be pragmatic constituents of lexical meaning. 3. “Gender” refers to social features attributed to males and females in a language community. “Sex” is used with the reference to natural biological differences between males and females. 4. A paradigm is a group of words “having one feature in common and distinguished from each other by features that each discriminate more than one pair of words. …the distinction between ‘man’ and ‘woman’ is paradigmatic because it also figures in the distinction between ‘boy’ and ‘girl’, ‘actor’ and ‘actress’ and a great many others” (Fillmore 1978, 164).



The lexical paradigm based on sex distinction 197

different morphological systems,5 but also operate in two different social and cultural domains.6 Therefore, theoretical and practical outcomes of this research may become one more step towards understanding of language, culture and mind interaction on the one hand, and clarification of pragmatic/semantic controversy within a word meaning on the other. We would like to stress that the contrastive study of the spectrum of gender-based pragmatic elements in the meanings of nouns denoting male/female humans and nouns referring to animals of opposite sex, has not been object of a comprehensive analysis yet. Scarce scientific coverage of the phenomenon investigated on the data from the Belarusian language makes this study of particular interest for the researchers of the Slavic languages.

5. The Belarusian language is an official language of Belarus alongside with Russian. Being one of the East Slavic languages, Belarusian shares many common features with other languages of the subgroup (Russian and Ukrainian), as well as with other Slavic languages in general. Nevertheless, Belarusian has distinct grammatical, lexical and phonological properties which date back to the 14th century when the language was separated from Old East Slavic and became known as Old Belarusian. Modern Belarusian uses the Cyrillic script, though the Belarusian Latin alphabet (Łacinka) was also used in the 18th–20th centuries. The Belarusian language is moderately synthetic, of fusional (flectional) subtype, conveying grammatical meaning largely through inflections, or by addition of suffixes and prefixes, which are fused with roots. As contrasted to Belarusian, modern English is moderately analytic, relying to convey grammatical meaning rather on word order and auxiliary verbs, than on a small number of inflections. See, e.g., Arakin 2005; Greenberg 1990; Nehaj, Poplavskaya 1983; Sapir 1970, 121–146. 6. Like all natural languages Belarusian has played a vital role in the history and self-identification of Belarusians as a distinct socio-cultural entity. Since gaining its independence in 1991 post-Soviet Belarus has functioned in the situation of bilingualism and has acquired the status of a predominantly Russian-speaking nation beyond the borders of Russia (Woolhiser 2014, 113). And even though Belarusian is identified as a potentially endangered, vulnerable language (Moseley 2010), the tongue sill functions in different spheres of social life, has lexicographically registered literary norms and is promoted by Belarusian authorities. The Soviet past and the ‘iron curtain’ shielded Belarusian language community from the impact of the “western capitalist world”. As an example, the Feminist movement which had a considerable impact on the idea of the equality of people in the UK and USA and brought various changes into English vocabulary and language use (Steinberg 2001, 272–273), affected neither the Belarusian language nor its native-speakers.

198 Maryia Turchynskaya

2. Description of the study 2.1

The object of the study

The research offers a contrastive analysis of the components of meanings of English and Belarusian words referring to animate beings and having the /sex/ feature in their semantics, such as in: (1) a. gander – a male goose (OxfD) b. shepherdess is a woman whose job is to look after sheep (CLCB) (2) a. свёкар – бацька мужа ‘father-in-law – the father of one’s wife’ b. жарабок – непакладаны конь; конь-самец ‘colt – an uncastrated male horse’ (ТСБМ).

The contrastive analysis of the semantic sex category in English and Belarusian reveals that the specific character of this category in the languages under investigation depends on a number of linguistic factors.7 For example, the division of Belarusian nouns into masculine, feminine and neuter gender on the one hand, and the loss of morphological gender category in English on the other.8 Moreover, 7. Semantic sex category or sexus represents information about biological sex of a denotatum (Krongauz 1996). Thus, words daughter, queen, actress, cow alongside with other semantic features provide information about female biological sex of the denotata, while nouns father, boy, bull indicate male biological sex. Sexus is a universal semantic category which, nevertheless, has specific features in different languages (Krongauz 1996, 511). For example, in Russian (as well as in Belarusian) semantic sex category correlates with grammatical gender category of nouns denoting animate beings (e.g. Russian кобель ‘male dog’ – masculine gender, male dog; сука ‘bitch’ – feminine gender, female dog). 8. The morphological gender category and, consequently, a big range of ‘female’ suffixes in Belarusian make it possible to form oppositions based on sex distinction for a prevailing part of Belarusian nouns denoting animate beings (58%) (see Table 1), out of which 95,6% are formed with the help of suffixation (пастух – пастушка ‘shepherd – shepherdess’, воўк – ваўчыца ‘hewolf – she-wolf ’), leaving only 0,06% for compounding (медбрат – медсястра ‘male nurse – female nurse’), 2,12% for other ways of derivation (zero suffixation: ліс – ліса ‘male fox – vixen’; and backformation: даярка – даяр ‘dairymaid – male milker’) and 2,2% for lexical means of formation of oppositions based on sex distinction (певень – курыца ‘cock – hen’, баран – авечка ‘ram – ewe’, дзядзька – цетка ‘uncle – aunt’). At the same time for a small number of modern English gender paradigms (only 7% of all English nouns denoting animate beings) the leading way of formation is compounding (42%: schoolboy – schoolgirl, landlord – landlady), making it possible only for 32% of sex oppositions to be formed with the help of suffixation (hero – heroine, lion lioness) and 26% with lexical means (boar – sow, goose – gander, brother – sister, mother – father) (see Turchynskaya 2013).



The lexical paradigm based on sex distinction 199

language specificity of the category under study may also be influenced by some non-linguistic parameters, such as political correctness or some other significant social factors in the framework of these language communities. The combination of the abovementioned aspects results in the distinct character of the lexical items under analysis: most of the modern English nouns, which denote animate beings, are neutral in terms of sex identification, while animate being nouns containing the /sex/ marker in their semantics prevail in the Belarusian language (see Table 1). Table 1.  Sex marker in the semantics of nouns denoting animate beings in the English and Belarusian languages9 Types of nouns denoting animate beings

Belarusian English (lexical items) (lexical items)

Nouns denoting animate beings without a sex marker in their semantics Nouns denoting animate beings with a ‘female’ sex marker in their semantics but without a corresponding opposition based on sex distinction* Nouns denoting animate beings with a ‘male’ sex marker in their semantics but without a corresponding opposition based on sex distinction* Nouns denoting animate beings which have a sex marker in their semantics and form oppositions based on sex distinction Total volume of sample words9

2146 (39%)

3497 (85%)

  94 (1,7%)

  123 (3%)

  74 (1,3%)

  208 (5%)

3347 (58%)

  281 (7%)

5661 (100%)

4109 (100%)

*These lexical items have either ‘male’ or ‘female’ /sex/ marker in their semantics, but do not have a corresponding opposition based on sex distinction, thus can be treated as gaps in the lexical paradigm under investigation.

9. The lexical items for the investigation were manually selected with the help of continuous sampling method from Тлумачальны слоўнiк беларускай лiтаратурнай мовы (ТСБЛМ) ‘Dictionary of the Belarusian Literary Language’ and Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary (CLCB). The dictionaries were chosen because of the comparable number of their entries which reflect the current, basic vocabulary of the languages investigated. The dictionaries employed do not aim to comprise special terminology, slang, obsolete or dialectal words, which are typically restricted to a particular context or group of people. A further study based on the data from particular forms of the languages researched can reveal other aspects of the problem investigated. It should also be noted that our investigation of the data from the English language is based on its British variant, for this reason the lexical items which were marked as American, Australian or of some other variant of English were not included into the data analyzed.

200 Maryia Turchynskaya

For our study of gender-based characteristics associated with the constituents of the semantic sex category in English and Belarusian, a set of the most frequently used words denoting male/female animate beings was compiled from the whole list of the lexical items analysed (see Table 2).10 As a result, the object of the research comprises 100 frequently used nouns referring to human beings in English and the same number of lexical items in Belarusian (50 words denoting males and 50 females in both languages); as well as 50 nouns referring to male and 50 to female animals in Belarusian, and only 24 lexical items denoting male and 14 female animals in English, as the number of English words referring to animals and having the /sex/ marker in their semantics is limited to a small group of lexical items denoting domestic animals (e.g. ram – ewe, cock – hen) and a number of wild ones (e.g. tiger – tigress, fox – vixen). Table 2.  Subject of the research English nouns denoting animate beings

Belarusian nouns denoting animate beings

100 nouns denoting humans

100 nouns denoting humans

50 male

2.2

38 nouns denoting animals

50 female 24 male

14 female 50 male

100 nouns denoting animals

50 female 50 male

50 female

Methodology

The investigation of pragmatic gender-based characteristics involved a series of experiments in order to gain access to the elements of meaning pertaining to the lexical items under investigation (see Boudnikova 2010). Firstly, we resorted to the analysis of meaning components of phraseological expressions and derivatives of the lexical items under study i.e. 1197 items from the dictionaries of contemporary English (CED, CLCB, MWD, OxfD, PHRD etc.) and 1069 items from the dictionaries of present-day Belarusian (ТСБМ, СФ).11 We 10. The frequency of the words selected was defined according to The Longman Communication 3000 (LC), Частотны слоўнік беларускай мовы ‘Frequency Dictionary of the Belarusian Language’ (ЧСБМ) and the frequency of the words under analysis in The British National Corpus and the Belarusian corpus of texts N-корпус. 11. It should be emphasized that the number of reputable dictionaries of contemporary Belarusian cannot be compared to that available in English today. For this reason, we resorted to the analysis of the language data in the corpora (contextual meanings of the nouns researched



The lexical paradigm based on sex distinction 201

focused on different types of derivatives of the words selected, meanings of which can explain features of the words they were derived from, as in the examples below:12 (3) a. cock → cocky – conceited or confident in a bold or cheeky way (OxfD) b. hen → hen-hearted – timid, fearful, cowardly (MWD) c.  баба13 – пра цікаўнага, балбатлівага або з нерашучым характарам мужчыну ‘woman / a married woman’ – used to refer to a curious, talkative or weakminded man’ (ТСБМ) d.  прыкідвацца авечкай – выдаваць сябе за някемлівага, дурнаватага чалавека  ‘to pretend to be a ewe – pass oneself off as somebody slow-witted, silly’ (ТСБМ).

The examples above demonstrate that the meaning of the adjective cocky profiles attributes of the word it was derived from: cock i.e. conceited, confident, bold and cheeky. Likewise, the figurative meaning of баба ‘curious, talkative or weakminded man’ actualises characteristics associated with the primary meaning of the word баба ‘woman / a married woman’: curiosity, talkativeness, weak-mindedness. Secondly, based on Jackendoff ’s proposal (2002, 283–286) that access to the multitude of the features proper to the meanings of a word can be analysed with its contextual environment, we studied the contextual usages of the derivatives analysed (4), as well as the contextual non-referential usages of the lexical items under investigation (5, 6). This resulted in investigating 13854 contextual usages which were manually selected from The British National Corpus and 12042 contextual usages selected from the Belarusian corpus of texts N-корпус. We give below a few examples: and their derivatives), which we believe can help to overcome possible drawbacks of the lexicographic investigation. 12. Investigations of the linguistic and cognitive mechanism of derivation indicate that the semantics of the derivatives can be motivated by manifold background knowledge associated with the lexical items from which they are derived (Lakoff 1987; Swanepoel 1992). Derivatives semantics can be based not only on categorial and sub-categorial features, but can also be drawn from the knowledge of non-categorial properties of salient appearance, behaviour, habitat, etc. of the beings named (Kharitonchik 2014). Therefore, we believe that the analysis of the derivatives meanings can bring into light various features of the words they are derived from. 13. There are three Belarusian words which are equivalents of the English word woman but have specific shades of meaning: жанчына is stylistically neutral and denotes ‘a female human being’; кабета is a colloquial term used to refer to an adult, usually married, female; баба is another colloquial word which has the meaning of ‘a married woman’ (ТСБМ).

202 Maryia Turchynskaya

(4) a.  …his son is not merely a father in the male sense. He is a motherly father too. b. Her tone is wifely, concerned, but not patronising (BNC). c. За рулем чакаў малады шафер з бычынай шыяй… ‘There was a driver with a bull like neck waiting in the car…’ (NC). (5) a.  We both like to work with gold. It is as remarkable as a woman. When it is hot it is sift in the hands… b.  …behaving like a stallion – calling and courting mares, and threatening rivals (BNC).

(6) a. Я была дужая, панечка, як мужчына… ‘(A maid) I was robust, my lady, like a man.’ b. А я кажу, што ты дурны, як авечка. ‘And I am saying that you are as silly as a ewe’ (NC). We were aiming at analysing only those components of meaning which would give information about characteristics associated with masculinity / femininity. Features which are common for both words denoting males and words referring to females were declared as beyond the scope of this research e.g. ‘wildness’ for lion – lioness, ‘stripes on the skin’ for tiger-tigress, ‘professional skills’ for waiter – waitress, артыст – артыстка ‘actor – actress’ etc.

3. The lexical paradigm based on sex distinction in the English language The complex analysis of the English language data revealed a wide range of gender-based features within the meanings of nouns referring to male/female people or animals. The attributes exposed represent elements of knowledge about typical male/female traits of appearance, physiology, character and behaviour. Therefore, the range of the attributes revealed, can be subdivided into the following types: perceptual, physiological, behavioural and psychological ones as shown in Table 3 below.14 The study shows that the lexical paradigm based on sex distinction is characterized by the opposition of different but correlating features, revealing typical characteristics associated with masculinity and femininity.

14. The quantitative analysis of how many features are proper to the meanings of certain constituents of the lexical paradigms researched requires a further detailed investigation.



The lexical paradigm based on sex distinction 203

Table 3.  Pragmatic characteristics of nouns denoting male/female animate beings in the English language Male human beings

Male animals

Female human beings Female animals

distinctive male appearance size (large) other

distinctive female appearance size (small) other

Perceptual features distinctive male appearance size (large) other

distinctive female appearance − other

Psychological and behavioural features superiority/dominance aggression sexual activity courage/bravery rationality/prudence toughness

superiority/dominance aggression sexual activity courage/bravery − −

authority protection responsibility

− − −

care care faintheartedness faintheartedness tearfulness − silliness silliness sexuality − housekeeping/domestic − labour tenderness/warmth − − − − −

strength −

weakness/feebleness fertility

Physiological features strength −

3.1

weakness/feebleness fertility

The perceptual properties

Thus, the words researched explicate a number of features which represent information about typical perceptual properties of the beings to whom one refers, as in (7): (7) a. Miss Pennycott was taller, thicker, with the neck and shoulders of a man. b. …his fingers were rather long, slender like a girl’s. c. …her small breasts lay flat on her boyish chest… d. …like a lion’s mane… e. …like a cock’s comb (BNC). The examples above explicate that elements of knowledge about ‘distinctive male/ female appearance’ are associated and, therefore, activated in speech by words denoting males and females. Typical ‘size’ is another gender-based perceptual characteristic revealed in the meanings of the lexical items analysed. Consider the following examples:

204 Maryia Turchynskaya

(8) a. …she recalled thinking how small his hands were: rather like a woman’s. b. He pushed the beer away from him with his rather small girlish hand. c. as big as the ox; as small as a duck; the size of a hen (BNC) It should be stressed that in some cases the perceptual feature ‘size’ is revealed only when the words derived in the same paradigm are compared. Table 4 demonstrates that ‘big size’ is profiled in the derivatives meanings of such lexical items as king and grandfather, while ‘small size’ is proper to the meanings of the words derived from queen and grandmother. Table 4.  Actualisation of the feature ‘size’ in the semantics of derivatives king-size(d) of a larger size than the standard; queen-size(d) of a larger size than the standard very large; but smaller than something that is king-sized; king-size display (30 х 144 inches);

queen-size display (27 x 85 inches);

king jet-clip large-size jet-clip;

queen jet-clip small-size jet-clip;

grandfather clock a clock in a tall freestanding wooden case, driven by weights;

grandmother clock a clock similar to a grandfather clock but about two thirds the size.

Among other features of this type found within the meanings of the nouns studied, we come across such properties as specific ‘sounds’ of male/female animals (9), or ‘voices’ of men and women (10), and even ‘scent/smell’ associated with males and females (11). The following examples demonstrate it: (9) a. the crow of a cock b. the sounds a cow makes (BNC) (10) a. In a woman’s voice he said… b. … he describes Johnson’s voice as manly, or deep, or sonorous, or loud (BNC). (11) a. With every breath he inhaled the warm, womanly scent of her. b. …smelling his manly smell. c. rammish – like a ram, esp in being lustful or foul-smelling (CED); d. …complaint about a ‘tom cat smell’ (BNC). 3.2

Psychological and behavioural properties

As far as psychological and behavioural features are concerned, the lexical paradigm under analysis is characterized by a wide range of the attributes representing male and female traits of this type, such as in: …their aggressive, assertive masculinity which caused them to dominate (12) a.  their children rather as a father might…(BNC). b. cock of the walk – someone who dominates others within a group(OXFD)



The lexical paradigm based on sex distinction 205

(13) a. manhood – qualities traditionally associated with men, such as courage, strength, and sexual potency (OxfD) b. …because he were a bit of a lad.’’ He had an eye for the women, you mean?’ (BNC) c. ram – a sexually active man (CED) The examples above demonstrate that both nouns denoting male animals and words referring to human beings are accompanied by such features as ‘superiority/ dominance’ (12), ‘sexual activity’ (13), as well as ‘courage/bravery’ and ‘aggression’, as seen in (14) and (15): (14) a. to man – archaic fortify the spirits or courage (OxfD) b.  She had taken her husband’s brain tumour like a… well, like a man. (BNC) c. bold as a lion; game as a cockerel (PHRD) (15) a.  cock rock – an aggressive style of rock music performed by male bands (CED) b. boys will be boys – when a group of men are behaving noisily or aggressively, you are suggesting in a light-hearted way that this is typical male behaviour and will never change (CLCB) c. …so parents tend to approve of aggression in their male offspring as ‘manly’ (BNC).

At the same time, the analysis reveals that the nouns denoting females associate in their meanings such attributes as ‘care’ (16), which for the words referring to female animals is always connected with ‘care’ and ‘protection’ of the brood (17). The examples below demonstrate it: (16) a. to mother – bring up (a child) with care and affection (OxfD) b. You behave like a woman, running round looking after people. (BNC) (17) a. Like a vixen with only one whelp. b. I have gathered thy children as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings (BNC) Other common female animal/human features are ‘silliness’ and ‘faintheartedness’, the later for the nouns denoting female human beings is often accompanied by such feature as ‘tearfulness’. These attributes are exemplified in (18) and (19) respectively: (18) a. Some people refer to women as girlies, especially when they think they are not as intelligent or able as men (CLCB) b. …she knew as much of science as a cow does of conic sections… c. I never thought she had the sense of a hen. – She was cleverer than all of us, – protested my mother (BNC).

206 Maryia Turchynskaya

(19) a. I am literally shaking. And I’m crying like a fucking girl, but silently (BNC). b. …eyes like a frightened doe’s. c. I should see if a few womanly tears would be a good ploy (BNC). 3.3

Physiological properties

The data investigated demonstrate that the meanings of the words studied may also represent elements of knowledge about physiological features based on gender. To illustrate this type of properties we give the following examples: (20) a. queen – a reproductive female in a colony of social ants, bees, wasps (OxfD) b. …the chief function of a woman is to give birth (BNC). c. to mother – to give birth (OxfD) d. …I wrote as naturally as a hen laying eggs (BNC). (21) a. He was fighting like a girl. b. There was just a trembling being as vulnerable as any other woman. c. …the next she was down on her back like a tumbled ewe. d. He becomes as soft and nervous as a cow (BNC).

As it can be seen from the examples above, the nouns referring to female animals and human beings actualise such properties as ‘fertility’ (20) and ‘weakness/ feebleness’ (21), while male nouns represent in their semantics information about ‘strength’ which is proper to the representatives of the ‘stronger sex’ (22), such as in: (22) a. strong as a bull (PHRD) b. to ram – to crash with force (CED), roughly force into place (OxfD) c. …a blowsy woman with the strength of a man (BNC).

3.4

Animal vs. human gender-based features in English

It should be emphasised that despite the fact that the types of the gender-based pragmatic characteristics is similar for the nouns denoting animals and nouns referring to human beings (perceptual, physiological, behavioural and psychological), the study shows that the range of the profiled gender-based features is different for the words analysed. In particular, lexical items denoting people of different sex are characterized by a wider range of gender-based attributes in comparison with the words referring to male/female animals. For example, English nouns denoting men also represent in their semantics the following features, which are not profiled in the nouns referring to male animals: ‘rationality/prudence’ (23), ‘authority’ (24), ‘toughness’ (25), ‘responsibility’ (26), ‘protection’ (27), as in:



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(23) a.  to husband – use it carefully and do not waste it (CLCB), use (resources) economically (OxfD) b.  …the idea of superior male rationality and causality versus inferior female irrationality and passivity (BNC). (24) a.  …God is to be seen as a Father in authority and teaching, and as a Mother in kindness and mercy. b.  He’s like some perfect uncle, authoritative and kind, but slightly removed (BNC). (25) a. …looking stern and fatherly. b.  She’s a beautiful woman, but she can be as hard as a man (BNC). (26) a.  …he was in charge of men, like father. b.  I’d be failing in my duties as a husband. c.  A son is duty bound to look after his mother (BNC). (27) a.  He protected her like a lover, shielding her from curious. b.  …will protect them like a father. c.  He regarded Lexandro musingly as a brother might a sister whose honour he must protect (BNC).

Similarly to that, the meanings of the words denoting female animals do not actualize some of the components revealed in the nouns referring to women. Such features as ‘tenderness and warmth’ (28), ‘sexuality’ (29) as well as ‘housekeeping and domestic labour’ (30), which are explicated by a wide range of the components representing knowledge of typical female work and household duties, are profiled only in the words denoting female humans. The examples below illustrate it: (28) a.  womanly – possessing qualities, such as warmth, attractiveness, etc. (CED) b.  with the tenderness, nay, even shyness, of a woman (BNC). (29) a.  sex goddess – If you refer to a woman, especially a film star, as a sex goddess, you mean that many people consider her to be sexually attractive (CLCB) b.  a hot mama = sex bomb (PHRD). (30) a.  lady’s companion ‘a small case or bag containing needlework items’ (OxfD) (for example, in the word combination lord’s companion no features of this kind are conveyed) b.  A woman’s work is never done (PHRD) c.  However it is also likely that many ‘wifely’ tasks such as teamaking and the bosses shopping disappear… (BNC)

Therefore, the study clearly shows that the constituents of the lexical paradigm based on sex distinction in English explicate contrasting gender-based features associated with male or female properties and characteristics in behaviour, appearance and physiology.

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4. The lexical paradigm based on sex distinction in the Belarusian language The analysis of the data from the Belarusian language demonstrates a strong correlation with the English language material, not only in terms of the types of features proper to the constituents of the paradigms researched, but also in terms of the range of the features associated with the words denoting males and females of animate beings (Table 5). Table 5.  Pragmatic characteristics of nouns denoting male/female animate beings in the Belarusian language Male human beings

Male animals

Female human beings

Female animals

distinctive male appearance size (large) other

distinctive female appearance size (small) other

distinctive female appearance − other care silliness − − −

− fertility

Perceptual features distinctive male appearance size (large) other

Psychological and behavioural features superiority/dominance − sexual activity courage/bravery rationality/prudence

− aggression sexual activity courage/bravery −

authority toughness responsibility protection caress/tenderness concern/help − −

− toughness − − − − arrogance stubbornness

care silliness tearfulness sexuality housekeeping/domestic labour tenderness/warmth talkativeness − − − − − −

strength −

weakness/feebleness fertility

− − − − − − − −

Physiological features strength −

Even though the correlation of the whole set of the attributes revealed in Belarusian does not cover 100% of what was found with the English language, identical gender-based properties for humans and animals are observed in the range of Perceptual characteristics. These elements represent real-world knowledge about



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typical male or female ‘size’ (31), as well as distinctive traits of ‘appearance’ of men and women (32), male and female animals (33), as in: (31) a. …з жаночы кулачок ‘the size of a woman’s fist’. b. …у ім ляжалі вялікія – па мужчынскаму кулаку – кавалкі мяса ‘there were large – as a man’s fist – pieces of meat’. c.  …там стаіць на задніх лапах вялізны, як вол, мядзведзь. ‘…there was as big as an ox bear standing on its hind legs’ (NC). (32) a.  У яго была натуральная мужчынская фігура. ‘He had a real manly figure.’ b.  …хударлявыя ногі, жаноцкія рысы твару, доўгія валасы. ‘…thin legs, womanlike facial features, long hair.’ c. На беразе Сожа, трава, нібы косы дзяўчыны, мяккая, пяшчотная, пахучая. ‘On the banks of the Sozh the grass is as plaits of a girl, soft, delicate, sweet-scented (NC). (33) a. …вялізны драўляны цыркуль, падобны на галаву гусака. ‘…a large wooden pair of compasses similar to the head of a gander.’ b. …на шыі каралі, як у індыка. ‘…like turkeycock’s beads on the neck.’ c.  І шыя ў яго была нейкая курыная. ‘His neck was like that of a hen’ (NC).

Nouns denoting male animals, as well as nouns referring to human males, tend to actualise features indicative of the typical ‘large’ size of the representatives of the ‘stronger sex’. However, only a small number of Belarusian words denoting female humans profile the features of a ‘small size’, and no words referring to female animals explicate this attribute in the language data researched. It should also be mentioned, that the investigation carried out reveals correlation in terms of how two different European languages explicate importance attached to good looks of a woman, but not of a man, who is praised for other qualities and characteristics, such is wealth and intellect. A number of proverbs and sayings in English and Belarusian demonstrate it, as in the following examples: (34) a. Прыгажосць – гэта багацце жанчыны. Багацце – прыгажосць мужчыны. ‘Beauty is the wealth of a woman. Wealth is the beauty of a man (NC). b. …because a woman is what she looks like (BNC). c. A man is as old as he feels, and a woman as old as she looks. d. I rather would a husband wed with a beetle brow than a beetle head (PHRD)

The range of other Perceptual features includes such properties as typical ‘voices’ of men and women and ‘sounds’ of male/female animals, as in the examples below:

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(35) a.  У цябе голас мужчыны! ‘You have the voice of a man!’ b.  І зусім не стасаваўся да гэтай мажной паставы па-жаночаму мяккі голас. ‘And a womanly soft voice did not fit that hefty posture.’ c. …было вядома павер’е, калі курыца заспявае як певень, значыць у ёй жыве нячыстая сіла… ‘…there was a superstition that if a hen starts crowing like a cock, it means there is an evil spirit in it…’ d.  Жанчына як курыца, квокча. ‘The woman is clucking like a hen’ (NC).

Our study reveals that knowledge about specific ‘smell’ associated with males and females of both people and animals is also related to the words under investigation. The examples below demonstrate it: (36) a.  …дазволіла ўстанавіць, што жанчыны па-рознаму ўспрымаюць пах мужчыны. ‘…it was specified that women perceive the smell of a man differently’; b.  …столкі лістка пахла нечым цёплым, дзявочым… ‘the paper smelt of something warm, girlish…’; c. …вылегчаць, як смярдзючага кнораза. ‘…to castrate him like a stinking boar.’; d.  Цяжкі пах цялушкі. ‘A strong smell of a heifer’ (NC).

A number of perceptual attributes profiled in the meanings of nouns denoting male and female human beings represent elements of conceptual information about very subtle properties attributed to men and women, which, nevertheless, are easily identified by language speakers and evoke certain images associated with gender, such as in: (37) a.  …джунглі. Дыханне іх было, як подых жанчыны ля яго вуснаў. ‘…the jungle. Its breath was like a breath of a woman by his mouth.’ b.  За спіной раздаваўся тупат ног мужчыны. ‘There were footsteps of a man behind them.’ c.  Прыгожага роўненькага дзявочага почырку канверт. ‘An envelope with a beautiful smooth girlish handwriting on it.’ (NC)

5. English and Belarusian comparison 5.1

Physiological gender-based features in Belarusian and English

Gender-based Physiological characteristics for male and female nouns of both people and animals are the same in English and Belarusian and actualise information about ‘strength’ proper to males, and ‘fertility’ proper to females, as illustrated in the Examples (38) and (39) respectively:



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(38) a.  Узяцца так, каб дух ёй зацяло. Моцна, як мужчына! ‘To take her so mighty that she could not breathe. As strongly as a man!’ b.  Яшчэ ў трэцім классе быў моцны, як бык… ‘Even in the third class he was as strong as a bull…’ c.  …па дзесяць вёдзер вады каровам носіць! Яна як конь! ‘…she can carry up to 10 baskets of water for the cows! She is like a (male) horse! (NC). (39) a.  лона маткі/жанчыны ‘the bosom/lap of a mother/woman’ (NC) b. жарабіцца – нараджаць дзіцяня (пра кабылу, асліцу, вярблюдзіцу) ‘to foal’ the verb derived from the word жарабіца ‘mare’ c. цяліцца – нараджаць цяля (пра карову, самку аленя, лася) ‘to calve’ the verb derived from the word цяліца ‘heifer’ (ТСБМ).

The exception is ‘weakness/feebleness’ revealed in a number of words referring to female humans and not found with the nouns denoting female animals in Belarusian, as in: (40) a.  жаночая слабасць ‘the weakness of a woman’ b.  …і голас яго – о не, зусім не дзявочы, не слабы! ‘…and his voice – not as a girl’s, not weak at all!’ (NC).

5.2

Psychological and behavioural gender-based features in Belarusian and English

The results of the research in the Belarusian language demonstrate that the range of Psychological and Behavioural features for the nouns denoting human beings is also wider than that for animals and is not very different from the spectrum of the attributes associated with gender in the English language. Moreover, in both languages nouns denoting animals explicate attributes similar to those profiled in the meanings of words referring to human beings. Belarusian nouns denoting male animate beings are characterised by such common properties in their meanings as courage/ bravery (41), sexual activity (42) and toughness (43). They are exemplified below: (41) a. …штосьці смелае, мужчынскае праступала ў яго танцы. ‘there was something courageous, manly in his dance’ b. …смела, цверда, не азіраючыся – як арол па скале… ‘…courageously, firmly, not looking back – like an (male) eagle on the rock…’ (NC). (42) a.  …каб утаймаваць свoй чароўны юнацкі юр ‘to restrain his charming boyish lust’ b.  …якія зьведалі ложак мужаў… ‘…who experienced husband’s bed…’ c.  Потым, спатоліўшы свой ненасытны юр самца, усеўся на арбу. ‘Having satisfied his insatiable lust of a buck, he sat down on a bullock cart.’ (NC).

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(43) а.  жорсткай мужчынскай бойкі ‘tough manly fight’ b. цвёрдыя мужскія абяцанні ‘firm male promises’ c.  А гэты, быццам бык, нагнуўся злы і строгі. ‘And this one, as if a bull, bended down angry and stern’ (NC).

As for the range of psychological and behavioural properties associated only with the Belarusian nouns referring to male human beings, it mostly coincides with what was revealed in English. It includes the following qualities common for both languages: superiority/dominance (44), rationality/prudence (45), authority (46), responsibility (47) and protection (48). We cite the following examples to demonstrate it: (44) a.  Усё вучыць, усё выхоўвае, камандуе, нібы бацька. ‘He is constantly teaching, commanding, as if he were a father’ (NC) b. муж – галава жанчыны ‘a husband is the head of a wife’ (ФС). (45) a.  …але свёкар заўсёды, як мужчына больш разважлівы і практычны, чым кабета… ‘but the father-in-law is always, as a man more rational and practical, than a woman…’ (NC) b. гаспадар → гаспадарлівы – эканомны, ашчадны, руплівы ў вядзенні гаспадаркі ‘master of a house → adj. – thrifty, prudent, efficient in managing the household/farm’ (ТСБМ). (46) a.  Міхаіл Уладзіміравіч мне як бацька. Я яго паважаю, таму і слухаю. ‘Michail Uladzimiravich is like a father to me. I respect him and that’s why I listen to him’ b. Мужава воля: загадаў – ахрысцілася ‘The husbands will: he orders – she gets baptized’ (NC). (47) a.  мужаў абавязак ‘husband’s duty’ b.  сынаў абавязак/сыноўні абавязак ‘son’s duty’ (NC). (48) a.  за бацькавай спіной ‘behind the father’s back’ (means being protected ‘standing behind his back) b.  Як жа адна, без абароны мужавай жыць думаеш? ‘And how are you going to live alone without husband’s protection’ (NC).

It is of particular interest that such characteristics as ‘caress/tenderness’ (49) and ‘concern/help’ (50) are systematically found in Belarusian words denoting men, such as in: (49) a.  …дзе вы знойдзеце ласку Братэрскую ў сэрцах… ‘where will you find brotherly caress…’ b. у мужавай ласцы ‘in husband’s caress’ c. жаданне мужчынскай ласцы і моцы ‘desire of man’s caress and strength’ (NC).



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(50) a. Сябар любіць вас yсякі час і, як брат, явіцца ў нашчасці. ‘The friend loves you all the time and, like a brother, will come to you in the time of misery/misfortune.’ b.  …і ён павінен чымсь пасабіць, як мужчына… ‘…and he must help somehow, like a man should…’ (NC).

In English the abovementioned features are found only in a small number of contextual usages of the derived items from the words father and brother, which, just like other terms of kinship, explicate such properties as ‘care/help/love/concern’. Another specific pragmatic characteristic of the analysed lexical items in Belarusian is that only nouns referring to male animals actualize such characteristics as aggression and arrogance (51), as in the examples below: (51) a.  Што сунуўся, як бык? На свайго! На немца не сунуўся… ‘Why did you attack, like a bull? Attacked your comrade! Not the Germans…’ b.  Як певень перад бойкай, натапырыўся Мікола. ‘Micola ruffled his feathers (bristled up) like a cock before a fight (NC). c.  …Ідзе на стук неспадзяваны хадою важнаю індыка. ‘He is going to the sudden sound with a pompous gait of a turkey-cock.’ d.  Пыжыўся, як певень. ‘He was puffed up like a cock’ (NC).

It must be noted though, that the English words buck and cock can also explicate ‘arrogance’. Nevertheless, this property is associated with attribute such as ‘dandyism/foppishness’ (53), which is not typical of the Belarusian nouns denoting male animals, as in: (52) a. buck – a dandy, fop (CED) b. …he strutted out like a barnyard cock…(BNC).

As far as nouns denoting females are concerned, attention should be drawn to the similarity of the range of Psychological and Behavioural properties in two languages under investigation (e.g. ‘care’, ‘silliness’, ‘tearfulness’, ‘sexuality’, ‘housekeeping/domestic labour’, ‘tenderness/warmth’). Moreover, similarly to the English words analysed, Belarusian nouns referring to human females also profile a much wider spectrum of the features of this type than the nouns denoting female animals. Therefore, there are only two attributes which are common for both words denoting female humans and nouns referring to female animals in Belarusian: ‘care’ (53) and ‘silliness’ (54). The following examples demonstrate it: (53) a. …было многа дзяцей і многа шчаслівага жаночага клопату. ‘…there were lots of children and lots of female happy cares’ b.  Як арліца будзе гняздо свае, пырхае над арлянятамі. ‘Like a she-eagle which builds her nest, flutters about her eaglets.’

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c. Дзяржава, яна, брат, што квактуха. Глядзіць вас, курчатак. ‘The State, my fellow, is like a sitting hen. It looks after you, little chicks’ (NC). (54) a.  Гарадзіла б дзявочыя глупствы… ‘You would talk girlish silliness…’ b. Кароткі бабскі розум ‘Short womanish intellect’ c. Куды табе курынымі жаночымі мазгамі зразумець гэта ‘How can you understand it with your female brain of a hen?’ (NC)

The spectrum of other gender-based Psychological and Behavioural features revealed in the meanings of the nouns denoting female human beings embraces such traits as ‘tenderness/warmth’ and ‘tearfulness/faintheartedness’. These features are exemplified in (55) and (56): (55) a.  Печ прыгорне нас, як матка. ‘The stove will warm us like a mother’15 b.  Брыняла зямля пяшчотаю нявесты маладой, цяплынёю курылася… ‘The earth was full of tenderness of a bride, burning with warmth…’ (NC). (56) a.  …на бар’ер манежа і загаласіў як баба. ‘…he came to the bar of the arena and started lamenting like a woman (a married one).’ b.  …і яна заплакала ціха і пакорна – звычайнымі дзявочымі слязамі… ‘…and she started crying quietly and humbly with traditional girlish tears…’ (NC).

Among other features associated with the nouns denoting women in Belarusian are properties referring to ‘housekeeping/domestic labour’ skills relating to women (57). As an illustration consider the following: (57) a.  Жанчыны ж заняліся дамскім рукадзеллем ‘Women started ladies’ needlework’ b.  прасаванне бялізны – выключна жаночы клопат ‘ironing – is exclusively the task of a woman’ (NC).

In contrast with English, the attribute ‘sexuality’ is actualised in the meanings of a small number of words referring to women found only in modern Belarusian newspaper articles. A few examples are: (58) a.  Жаночая сэксуальнасць раскрываецца ў руках толькі каханага… ‘Sexuality of a woman opens up only in the hand of a beloved one…’ b.  Гэты час лічыцца росквітам жаночай сэксуальнасці. ‘This time is considered to be the bloom of a woman’s sexuality’ (NC).

15. The traditional Russian stove/oven was used for cooking, heating and sleeping on the top of it in winter.



The lexical paradigm based on sex distinction 215

The research carried out in the Belarusian language reveals a specific genderbased trait, ‘talkativeness’, associated with many Belarusian nouns denoting female humans, reference to which is not found in the English data, as in: (59) a. Язык цешчы (a traditional dish) ‘Mother-in-law’s tongue’ b.  Ты шмат п’еш Дзітрых, а калі чалавек вып’е, ён робіцца балбатлівы, як жанчына. ‘You are drinking a lot Dzitrych, and when a man drinks, he becomes as talkative as a woman’ (NC).

However, it is possible to assume that this ‘typical female’ characteristic is explicated in the following nouns denoting plants in English and derived from the words mother and woman: mother-in-law’s tongue and woman’s tongue. Probably, in the case of mother-in-law’s tongue the long sharp leaves of the plant were associated with ‘talkativeness’ and ‘sharpness’ typically related to mother-in-laws. No other cases of actualisation of this feature were found either in the meanings of the items derived from these female nouns, or in their contextual usages.

6. Discussion 6.1

Summary of findings

The complex analysis of the constituents of the lexical paradigm based on sex distinction in English and Belarusian revealed a wide range of gender-based features in the semantics of nouns denoting animate beings. The characteristics disclosed explicate elements of encyclopaedic knowledge about typical perceptual attributes and physiological properties of males/females, which coincide in the languages under investigation.16 The research demonstrates that the set of the behavioural and psychological traits related to masculinity and femininity can be permeated with some culture-specific elements (see Table 6, 7). The specificity revealed in this type of gender-based characteristics may reflect differences in typical behaviour associated with males and females, and, probably, different cultural and social attitudes towards representatives of different gender roles in the language communities studied.

16. By encyclopaedic knowledge we mean primarily non‐linguistic, or conceptual in nature, highly detailed and structured knowledge about the world “we as humans appear to have access to in order to categorize the situations, events, and entities we encounter in our everyday lives and in the world”, “the knowledge we draw upon in order to perform a range of other higher cognitive operations including conceptualization, inference, reason, choice” (Evans 2009, 17).

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Table 6.  Actualization of gender-based features in the semantics of male animate beings nouns in English and Belarusian Gender−based features

Male human being nouns

Male animal nouns

English

Belarusian

English

Belarusian

+ + +

+ + +

+ + +

+ + +

+ + + + + + + + + − − − −

+ − + + + + + + + + + − −

+ + + + − − − − − − − − −

− + + + − − + − − − − + +

+

+

+

+

Perceptual distinctive male appearance size (large) other Psychological and behavioural superiority/dominance aggression sexual activity courage/bravery rationality/prudence authority toughness responsibility protection caress/tenderness concern/help arrogance stubbornness Physiological strength

The conformity of the gender-based characteristics revealed in two typologically different languages, English and Belarusian, may well lie in the fact that these linguistic communities share many elements of modern European cultural framework they operate in. Typological specificity of languages may have impact on different means of identification of biological sex of the denotata and, consequently, on the structural characteristics of the lexical paradigms based on sex distinction. Nevertheless, we may assume that it is the socio-cultural factor which determines common or language-specific pragmatic features attributed to the lexical items denoting animate beings of opposite sex in different languages. 6.2 Interpretation of the findings Interpreting the results of the investigation carried out, we should firstly point out that gender-based features in the semantics of the nouns denoting male/female living beings represent basically stereotypical characteristics associated with them



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Table 7.  Actualization of gender-based features in the semantics of female animate beings nouns in English and Belarusian Gender−based features

Female human being nouns Female animal nouns English

Belarusian

English

Belarusian

+ + +

+ + +

+ − +

+ − +

+ + + + + + + −

+ + − + + + + +

+ − + + − − − −

+ − − + − − − −

+ +

+ +

+ +

− +

Perceptual distinctive female appearance size (small) other Psychological and behavioural care tearfulness faintheartedness silliness sexuality housekeeping/domestic labour tenderness/warmth talkativeness Physiological weakness/feebleness fertility

(many female beings are far from being weak and small, just like not all males are dominant and sexually active). From the point of view of American philosopher H. Putnam in the case of ‘natural kind’ words (such as gold, lemon, tiger, acid) the meaning conveys the associated stereotype or “a standardized description of features of the kind that are typical, or ‘normal’, or at any rate stereotypical” (Putnam 1975, 147). The problem is that a natural kind may have abnormal members and, if some lemon is not yellow, or some tiger has three legs, one still has stereotypical features of its denotatum which serve as a criteria “of recognising if a thing belongs to the kind or, at least, necessary conditions (or probabilistic conditions) for membership in the kind” (Putnam 1975, 147).17 Similarly to this point of view K. Allan considers the meaning of a language expression (or a lexeme) as a number of stereotypical facts about a typical denotatum (Allan 2001, 333). Thus, it is quite reasonable that the revealed features, which originate from the manifold

17. It must be noted that H. Putnam dwelling upon the question of stereotypical features of word meaning stresses the role of a linguistic community and points out that “not all criteria used by the linguistic community as a collective body are included in the stereotype” and that “in some cases the stereotype can be quite weak” (Putnam 1975, 147).

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encyclopaedic knowledge about various traits of males and females, represent stereotypical, easily recognised properties of the denotata of the words studied. Secondly, the research of the lexical paradigms based on sex distinction in English and Belarusian reveals cases of oppositional substitution of its members, which results in such linguistic phenomenon as transposition. The study shows that in some contextual usages, alongside explication of their typical features, the constituents of the lexical paradigm under investigation can acquire characteristics of their counterparts (for example, such typical male features as ‘aggression’, ‘strength’, ‘sexual activity’ etc. can be proper to the meanings of the nouns referring to females). However, actualization of these features is different from that revealed in the nouns typically characterized by these properties. For example, if ‘aggression’ is found in the meanings of words denoting female animals, it is always connected with ‘care and protection’ of their brood, as in: (60) terrible as a lioness with cubs; like a tigress defending a cub (BNC).

A typical male feature ‘sexual activity’ is perceived as a negative condemned feature for females as in the following example:18 (61) bitch; she is loose as a goose; to make an honest woman of smb (PHRD).

And even ‘strength’ of the representatives of ‘the softer sex’ is different from this typical male characteristic, which is illustrated in the examples below: (62) a. …blue eyes shone with a gentle womanly strength (BNC) b. Упершыню я адчую вабную моц дзявочага цела. ‘It is the first time when I feel alluring power of a girl’s body’ (NC).

Therefore, the contrasting character of the features revealed suggests that even though nouns denoting males and females can profile some common characteristics, there still exist typical attributes viewed as ideal for the representatives of one gender, and inappropriate for the other one. Compare, for example, derivatives of the English words man and woman: (63) a.  mannish (of a woman) having an appearance and qualities that are typically associated with men and considered unbecoming in a woman: a mannish, sadistic matron (OxfD) 18. Encoding animal imagery in different languages scholars indicate that females in animal metaphors adopt the role of recipient, patient or marginal agent, rather than the agent that performs (Lopez 2009). When the roles are reversed and the woman takes on the active role of a man, “she is portrayed as a menacing animal, as though implying the inappropriateness of such power”, e.g. English and Spanish animal terms lioness/leona, tigress/tigresa and loba (a ‘she-wolf ’) are used figuratively to refer to sexually active women, promiscuous women and even prostitutes (Lopez 2009, 92).



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b.  womanish (1) suitable for or characteristic of a woman: he confused introspection with womanish indecision; (2) (of a man) effeminate; unmanly: Burden thought him a weak womanish fool (OxfD).

The contrast of pragmatic attributes of the constituents of the lexical paradigm under investigation is also observed in Belarusian. For example, the Belarusian words герой ‘hero’ and гераіня ‘heroine’ can be used metaphorically to praise absolutely different human qualities and characteristics. The word герой ‘hero’ can be used to refer to such features as ‘bravery’ and ‘ability to fight and protect’, while гераіня ‘heroine’ is attributed to a woman who either gives birth and takes care of many children, or ‘heroically’ combines career and motherhood. The examples below demonstrate it: (64) a.  І ў народным выяўленні загінуў ён як герой. ‘In the national image he died like a hero. b. Чаклун ваюе як герой… ‘Chaklun fights like a hero…’ c. Мамы ў нас – сапраўдныя гераіні. ‘Our mothers are real heroines’ (NC) d.  маці-гераіня  – ганаровае званне якое прысвойваецца ў СССР жанчыне-маці, што нарадзіла і выхавала не менш дзесяці дзяцей ‘mother-heroine – an honorable title in the USSR given to a woman that gave birth and raised at least 10 children’ (ТСБМ).

The contrasting character of ‘male/female’ features is also profiled in the semantics of the derivatives from гаспадар ‘master’ and гаспадыня ‘mistress’, such as in: (65) a.  гаспадарлівы – эканомны, ашчадны, руплівы ў вядзенні гаспадаркі (пра чалавека): adj. from гаспадар ‘master’– ‘thrifty, prudent, efficient in managing the household/farm’(ТСБМ) b.  гаспадыньскі – які мае адносіны да гаспадыні, звязаны з работай гаспадыні: adj. from гаспадыня ‘mistress’ – ‘something connected with mistress, with her work as a mistress’ (ТСБМ)

Contrasting nature of gender-based features, which explicate ideas of ‘appropriateness’ of certain features for women, and other traits – for men, is also explicated in the following examples: (66) a.  Ды і не жаночая гэта справа – улада, барацьба. ‘It is not a woman’s business – power, struggle’; b.  А вайна – не дзявочая справа. Тут сіла, воля патрэбна. ‘And war is not a girlish business. It needs strength and will. c. Прыбіраць – справа жаночая. ‘Cleaning is a womanish work’. d.  …шматслоўнасць – усе ж не мужчынская рыса ‘…talkativeness is not actually a manly trait’ (NC).

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Thirdly, the research carried out shows that elements of manifold knowledge about different gender roles are often represented in the meanings of the corresponding nouns not as one single specified feature, but as a complex of gender-based properties attributed to male or female living beings. Consider the following examples: (67) a. manly – having or denoting those good qualities traditionally associated with men, such as courage, strength and spirit b. womanly ‘possessing qualities, such as warmth, attractiveness’ (CED). c. …напоўнены адвечнымі праблемамі жанчыны: у што апрануцца і чым накарміць… ‘…it was full of eternal problems of a woman: what clothes to put on and what to give for a meal…’ (BNC). d.  Голас быў дзявочы – няўпэўнены, нясмелы… ‘The voice was girlish – irresolute, timid…’ (NC).

Furthermore, the research makes it obvious that actualization of such feature as ‘sexual activity’ in the meanings of words referring to males is accompanied with another ‘male’ feature ‘strength’, while absence of this attribute in male nouns profiles components which explicate ideas of ‘lack of strength and power’ associated with sexually inactive males. Compare the examples in (68) and (69): (68) a. manhood – qualities traditionally associated with men, such as courage, strength, and sexual potency (OxfD). b. macho (adj.) – denoting or exhibiting pride in characteristics believed to be typically masculine, such as physical strength, sexual appetite, etc. (CED). (69) eunuch – lacking in power, an ineffectual person: a nation of political eunuchs (OxfD).

Therefore, many of the characteristics revealed can represent not only one type of the specified gender-based features (i.e. perceptual, physiological, psychological and behavioural), but can refer to a combination of them. The language data demonstrate that features ‘strength\weakness’ can be viewed as a physiological characteristic as well as a behavioural or psychological attribute (70), such as in: (70) a. …Emily Grenfell was no weak-kneed lady of leisure, but as strong as any man when it came to business. b. …in some ways she was as strong as a man (BNC).

Similarly, the attribute ‘sexuality’ represents elements of conceptual information of both perceptual and behavioural characteristics of women, as well as the attribute ‘size’ in the meanings of the nouns denoting males can be perceived both as a perceptual trait or a physiological property (see Figure 1).



The lexical paradigm based on sex distinction 221

Perceptual appearance, other (e.g. voice, smell) sexuality Behavioural care, tenderness, aggression, rationality, etc.

size Physiological fertility

sexual, activity; strength; weakness

Figure 1.  Complex of interconnected gender-based features proper to the nouns denoting animate beings

7. Conclusions The results of the study presented above indicate the following: 1. Pragmatic characteristics proper to the meanings of the constituents of the lexical paradigm based on sex distinction are socio-cultural in nature and are opposite for the nouns denoting male and female animate beings (e.g. big, strong, brave etc. vs. small, weak, fainthearted etc.). 2. The spectrum of the gender-based features revealed in the meanings of the paradigms researched represents elements of knowledge about the following types of male/female properties: perceptual, physiological, behavioural and psychological. 3. Gender-based pragmatic characteristics have systematic character and can be profiled in the meanings of both nouns referring to male/female humans and nouns denoting animals of opposite sex. The latter are characterized by a smaller range of gender-based properties in comparison to the words denoting male/female humans. 4. The meanings of the constituents of the lexical paradigm researched in English and Belarusian explicate a wide range of common gender-based pragmatic properties. A small number of culture-specific attributes is revealed only in the spectrum of behavioural and psychological features associated with males and females.

222 Maryia Turchynskaya

The results of the research indicate that pragmatic characteristics are influenced by core semantic features of a word (e.g. semantic /sex/ marker → gender-based pragmatic properties). Therefore, /sex/ marker in the semantics of a word, which represents information about biological sex of a denotatum, is accompanied by pragmatic gender-based features associated with masculinity and femininity in a certain linguistic community. In this respect, it would be interesting to proceed with our investigation in the framework of other genetically distant languages, on the one hand, and to verify the results of the research with the help of psycholinguistic experiments, on the other.

References Allan, Keith. 2001. Natural language semantics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Bach, Kent. 1999. “The Semantics-Pragmatics Distinction: What It Is and Why It Matters.” In The Semantics, Pragmatics Interface from Different Points of View, ed. by Ken Turner, 65–84. Oxford: Elsevier. Bianchi, Claudia. 2004. “Semantics and Pragmatics: The Distinction Reloaded.” In The Semantics and Pragmatics Distinction ed. by Claudia Bianchi, 1–11. Stanford, Calif.: CSLI. Bolinger, Dwight. L. 1965. “The Atomization of Meaning.” Language 41 (4): 555–573. doi:  10.2307/411524

Borg, Emma. 2012. “Semantics without Pragmatics?” In Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Allan Keith, and Kasia M. Jaszczolt, 513–528. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9781139022453.028 Börjesson, Kristin. 2014. The Semantics-Pragmatics Controversy. Berlin; Boston: Walter De G ­ ruyter. doi:  10.1515/9783110333411

Carston, Robyn. 1999. “The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction: A View from Relevance Theory.” In The Semantics, Pragmatics Interface from Different Points of View, ed. by Ken Turner, 85–124. Oxford: Elsevier. Cruse, Allan D. 2000. Meaning in language: An introduction to semantics and pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford university press. Evans, Vyvyan, and Andrea Tyler. 2007. The Semantics of English Prepositions: Spatial Scenes, Embodied Meaning and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evans, Vyvyan. 2009. How Words Mean: Lexical Concepts, Cognitive Models, and Meaning Construction. New York: Oxford University Press. doi:  10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199234660.001.0001

Fillmore, Charles J. 1978. “On the Organization of Semantic Information in the Lexicon.” In Papers from the Parasession on the Lexicon, ed. by Donka Frakas, et al. 148–173. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Greenberg, Joseph H. 1990. “A Quantitative Approach to the Morphological Typology of Language.” In On Language: selected writings of Joseph H. Greenberg, ed. by Keith Denning. 3–25. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Jackendoff, Ray. 2002. Foundations of Language: Brain, meaning, grammar, evolution. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198270126.001.0001



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Kamp, Hans. 2013. “Semantics versus Pragmatics.” In Meaning and the Dynamics of Interpretation: Selected Papers of Hans Kamp, ed. by Klaus von Heusinger, 185–217. Leiden: Brill. doi:  10.1163/9789004252882_009

Kharitonchik, Zinaida A. 2009. “Lexical Meaning as a Dynamic Entity of Variant Semantic Components.” In Probleme Actuale de Linguistică, Glotodidactică i Ştiintă literară, ed. by Zbant Ludmila, and Veronica Păcuraru, 113–121. Chişinău: CEP USM. Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226471013.001.0001 Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Volume I: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195331967.001.0001 Lopez Rodríguez, Irene. 2009. “Of women, bitches, chickens and vixens: animal metaphors for women in English and Spanish.” Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación. Culture, Language and Representation 7: 77–100. Lyons, John. 1987. “Semantics.” In New Horizons in Linguistics 2, ed. by Lyons John et. al., 152–178. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Moseley, Christopher (ed.). 2010. Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger 3rd edition. Paris: UNESCO Publishing. Putnam, Hilary W. 1975. Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511625251 Recanati, Francois. 2012. “Contextualism: Some varieties.” In Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Allan Keith, and Kasia M. Jaszczolt, 135–151. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9781139022453.008 Sapir, Edward. 1970. Language: an Introduction to the Study of Speech, 2nd impr. London: Hart-Dawis. Swanepoel, Piet H. 1992. “Linguistic motivation and its lexicographical application.” South African Journal of Linguistics 10(2): 49–60. doi: 10.1080/10118063.1992.9723878 Steinberg, Danny D., Hiroshi Nagata, and David P. Aline. 2001. Psycholinguistics: Language, Mind and World, 2nd edition. Harlow: Longman. Woolhiser, Curt. 2014. “The Russian Language in Belarus: Language Use, Speaker Identities and Metalinguistic Discourse.” In The Russian Language outside the Nation, ed. by Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, 81–116. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. doi:  10.3366/edinburgh/9780748668458.003.0004

Аракин, Владимир Д [Arakin, Vladimir D]. 2005. Сравнительная типология английского и русского языков. 3-е изд [Contrastive Typology of the English and Russian Languages 3rd impr.]. Москва: ФИЗМАТЛИТ. Будникова, Елена И [Boudnikova, Helena I.]. 2010. “К методике определения значимости семантических компонентов лексического значения (на материале наименований животных английского языка)” [On the Methodology of Assessing Feature Salience in a Word Meaning (on the Material of English Animal Names)]. ВестникМГЛУ. Филология 5(48): 54–62. Кронгауз, Максим А. [Krongauz, Maksim A.]. 1996. “Sexus, или Проблема пола в русском языке” [Sexus, or the Problem of Sex in the Russian Language]. In Русистика. Славистика. Индоевропеистика[Rusistika. Slavistika. Indoevropeistika], отв. ред. Т. М. Николаева и др. [T. M. Nikolaeva et. al.], 510–525, Москва: Индрик.

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Нехай, Ольга А., и Татьяна В. Поплавская [Nehaj, Olga A., and Tatiana V. Poplavskaya]. 1983. Сравнительная типология английского и белорусского языков [Contrastive Typology of the English and Belarusian Languages]. Минск: Вышэйш. шк. Турчинская, Мария В. [Turchynskaya Maryia V.]. 2013. “Семантическая категория пола и способы ее выражения (на материале наименований живых существ современного белорусского и английского языков)” [Semantic Sex Category and Means of its Identification (Based on Names of Living Beings in the Belarusian and English languages)]. Вестник МГЛУ. Филология 4(65): 34–43. Харитончик, Зинаида А. [Kharitonchik, Zinaida A.]. 2014. “Семантика и прагматика языковых единиц в зеркале деривационных процессов.” [Semantics and Pragmatics of Language Units in the Process of Derivation]. Slavische Wortbildung im Vergleich. Theoretische und pragmatische Aspekte. – Berlin: LIT-Verlag Dr. W. Hopf (Slavica Varia Halensia, Bd. 12): 17–33.

Sources of language data BNC – The British National Corpus. 2007. (BNC XML Edition) (Computer file): Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium: Oxford, 2 CD-ROM. CED – Collins. 2006. (for ABBYY Lingvo x3) (Computer file): Collins English Dictionary, 8th Edition: HarperCollins Publishers. CLCB – Collins Cobuild. 2008. (for ABBYY Lingvo x3) (Computer file): Collins Cobuild Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary. New Digital Edition: HarperCollins Publishers. LC – Longman Communication 3000 (Electronic resource). Mode of access: http://www.­ lextutor.ca/freq/lists_download/longman_3000_list.pdf. MWD – Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary (Electronic resource). Mode of access: www.­merriamwebster.com. OxfD – Oxford Dictionary. 2005. (for ABBYY Lingvo x3) (Computer file): Oxford Dictionary of English, Revised Edition: Oxford University Press. PHRD – Idioms. 2006. (for ABBYY Lingvo x3) (Computer file): The Comprehensive EnglishRussian Phraseological Dictionary, ed. by Aleksander V. Kunin: Russkiy Yazyk – Media. NC – Беларускі N-корпус. Mode of access: http://www.http://bnkorpus.info. СФ – Слоўнік фразеалагізмаў беларускай мовы: каля 7000 фразеалагізмаў. 2008. І. Я. Лепешаў: у 2 т. Мінск: Беларуская Энцыклапедыя. ТСБЛМ – слоўнiк беларускай лiтаратурнай мовы: Больш за 65.000 слоў, 1996. Пад рэдакцыяй М. Р. Суднiка, М. Н. Крыўко. Мінск: Беларуская Энцыклапедыя. ТСБМ – Тлумачальны слоўнік беларускай мовы. 1977–1984. АН БССР, Інстытут мовазнаўства імя Я. Коласа; пад агульнай рэдакцыяй Кандрат К. Атраховіча (К. Крапівы): у 5 т. Мінск: Беларуская Савецкая Энцыклапедыя. ЧСБМ – Частотны слоўнік беларускай мовы. 2006. Надзея С. Мажэйка. Мінск: Зоркі гор.

part ii

Intersectional peripheries

When She and He become It The use of grammatical gender in the Greek of the Armenians of Cyprus Chryso Hadjidemetriou University of Leicester

This paper is based on empirical data with adult speakers bilingual in Armenian and Cypriot Greek and examines the results of the contact between Armenian and Cypriot Greek (CG) in Cyprus. The focus is on the use of the grammatical gender of CG by the Armenians of Cyprus. The speakers interviewed are divided into two groups: (a) Cypriot-Armenians (CyAs) who were born in or arrived to Cyprus as infants, and (b) non-Cypriot-Armenians (non-CyAs) who arrived to Cyprus as teenagers or young adults. Variables such as age, sex, generation for the CyA group and length of exposure to CG and intensity of contact for the non-CyA group are taken into consideration. The overall results show that the use of grammatical gender is problematic for both groups exhibiting similarities in terms of the location of grammatical deviations1 in noun phrases, difficulties in gender agreement, and the preference for the use of the neuter gender. Keywords: language in contact, multilingualism, second language acquisition, grammatical gender, Armenian, Greek-Cypriot

1. Introduction: Grammatical gender and language acquisition Grüter, Lew-Williams and Fernald (2012) discuss grammatical gender as being difficult to master for second language speakers arguing that this “raises the question of whether native-like mastery of grammatical gender in an L2 is attainable

1. The term “deviation” is used in this paper to refer to grammatical gender assignment that deviates or diverges from the accepted gender assignment in L1 Cypriot Greek. The term ‘error’ was intentionally avoided as it can have negative connotations for L2 speaker. doi 10.1075/pbns.264.09had © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

228 Chryso Hadjidemetriou

or not” (2011, 1).2 They refer to the “wealth of research” on grammatical gender acquisition by L2 speakers without seeing any answers whether grammatical gender in a second language is attainable or not. As will be discussed later on, there are a number of studies on the acquisition in L1 or L2 of grammatical gender, on the use of grammatical gender under carefully constructed experimental tests, or on gender processing; however, the present study departs from the experimental approach to studying grammatical gender. This study focuses on the use of Cypriot Greek grammatical gender by bilingual speakers in Armenian and Cypriot Greek (where Cypriot Greek is considered the L2) as a morpho-syntactical phenomenon in its “periphery”. “Periphery” is understood in the different studies in this volume in different ways: all mak(ing) this notion of periphery at work in different ways, sometimes in the same direction, sometimes conflicting, but always exploring peripheral spaces and minor phenomena through hybrid methodologies, original data or emerging approaches. (Abbou and Baider 2016, 12)

Thus, working on a social and linguistic minority, the chapter looks at how Armenian speakers use grammatical gender in everyday interactions in Cypriot Greek as opposed to using experimental data. It looks at the patterns of grammatical gender usage and analyses the deviations from the grammatical gender norm of Cypriot Greek as an L1 – where the informants tend to use primarily the neuter gender in noun gender assignment as a ‘peripheral’ category, and also the conversational structure of ‘deviant’ grammatical gender-related self-initiated self-repairs, that is, the repair of an already correct noun phrase in terms of grammatical gender into the wrong grammatical gender. The use of grammatical gender by the Armenians of Cyprus offers a unique opportunity to explore grammatical gender from a lesser studied perspective where the speakers can be categorised somewhere along a spectrum of L2 speakers (with varying degrees of competency) in an L1 context. The Armenians in this study are in an environment where the majority language is Cypriot Greek, but where home and sometimes school interaction was in Armenian. Exposure to Cypriot Greek was frequently limited at the time of acquisition. Montrul (2013) when discussing heritage speakers and their linguistic attainment in the heritage language explains how language shift in heritage speakers occurs with the 2. For the complexity of grammatical gender, see Audring (2014, 5) who discusses grammatical gender as ‘a complex features of natural languages’ focusing on the complexity of gender systems by looking at gender values, assignment rules and morphological expression. She also examines whether complexity is equal to language acquisition and whether higher complexity of expression can facilitate or not acquisition. Janse, Joseph and De Vogelaer (2011) investigate the diachrony and evolution of gender systems from multidisciplinary perspectives (i.e. language acquisition, contact linguistics, theoretical syntax).



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beginning of schooling in the majority language and sometimes earlier, which contributes to a reduction of input in the heritage language, thus, resulting in degrees of linguistic attainment. The author (op. cit, 153), in fact, looks at evidence from “gender agreement in Spanish, a grammatical feature that is mastered at almost 100% accuracy in production by native speakers; yet it is one of the most difficult areas to master for non-native speakers, including near-natives”. This section, thus, introduces studies focusing on the L1 acquisition of grammatical gender and juxtaposing them with L2 studies on the acquisition of grammatical gender, both relevant for the case of Armenians. Grammatical gender has undergone a great deal of examination over the years from various approaches and perspectives. There are studies focusing on the grammatical gender systems of different languages (e.g. Aikhenvald (1996) for gender in Manambu, Castellino (1975) for gender in Cushitic, Corbett and Mtenje (1987) on the gender system in Chichewa, Guthrie (1948) for gender in the Bantu languages, Jaworski (1989) for gender in Polish, Ralli (2002) on gender in Greek and Roca (1989, 2000) on Spanish), to mention just a few. Great attention has been paid to studies that focus on the process of acquisition of grammatical gender in a L1 or by bilingual children. For example, Müller (1994) wrote on the acquisition of gender and number agreement by two children bilingual in French and German; Koehn (1994) on the acquisition of gender and number morphology by two children bilingual in French and German; Müller (1990) on the development of two gender assignment systems in German and French; and Pérez-Pereira (1991) on the acquisition of gender by Spanish-speaking children. Another set of studies investigated the L2 acquisition of grammatical gender: Bartning (2000) studied gender agreement in L2 French and Delisle (1985) the acquisition of the German grammatical system by L2 American students; Franceschina (2001) made a comparison of the grammatical gender in native and non-native Spanish grammars; Franceschina (2003) examined the nature of grammatical representations in mature Spanish L2 grammars, and Oliphant (1997) the acquisition of grammatical gender in Italian as a foreign language. Many recent studies looked at the effects of age and context of acquisition in relation to gender agreement.3 3. See Montrul, Foote and Perpiñán (2008) on adult second language learners and Spanish heritage speakers; Unsworth (2008) on age and input in the acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch focusing on L2 learners of Dutch (L1 English); Blom, Polišenska and Weerman (2008) comparing child L1 learners of Dutch, L2 Moroccan children and adults when learning Dutch as an L2 and specifically looking at the grammatical gender of articles; Unsworth, Argyri, Cornips, Hulk, Sorace and Tsimpli (2014) looking at grammatical gender in Greek and Dutch and the role of age of onset and input in early bilingual children (Greek and English; Dutch and English); Alarcón (2011) looking at early and late bilingual’s acquisition of Spanish gender agreement focussing on the noun phrase (speakers with L1 English and L2 Spanish).

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Looking at grammatical gender studies in L1, when L1 speakers acquire the gender system of their language, the strategies they use are not random. They do not simply rely on semantic criteria for gender assignment, but on phonological and morphological criteria too. Studies that have examined gender assignment of loanwords show that speakers employ certain strategies, and, according to Poplack, Pousada and Sankoff (1982, 25), “once a borrowed noun is assigned a gender by whatever criteria, there is generally unanimous agreement among speakers”. Poplack et al. (1982) examine the assignment of gender to English nouns borrowed into Puerto Rican Spanish and Montreal French. They conclude that there is an overwhelming regularity in gender assignment among all members of both samples by showing that well-defined criteria applying to native nouns also apply rigorously to borrowed material: words of English origin take on specific native grammatical functions.  (Poplack et al. 1982, 26)

Whereas L1 children master gender classification early on, and are also able to deal with loanwords in a way that generally there is no confusion or disagreement on the organization of grammatical gender, L2 learners are unable to fully master grammatical gender. Bartning (2000) examines the acquisition of grammatical gender in definite and indefinite articles in French by advanced and pre-advanced learners. Reporting on previous L1 studies concerning the acquisition of the French grammatical system correctly (Clark 1985; Carroll 1989, cited in Bartning 2000, 228), he argues children acquire gender early and correctly. However, Bartning points out that, for L2 learners of French, gender is not acquired early, fully or correctly. Another study, by Towell (1987), shows that even after nine years of studying, gender was not acquired by advanced learners (cited in Bartning 2000, 228). This is also corroborated by the data in this study when several gender deviations are observed in the speech of adult Armenians who have lived in Cyprus all their lives and might be expected to exhibit complete acquisition of grammatical gender. In Franceschina (2001), the acquisition of gender by L2 advanced Spanish learners with two different first languages, Italian and English, is examined. The results from the English speakers indicated that morphological operations not used in their L1 had no major consequences for mistakes (Franceschina 2001, 13). The presence of certain syntactic features in the L1 does not necessarily guarantee the L2 learner’s success when encountering those syntactic features in the L2. Franceschina states that: if (…) adult L2 learners were limited to the functional feature specification of their L1, Italians would not be expected to be significantly different from Spanish native-speakers in their gender representations, since these features are already specified in their L1, whereas English speakers would be expected to have more difficulties given that English grammars do not have such feature specification.  (Franceschina 2001, 17)



When She and He become It 231

A different study examined the acquisition of gender in Italian by L2 learners (Oliphant 1997). Oliphant used first and second year students of Italian from an American university and an American community college. Students were given three different tests designed to examine sensitivity to cues that help the determination of gender in Italian nouns (Oliphant 1997, 10). Oliphant found that students found gender assignment much less problematic when there were complementary cues to help them assign the gender of a particular noun (Oliphant 1997, 26). However, when conflicting cues existed, the results showed that gender assignment was more problematic (see Oliphant 1997). Oliphant argues that this evidence suggests that the students employed different cues simultaneously even though their ability to employ all of the cues successfully varied. Some cues were more dominant than others, with semantic cues sometimes prevailing over syntactic agreement, for example, students focused more on semantic cues even when they conflicted with the gender of an article (Oliphant 1997, 27). This suggests that students seemed to ignore the importance of syntactic agreement. Müller, though, claims that gender is an inherent feature of nouns and an agreement phenomenon (1990, 194) and Pérez-Pereira argues “agreement is the essence of gender” (1991, 572). Finnemann (1994) examined three first-year Spanish language students (L1 English though this is not clearly stated in the article). He concentrated on noun phrase agreement and claimed that students operated on default values in the acquisition of number and gender agreement, since they showed a preference for singular and masculine modifiers (Finnenmann 1994, 134). More specifically, the subjects showed higher agreement rates when referring to themselves and when the noun referred to a specific female human being. In cases where the subjects dealt with MRK1 nouns (i.e. nouns gender-marked by regular o/a alternation as in el libro and la casa) denoting a human, the subjects had a lower error rate with female referents. It is further explained that the masculine default was evident in cases where the nouns had a gender-ambiguous human reference (for example, one of the subjects incorrectly used amigo ‘friend’ and muchacho ‘kid’ to refer to female friends. The intended meaning was assumed to be a generic ‘friend’ and ‘kid’). Finnemann maintains that the default is potentially the unmarked form of a paradigm, and in this case, the masculine gender is the ‘unmarked’ gender of Spanish. Some non-semantic factors affected the agreement rates and noun morphology somehow aided agreement. Finnemann raises an issue that was not raised in the studies mentioned previously, that of ‘markedness’ in gender acquisition. This issue is investigated with reference to the data collected from the Armenian informants, examining the nature of deviations with the aim of understanding whether an ‘unmarked’ gender exists in their interlanguage. This is postulated due to the frequent usage of the neuter gender.

232 Chryso Hadjidemetriou

2. The study The purpose of this paper is to examine one of the consequences of the contact between Cypriot Greek (henceforth abbreviated as CG) and Armenian in the CG of Armenian speakers.4 The analysis focuses on the use of grammatical gender in Cypriot Greek.5 The study takes conversational data with Armenian speakers bilingual in Armenian and Cypriot Greek and examines the use of grammatical gender in these interactions.6 The major concern during interviews was to achieve spontaneity in conversation, which is why structured interview questions were avoided and elicitation techniques regarding the use of grammatical gender were not employed. The study is based on empirical data collected during the period 2002–2003 primarily and at later stages up to 2006. In total, 32 speakers were interviewed during long-term fieldwork in two cities in Cyprus (Larnaka / Larnaca and Lefkosia / Nicosia) (some of the speakers interviewed did not exhibit the phenomenon in question). The Armenians were not randomly selected for interview. Initial observations showed that Cypriot Armenians can be grouped according to their first arrival in Cyprus into people who:

4. The study draws from Hadjidemetriou (2009) which looked at the consequences of language contact in the Cypriot Greek of Armenians and Maronites in Cyprus. 5. In CG, the declension of lexical items differs slightly from Standard Modern Greek. In some masculine nouns, the plural accusative and genitive cases are similar, for instance: tus xorka′nus (‘the villagers’) can be the plural accusative or the plural genitive (Newton 1972). Some other masculine nouns have the same plural nominative, genitive and accusative, for example: i pa′ppues (‘the grandfathers’-masc.nom.sg) and tus pa′ppues (‘the grandfathers’masc.gen/acc.pl) (id). In feminine nouns, the plural nominative and accusative have the same form: i ka′rekles (‘the chairs’-fem.nom.pl) and tes ka′rekles (‘the chairs’-fem.acc.pl) (ibid). This characteristic of masculine nouns having the same form in both genitive and accusative is one of the differences between CG and Standard Modern Greek. In CG neuter nouns, the nominative and accusative in both the singular and plural have the same form: to psu′min (‘the bread’-sg) can be the nominative or accusative singular form and ta psu′mja (‘the bread’-pl) can be the nominative or accusative plural form. In CG, the form of neuter nouns in the nominative case, and therefore in the accusative case as well, differs from the form of neuter nouns in Standard Modern Greek. Neuter nouns which end in a vowel in Standard Modern Greek are followed by -n in CG, for example, in Standard Modern Greek to vu′no becomes to vu′non (‘the mountain’) in CG. 6. For many Armenians in Cyprus, English is also present in their everyday lives. For some, primary and secondary education is primarily in English. For some who choose to go to the Armenian primary schools, Armenian, English, and Greek are the languages of instruction.



i. ii. iii. iv. v.

When She and He become It 233

were born and raised in Cyprus – Cypriot-born Armenians arrived in Cyprus as infants arrived on the Island at around the age of nine to ten migrated to Cyprus as teenagers, or came to Cyprus as adults (over the age of 20).

Initially the aim was to focus on the Cypriot-born Armenians who are those Armenians who were born in Cyprus and have lived on the Island for their whole lives. This group can be further subdivided into the Deghatsi families (Armenians who came before the 1915 genocide) and the descendants of Armenians who first arrived in Cyprus at the start of the 20th century (Kaghtagan) (Paul-Pattie 1997).7 The objective was to interview speakers who had been exposed to the Armenian and Cypriot Greek language contact environment at around the same age. However, during the data collection informants from the other groups were interviewed as well, therefore redefining the sample frame in an attempt to obtain a better understanding of the social structure of the Armenian community. The Armenians were interviewed individually, in pairs or in groups, and the interviews were recorded. The approach to age is based on life stages, which relates to the speakers’ place in the Armenian community in Cyprus. The Armenian speakers used in this study of grammatical gender can be grouped into two categories, accordingly: i. adult Armenians born in Cyprus or who arrived in Cyprus as infants or at around the age of one to two (Cypriot Armenians, hereafter abbreviated to CyAs) who exhibit grammatical gender deviations ii. adult Armenians not born in Cyprus; that is, Armenians who arrived in Cyprus when they were nine to ten years old, or as teenagers or as adults (nonCypriot-born Armenians, hereafter abbreviated to non-CyAs) and exhibit grammatical gender deviations

7. According to Paul-Pattie, the Armenian families who lived in Cyprus before the arrival of the refugees in the 20th century were called Deghatsi (native), as opposed to the Armenians arriving later who became known as Kaghtagan (refugee) (1997, 51). The origins and exact date of arrival of all the Deghatsi families, according to Paul-Patie, is unknown, although some Deghatsi families have been traced back to the early 19th century.

234 Chryso Hadjidemetriou

3. The grammatical gender system in Greek and Armenian “Gender in Armenian is unmarked, i.e. there is no expressed grammatical distinction for masculine, feminine or neuter gender as in the case of many European languages” (Sakayan 2000, 54). In the third person singular, the Armenian personal pronoun does not express gender either (as in English with he/she/it) (ibid.). There is only one nominal suffix -uhi, which forms the feminine counterparts of masculine nouns indicating persons (e.g. ‘male teacher’ usutsicḫ vs. ‘female teacher’ usutscḫuhi, or ‘male student’ usanogḫ vs. ‘female student’ usanogḫuhi). On the other hand, Greek is characterized by a three gender-system, masculine, feminine and neuter, a typical gender system found in many Indo-European languages (Aikhenvald 2003, 19). Nouns inflect for gender, number and case. Knowledge of the gender of a particular noun is important, in order to be able to decline it correctly and attach the appropriate article or modify it with an adjective in the correct grammatical gender (Holton, Mackridge and Philippaki-Warburton 2004, 23). Adjectives can have separate forms for each gender, though not all do. The gender suffix that adjectives and nouns take also includes number and case marking. Tsimpli and Hulk (2013, 130) explain as well that some of the suffixes have predictive value for one of the genders only, though not always. Determiners, numerals and articles also inflect for gender to agree with the noun they are modifying (Holton et al. 2004, 67). In addition to these word-classes, pronouns also agree in grammatical gender with their antecedent and: pronominal clitic cross-indexing on the verb of a nonsubject nominal argument depends on the gender of the nominal argument (e.g. ton for masculine direct objects, tin for feminine ones, and to for neuter).  (Joseph and Philippaki-Warburton 1987, 153)

The gender of nouns and of their modifiers is reflected in the endings of these lexical items (Joseph and Philippaki-Warburton 1987, 245). Ralli (2002, 521) argues that gender is an inflectional category like number and case, since “it participates in agreement and varies according to the particular value it assumes”. Most of the time, however, it is difficult to locate gender as being part of the stem or the inflectional affix (op. cit., 523).8 Additionally, case markings and gender markings

8. Ralli (2002, 523) gives the following set of examples: (a) no′ni (‘godfather’masc.nom.pl) and no′nes (‘godmother’fem.nom.pl), and (b) ðromi (‘road’masc.nom.pl) and ′isoði (‘entry’fem. nom.pl). In the first set of examples, she explains (id.) that “form variation follows gender variation” and that form variation is found at the affix (-i or -es) with the stem remaining unchanged (non-). In the second set of examples, Ralli (ibid.) argues that “the stem varies (ðrom- or isoð-) while the affix remains unchanged (-i). Given the fact that gender is not related to any particular



When She and He become It 235

are intertwined, thus, nouns belonging in the same inflection class may maintain different gender values (op. cit., 534). An important issue worthy of attention is how gender is determined. Gender can be determined based on semantics, phonology or morphology. The following paragraphs deal with the relationship between these three levels of analysis and grammatical gender. Grammatical gender in Greek is fairly arbitrary and quite conventional, that is, the division between the three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter does not correspond to the division, male, female and inanimate (Holton et al. 2004, 22). However, in the determination of grammatical gender in Greek, semantics occupies an important position (Ralli 2002, 526–527). For example, Ralli (2002, 526) explains that “the language distinguishes a form for males and a form for females in the citation form of nominative singular: masculine nouns end in -os, -as, and -is, and feminine nouns in -a and -i”: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

′anθropos maθi′tis ′andras ji ′neka ′kori

‘man, human being’ ‘student’ ‘man’ ‘woman’ ‘daughter’

A grammatical gender system like the Greek one raises questions such as: how is it that native speakers of Greek are able to provide the correct gender of nouns? According to Anastasiadi-Symeonidi (1994), native speakers of Greek make very few mistakes or none at all when they use gender.9 When borrowed words enter the language, they always assign a gender and when speakers are given invented words, they are able again to assign grammatical gender for each noun provided (Anastasiadi-Symeonidi 1994, cited in Ralli 2002, 221). Tsimpli and Hulk (2013, 129) also agree that “gender acquisition is relatively unproblematic” citing morphological marker in Greek, a quick answer to the question raised in this paragraph [i.e. is it easy to locate gender in word structure?] is almost impossible”. 9. The debate about sexism in language seems to be current always. Tsokalidou (1996, 14), when talking about sexism in the Greek language, argues that ‘η γλώσσα είναι ένα δυνατό εργαλείο μέσα από το οποίο καθιερώνεται μία συγκεκριμένη τάξη πραγμάτων’ (language is a powerful tool with which a certain state of affairs becomes established). She further explains that ‘το αρσενικό γραμματικό γένος υπερισχύει του θηλυκού και του ουδέτερου’ (the masculine grammatical gender predominates the feminine and neuter genders) arguing that the discrimination against women in language can be observed in different levels of grammar, syntax and the semantics of words and sentences (Tsokalidou 1996, 17). For our concern, that implies that the grammatical gender of human terms could also vary according to the social gender of the referred beings.

236 Chryso Hadjidemetriou

two past studies (Stephany 1997 and Mastropavlou 2006). They explain though that neuter nouns show a rather unpredictable pattern of acquisition in comparison to feminine and masculine nouns. While L2 learners never master the target language gender system fully, they still exhibit certain tendencies regarding the cues or methods employed for the assignment of gender (e.g. see Oliphant 1997). The data analysed in the following sections examine the Armenian speakers’ tendencies in CG grammatical gender usage.

4. Results Not all of the speakers interviewed exhibited grammatical gender deviations. Table 1 provides information about the number of CyAs exhibiting grammatical gender deviations (15 out of 25 speakers), and Table 2 gives information about the number of non-CyAs exhibiting grammatical gender deviations (7 out of 7 speakers). The speakers analysed are predominantly first generation CyAs (only one speaker is a second generation CyA). Table 1.  Grammatical gender deviations in the CyAs1011 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Speakers10

# of tokens11

%

Generation

Age

Sex

sirush naz levon yerinaz karpis marat karekin vasak shamiram samuel lousvart mirak nara yelena lousaber

19/100 14/100 10/100 8/100 6/100 5/100 5/100 5/100 4/100 4/100 3/100 2/100 2/100 1/100 1/100

19% 14% 10% 8% 6% 5% 5% 5% 4% 4% 3% 2% 2% 1% 1%

1st 1st 1st 1st 1st 1st 1st 1st 1st 2nd 1st 1st 1st 1st 1st

64 79 63 65 75 64 65 80 79 42 62 64 78 64 64

F F M F M M M M F M F M F F F

10. The names used are pseudonyms. 11. This column measures the total number of tokens counted per speaker (100) and the number of deviant tokens within the 100 tokens sample per speaker. For each speaker, the first 100 NPs during a continuous stream of conversation were counted.



When She and He become It 237

Table 2.  Grammatical gender deviations in the non-CyAs 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Speakers

# of tokens

%

Age

Sex

sahak seda raya nadir arev husik barunak

37/100 27/100 17/77 8/100 6/100 3/100 3/100

37% 27% 22% 8% 6% 3% 3%

63 58 40 80 90 64 92

M F F M M M M

Table 3 provides the number of gender deviant noun phrases located in the 100 noun phrases count and the number of deviant lexical items – whether those are articles, nouns, adjectives, demonstratives etc. – in the 100 count of gender deviant noun phrases for each speaker. Table 3.  Number of deviant noun phrases and number of single gender deviant lexical items located in the total number of gender deviant noun phrases CyAs

Non-CyAs

Speakers

# of gender % deviant noun phrases

Total # of single Speakers lexical items with gender deviation

# of gender % deviant noun phrases

Total # of single lexical items with gender deviation

sirush naz levon yerinaz karpis marat karekin vasak shamiram samuel lousvart mirak nara yelena lousaber

19/100 14/100 10/100 8/100 6/100 5/100 5/100 5/100 4/100 4/100 3/100 2/100 2/100 1/100 1/100

20/39 16/31 14/20 9/17 9/16 8/10 6/11 5/11 9/10 4/10 4/6 4/5 2/4 1 / 3 1/2

37/100 27/100 17/77 8/100 6/100 3/100 3/100

37% 27% 22% 8% 6% 3% 3%

47/83 30/58 17/34 14/20 7/12 4/6 3/6

Total

89/1500

101/677

15% 122/219

19% 14% 10% 8% 6% 5% 5% 5% 4% 4% 3% 2% 2% 1% 1%

6% 112/195

sahak seda raya nadir arev husik barunak

238 Chryso Hadjidemetriou

The majority of non-CyAs performed less successfully in gender assignment (15%) than CyAs (6%). Age of speakers when they were first exposed to CG was expected to be extremely important in the acquisition of the CG grammatical gender. The results show that CyAs, who grew up in a bilingual environment, are more successful in gender usage. In the case of non-CyAs, 4 out of the 7 speakers perform higher than 90% in successful gender assignment. This is close to the levels of CyA speakers. Therefore, even though growing up in a bilingual environment from an early age can facilitate grammatical gender acquisition, it is nonetheless not necessary to be exposed to such an environment for complete grammatical gender acquisition. Speakers who begin their acquisition of CG at a later stage of life can also acquire grammatical gender successfully (e.g. Barunak and Husik in Table 3). This also suggests that the length of contact between two languages does not always entail that speakers exposed to the two languages will be able to use both natively. Obviously, the length of contact in conjunction with other extra-linguistic factors may promote the balanced acquisition of both languages or the use of one of the two languages more than the other. As Campbell argues “the outcome of borrowing can vary according to the length and intensity of contact, the kind of interaction, and the degree of bilingualism in the populations” (Campbell 2004, 67). When examining the number of gender deviations located in articles, adjectives, nouns, demonstratives and determiners, the results showed that both groups produced more gender deviations in articles (both definite and indefinite). The results of Tables 4 and 5 show the following: i. the location of gender deviations in 100 deviant noun phrases counted; ii. the type of gender deviation, for example: an article in a noun phrase expected to appear in feminine gender to agree with the head noun but instead appearing in neuter gender (F→N), or a noun expected to appear in masculine gender used in neuter gender instead (M→N);12

12. Examples: Incorrect form vs. Correct form to me′yalon ekli′sian i me′yali ekli′sian [neu sg] [neu sg] [fem sg] [fem sg] [fem sg] [fem sg] ‘The big church’ iðravli′ko iðravli′kos [neu sg] [masc sg] ‘Plumber’



When She and He become It 239

iii. lexical items which could not be categorised by type of gender deviation because their endings did not facilitate a grammatical gender categorisation. For instance, consider the following noun which is used by a non-CyA: polikati′kun (πολυκατικούν) instead of polikati′kia (πολυκατοικία) -fem ‘block of flats’. The form of the noun used by the non-CyA cannot be categorised based on its ending. These examples were extremely uncommon. Table 4.  Type of gender deviations and their location in the noun phrases counted in the CyAs Type of gender deviation Gender deviation located in

F→N

F→M M→N

M→F N→F

N→M Unidentified Total

Article (definite and indefinite) Adjective Noun Demonstrative (αυτός, τούτος, εκείνος) Determiner (most pronouns apart from personal pronouns can also be used as determiners) Subtotal

28

4

25

4

7

6

0

74

9 7 0

2 0 0

1 6 3

1 0 0

0 2 0

1 1 0

0 0 0

14 16 3

1

2

1

1

0

0

0

5

45

8

36

6

9

8

0 112

Table 5.  Type of gender deviations and their location in the noun phrases counted in the non-CyAs Type of gender deviation Gender deviation located in

F→N

F→M M→N M→F N→F

N→M

Unidentified Total

Article Adjective Noun Demonstrative Determiner Subtotal

34 1 4 2 3 44

2 3 0 3 2 10

1 0 0 1 1 3

1 0 1 0 0 2

29 2 8 2 1 42

12 2 1 0 0 15

2 4 0 0 0 6

81 12 14 8 7 122

240 Chryso Hadjidemetriou

The quantitative results of the use of grammatical gender by CyAs and non-CyAs show that even though CyAs were more successful in correctly using grammatical gender, they nevertheless have similarities to the non-CyAs in terms of the distribution of the location of grammatical deviations in noun phrases. To be more exact, both groups exhibit the highest percentage of gender deviations with articles (definite and indefinite), with the second highest number being head noun deviations. The percentage of deviant gender articles is the same (66% for CyAs and non-CyAs). At the opposite, there is a difference in the results for deviant head nouns and demonstratives. CyAs had a non-noteworthy higher percentage in deviant head nouns (14%) than non-CyAs (11%), whereas non-CyAs have a higher percentage of deviant demonstratives (7%) than CyAs (3%). These results are presented in Figure 1: 100

CyAs Non-CyAs

90

% gender deviation

80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

article

adjective

noun

demonstrative

Nominal element

Figure 1.  Gender deviation percentage results by group of speakers and by nominal category

When examining the results of grammatical gender preference, interestingly, both groups had similar results, in that both exhibited a preference for using the neuter gender when deviating. The CyAs assigned the neuter gender for feminine nouns in 40% of cases and masculine nouns in 32%. The non-CyAs used the neuter gender for feminine nouns in 36% of cases and 34% of masculine nouns. The nonCyAs also exhibited an interesting tendency: they used the feminine gender for masculine nouns 12%, whereas in the CyA data this only occurred in 5%. Another interesting difference between the two groups has to do with the way some neuter



When She and He become It 241

lexical items were changed into feminine or masculine (8% and 7% respectively for CyAs, and 5% and 3% for non-CyAs) though this difference is not noteworthy. These results are presented in Figure 2: 100

CyAs Non-CyAs

90

% of gender deviation

80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

F→N

F→M

M→N

M→F

N→F

N → M Unidentified

Type of gender deviation

Figure 2.  Percentage results by type of gender deviation in the CyAs and non-CyAs

The grammatical gender deviations are categorised into three different types: Type A Modifiers that disagree in gender with head nouns. This type includes examples where articles, adjectives, demonstratives, and any lexical item functioning as a determiner in a noun phrase disagree in gender with the head noun (e.g. ′enan-neu.sg ekli′sian-fem.sg vs. ′myan-fem.sg ekli′sian-fem.sg, ‘one church’) Type B Nouns that are in the incorrect grammatical gender with morphological changes to the head noun, and (e.g. to-neu.nom.sg ′kamilon-neu.nom.sg vs. i-fem. nom.sg ka′mila-fem.nom.sg, ‘the camel’) Type C Unaccompanied (zero determiner) lexical items that are assigned the wrong grammatical gender. This type was not included in the quantitative analysis of grammatical gender. Unaccompanied nouns were not counted because it was difficult to establish with certainty whether a particular lexical item was in the incorrect gender when there was no clear clue in its ending that the lexical item was in a deviant gender. Only when the endings of unaccompanied lexical items were changed was it possible to establish that a lexical item was in the incorrect grammatical gender. For instance, if a speaker were to say afto′kinitos-masc.nom.sg ‘car’ instead of afto′kinito-neu.nom.sg ‘car’ then the

242 Chryso Hadjidemetriou

gender deviation is clear. Such examples were infrequent and, without this change in ending, very difficult to identify, which is why they were not included in the quantitative analysis. However, they are still important for a qualitative analysis of the use of the CG grammatical gender by the Armenians.

An important characteristic of gender deviation in the CG of CyAs and non-CyAs is when a noun is accompanied by a modifier (article, adjective, demonstrative, determiner) and the modifier disagrees with the head noun in gender, the gender deviation becomes more obvious in the accompanied element (article, adjective etc.) than in the noun itself. This type accounts for 85% of gender deviations among the CyAs and 89% of those produced by the non-CyAs. As pointed out earlier “agreement is the essence of gender’ (Pérez-Pereira 1991, 572); in other words, in cases where the ending of a noun does not help in determining its gender, agreement with other elements makes its gender more obvious. As stated by Holton et al. (2004, 22–23), the gender of a noun is reflected in its endings and modifiers (article, adjective, determiner etc.). Thus, many of the members of the other word-classes (adjective, articles, some numerals, and determiners) inflect in order to agree with the gender of the noun that they accompany (Holton et al. op. cit., 67). But, if the noun is absent, they agree with the gender of the real person or item they denote (Holton et al. op. cit., 68). Consider the following examples: Form produced by the Armenians Correct form (1) ′enan ekli′sian ′myan ekli′sian one-neu.sg church-fem.sg [one church]-fem.sg ‘One church’ (2) to me′yalon me′yalon ekli′sia i me′yali ekli′sia the-neu.sg big-neu.sg big-neu.sg church-fem.sg fem.nom.sg ‘The big big church’ (3) armeni′ki mona′stiri ar′meniko mona′stiri Armenian-fem.sg church-neu.sg [Armenian church]-neu.sg ‘Armenian monastery’

In (3), it is difficult to establish whether a speaker perceives the noun (mona′stiri) with a wrong gender, thus producing a deviant-gender noun phrase altogether, or whether the deviant form is only located in the modifier (armeni′ki), that is, a speaker perceives a noun in its correct gender form, however, fails to produce the correct syntactic gender agreement between the noun and its modifier. Examples (4)–(5) illustrate gender deviations located in the determiner and the demonstrative of the respective noun phrases. Unlike the previous examples, with Examples (4) and (5), the case of the deviant phrases is easier to establish.



When She and He become It 243

(4) Form produced by the Armenians pu tus ′allus mio′notites from [the other]-acc.masc.pl minorities-acc.fem.pl Correct form pu tes ′alles mio′notites from [the other minorities]-acc.fem.pl ‘From the other minorities’ (5) Form produced by the Armenians ′tuto Ø yenokto′nia [this]-nom.neu.sg ø-def.art genocide-nom.fem.sg Correct form ′tuti i yenokto′nia [this]-nom.fem.sg [the genocide]-nom.fem.sg ‘This genocide’

As discussed earlier, the determiner and demonstratives in noun phrases in Greek need to agree in grammatical gender with the head noun. In Example (4), the definite article and contrastive pronoun and determiner (‘allus) appear in masculine gender instead of feminine, and in Example (5) the demonstrative (‘tuto) appears in the neuter gender instead of the feminine where the ending of the word (in -o) facilitates the categorisation of the demonstrative appearing in neuter gender instead of feminine gender (ending in -i). In summary, in Examples (1)–(5), it is extremely difficult to establish whether the speakers produced all the elements of a noun phrase in a deviant gender but at the same time maintained the gender agreement between the elements of the noun phrase even though it is a deviant grammatical gender, or whether they produced some elements of the noun phrase with gender deviation and therefore failed to establish the gender agreement between the elements of the noun phrase. The next type of gender deviation offers a clearer perspective on this issue. Noun phrases in the wrong gender with incorrect head noun morphology were, also, observed. The gender deviation can be observed in both the article that accompanies a noun and in the noun itself. Form produced by the Armenians Correct form (6) to ′kamilon i ka′mila [the camel]-neu.nom.sg [the camel]-fem.nom.sg ‘The camel’

In Example (6), the ending -on is a nominative singular of CG neuter nouns. A clue about the wrong gender is offered by the noun itself (′kamilon instead of ka′mila) and by the choice of the wrong gender article (to instead of i). Even if the

244 Chryso Hadjidemetriou

noun was not preceded by an article, there would still be clear evidence that the speaker has produced the wrong gender. In examples where there is a clear change of the morphological ending of a specific noun as in Example (6), it can be claimed that the whole noun phrase has a wrong gender. A third type of deviation was observed, though not very frequently as mentioned before: lexical items with zero determiner in the wrong gender. The infrequency of this type of deviation is due to the fact that it is difficult to claim that a particular lexical item is in the wrong gender form especially when there is no morphological indication. When lexical items are unaccompanied, the only clue for determining if a noun has the wrong gender is the morphological ending. For instance, consider Example (7): Form produced by the Armenians Correct form (7) sfa′yio sfa′yi slaughter-neu.sg slaughter-fem.sg ‘Slaughter’

Some unaccompanied lexical items which appear without any change in their morphological ending are not necessarily produced in the correct gender. Example (8) exhibits the same pattern, although it is somewhat more complicated. Form produced by the Armenians Correct form (8) pco mi′kro pco mi′kros more [young]-neu.sg more [young]-masc.nom.sg ‘Younger’

Here, the female speaker was asked “how many children do you have?” She answered that she had two sons and gave their names; she, then, mentioned that the second name she gave was the name of the younger of her two sons. When she refers to the second son, she would be expected to use the masculine gender, but instead she uses the neuter form. This might be a simple gender deviation where the speaker, instead of producing the masculine gender, produces the neuter gender to refer to her son. However, a different explanation for this deviation could be that the speaker uses the neuter gender because she is thinking of the noun ‘child’, which is neuter, rather than the noun ‘son’ which is masculine. So, the sentence would be “X who is the youngest-neu child-neu’ and not “X who is the youngestmasc son-masc’. This is an issue thoroughly investigated by Valiouli (1997), who provides a number of examples similar to the above but with Greek native speakers as her subjects. The examples are analysed by Valiouli not as grammatical deviations due to the speakers’ incomplete acquisition of Greek grammatical gender, but as shifts in perspective (Valiouli 1997). However, with Armenian speakers it is more difficult not to consider examples such as 8 as deviations considering the



When She and He become It 245

predominant tendency to use the neuter gender. In this case, a shift in perspective could have been considered had the speaker referred to her non-adult and possibly pre-adolescent sons, which is not the case. Another possible explanation is that the deviation in Example (8) is a case deviation and not a gender deviation. However, since the particular lexical item is not used with an article it is difficult to decide whether the deviation concerns grammatical gender or case marking. The following examples are interesting because the deviant nouns refer to particular people. As outlined earlier, nouns referring to humans are divided into masculine and feminine depending on whether the noun refers to a male or female person respectively (Ralli 2002, 526–527).13 Grammatical gender terms with human reference in Greek are not, however, purely based on semantic distinctions. Consider Examples (9) and (10): Form produced by the Armenians Correct form (9) iðravli′ko iðravli′kos plumber-neu.sg plumber-masc.nom.sg ‘Plumber’ (10) ma′θitria maθi′tis student-fem.sg student-masc.nom.sg ‘Student’

In Examples (9) and (10), the speakers were referring to specific persons. As a consequence, they knew that these people were male, and yet they used the wrong gender. These examples raise questions regarding both grammatical and extralinguistic gender, because they show that gender classification based on extralinguistic gender is not easier than classification based on grammatical gender.14 Furthermore, neuter gender could be perceived as a “common gender”, and thus, covering the masculine and feminine genders. It is possible that the speaker chooses the neuter gender as a “common gender” or a grammatical gender choice “beyond gender” when the grammatical gender knowledge is not available to the speaker.15

13. See Section 3 for the semantic determination of grammatical gender in Greek and exceptions to this tendency (i.e. sometimes nouns referring to male humans are not masculine and nouns referring to female humans are not feminine). 14. Extra-linguistic gender is related to the social gender of humans and, often, animals, while grammatical gender is not’ (see Trudgill 2002, 76 for a discussion). 15. Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for the insightful comments on ‘common gender’ and ‘beyond gender’.

246 Chryso Hadjidemetriou

5. Discussion Studies on the acquisition of grammatical gender in L1 speakers (see Section 1) showed how L1 speakers master grammatical gender classification early on and that they use not only semantic criteria for gender assignment, but also phonological and morphological criteria too (e.g. Poplack et al. 1982). When it comes to the acquisition of grammatical gender in L2 speakers, it was observed (see Section 1) that different factors contributed to grammatical gender choice (e.g. Franceschina 2001 on whether operations used in L1 had any consequences on mistakes in the L2; Finnemann 1994 on ‘markedness’ in gender acquisition; Oliphant 1997 on complementary cues in grammatical gender assignment). Grüter et al. (2012) explain that L2 learners’ difficulties with grammatical gender could come from different sources: (a) difficulty at the level of gender assignment (lexical knowledge), (b) difficulty at the level of gender agreement (syntactic knowledge)’, and (c) difficulty with accessing and/or deploying this lexical and/or syntactic knowledge within the real-time constraints imposed by the specific context in use.  (Grüter, Lew-Williams and Fernald 2012, 192)

The present chapter looked at grammatical gender usage in conversations and examined the lexical and syntactic knowledge of grammatical gender assignment in Cypriot Greek by the Armenians. The conversational data used for this study pose restrictions, the same way that experimental data pose restrictions. Grüter et al. (2012, 194) argue that language production data are difficult to interpret in terms of the presence or absence of functional features opting, in their case, for carefully constructed offline tasks. The difficulties of interpreting some of the data produced were outlined when discussing different types of gender deviations, including examples where it was difficult to establish whether the modifier disagreed in gender with the head noun and thus showing difficulties in gender agreement, or whether the modifier only was in the wrong gender but the head noun was in the correct one. Despite the difficulties of interpreting conversational data, the study did not use any carefully constructed tasks in Cypriot Greek, as the majority of the speakers expressed difficulties reading and writing in Greek. Furthermore, the purpose of the study was to examine actual usage of the Cypriot Greek grammatical gender system by the Armenians. Of course, Grüter et al. (id.) maintain that when it comes to gender agreement, this is acquirable in L2 and “any remaining errors with grammatical gender in production must be due to a production-specific performance problem”. It may be that real-time constraints are indeed an issue for studies relying



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on conversational data, but tendencies of L2 grammatical gender usage become evident when looking at conversational data. The analysis of the data provided uncontroversial results, in that the speakers tended to provide mostly the neuter gender. The most likely explanation is that speakers may have chosen the neuter gender as a ‘peripheral’ use of default gender in cases where they did not know the gender of a particular noun, thus, making their chosen to be the least “wrong” in comparison to the other two genders. A peripheral use of the neuter gender can be seen as a strategy to avoid semantic gender assignment, grammatical gender agreement, and simplification of a threeway grammatical gender classification system. Another interesting point that emerged from the data is related to the nature of gender deviations in nouns assignment of which should be based on extralinguistic gender. In other words, nouns that should have been masculine because they referred to male humans were actually produced in feminine or neuter gender. A possible reason for this type of deviation is transfer from the first language. It was stated earlier that Armenian does not express gender grammatically and that there is no grammatical gender distinction between masculine, feminine or neuter (Sakayan 2000, 54). “Gender must be discerned by the linguistic context or situation” (id.). Also, the third person singular pronoun in Armenian does not express gender (as in English he/she/it). It is a possibility that the lack of grammatical gender in Armenian has an effect on the use of grammatical gender in CG by Armenians. Research on other languages, specifically on Dutch, has shown that the Dutch variety of immigrants and also Netherlands-born immigrants, for example, is characterised by the ovegeneralisation of common gender (Aissati, Boumans, Cornips et al. 2005; Cornips 2002, 2004, 2008; Cornips and de Rooij 2003). Cornips (2008) discusses the overgeneralisation of common gender in Dutch in terms of whether this is an act of identity or the result of bilingual acquisition. She argues that: although the overgeneralisation of de constitutes a linguistic resource for every bilingual child acquirer (and even monolingual acquirers), it only becomes meaningful in the indexing and reproducing of an (immigrant) ‘allochtone’ identity versus the dominant ‘autochtone’ one.  (Cornips 2008, 120)

In the case of the Armenians, the over-usage of the neuter gender is a linguistic resource for the bilingual speakers; however, no evidence of the overgeneralisation of neuter gender by younger generations as a way of indexing an Armenian identity (as in the case of the Dutch immigrants) has been found. A comparison of the data from this study with data from other bilingual speakers with Greek as L1 offers valuable insights. Tsimpli (2003), for instance,

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examined the acquisition of the Greek grammatical gender system by speakers whose first language was Turkish, their second language Russian, and Greek their third language. The purpose of the study was to examine the ultimate attainment of grammatical gender agreement and not whether the use of one gender type in a particular noun was correct or not. Tsimpli found that agreement errors between adjective + noun were more common than between in/ definite article + noun (2003, 183). This is in contrast with the results of my study where the definite article was more susceptible to grammatical gender deviation. However, this difference may be due to the way the two studies were organised. Whereas in Tsimpli’s study the focus was only on the grammatical gender agreement in definite and indefinite noun phrases, in my study the focus was not only on grammatical gender agreement but also on whether the use of a particular gender class in a particular noun or modifier was correct or not. Additionally, in my study the noun phrases were not categorised into definite and indefinite noun phrases. It should be interesting to examine how similar or different the results will be once the same categorisation employed in Tsimpli is also applied in my data. This analysis was not applied at the time as the purpose of the study was not to test definite and indefinite noun phrases, but the purpose was to understand how Armenians use grammatical gender in everyday interaction. Tsimpli also observes that the neuter gender was overgeneralised more by all the participants in her study (90%), then followed the feminine gender (5%), whereas the masculine gender did not appear in grammatical gender agreement errors (Tsimpli 2003, 185). The preference for the neuter gender was also observed in my study. In Georgalidou, Spyropoulos, Kaili and Revithiadou (2005), bilingual speakers in Turkish (L1) and Modern Greek (L2) living on the island of Rhodes were examined; it was observed that the speakers avoided gender marking in Greek and used the neuter gender for masculine and feminine control nouns.16 In addition, Seaman (1972) provided interesting data on the use of grammatical gender in Greek by second and third generation Greek-American speakers who seemed to face similar difficulties when using the grammatical gender system of Greek as Armenian speakers. More specifically, Seaman found examples which exhibited the following tendencies (Seaman 1972, 154–160): 16. Looking at preliminary data from the use of Greek by British-born Greek Cypriot adolescents (2nd and 3rd generation), the same tendency towards the use of the neuter gender was remarked. At this stage of research, however, this is only a preliminary observation. It remains to see whether the preference for the neuter is highest for feminine or masculine nouns. Second generation British-born Greek Cypriot adults also exhibit the use of neuter gender.





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(i) third-person gender distinction in English is introduced in some Greek nouns:

a. ce’ðo ′exume ′enas (′ena) pe′ði ce and here have-1.pl one-masc.sg child and (one-neu.sg) ′pezi football plays-3.sg football

‘And here we have a boy who is playing football’

b. well ′ine ′ðio ko′ritses (ko′ritsja) well are-3.pl two girls-fem.pl (girls-neu.pl) ‘Well, there are two girls’

(ii) place names are referred to by using the neuter gender:

a. sto Greece instead of stin E′laða in+the-neu.sg Greece in+the-fem.sg Greece ‘In Greece’ b. a′po to In′ðia instead of a′po tin In′ðia from the-neu.sg India from the-fem.sg India ‘From India’ (iii) there is a tendency to use the neuter gender: a. ce e′ci ′ine ′ena yi′neca instead of ce e′ci ′ine mya yi′neca And here is a-neu.sg woman And here is a-fem.sg woman ‘And here is a woman’ b. ta spu′ðea ′anθropi instead of i spu′ðei ′anθropi The-neu.pl important people the-masc.pl important people ‘Important people’ (iv) there is a tendency, especially among first and second-generation speakers, to retain in Greek-American the correct non-neuter gender of Greek lexical items that were lost (not in use anymore and used in English instead): Greek-American a. ′mia pink blanket One-fem.sg pink blanket ‘A pink blanket’

Greek (nominative form) i roz ku′verta

b. ′mia painting One-fem.sg painting ‘A painting’

i i′kona

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(v) there is successful gender correction:

a. e’ðo ′ine ′enas-masc.sg, ′mia-fem.sg yi′neka ‘Here is a woman’ (vi) there is conscious gender confusion illustrating less successful attempts at gender correction: a. a′lla ′tote sti-fem.sg… sto-neu.sg indianapolis (stin inðia′napoli) ‘But in Indianapolis at that time’ (vii) There are subconscious gender ‘errors’. In such cases, the speaker shows no hesitation either before or after the erroneous form, a fact which indicates that the chances of it going undetected because the speaker ignores the correct form are quite high: a. sas a′resi i musi′ci…a: ameri′kaniko (ameri′kanici) ′oxi elini′ko (elini′ci)  ‘Do you like music…a: American-neu.sg (American-fem.sg) not Greekneu.sg (Greek-fem.sg).’ ‘Do you like American, no, Greek Music?’

Some of these tendencies appearing in the speech of Greek Americans also appear in the CG of the Armenian speakers. Seaman’s Greek American speakers exhibited a tendency to use the English sex distinction for some Greek nouns (1972). This occurred in cases like, pe′ðia ‘children’, which is neuter in gender, but for which speakers provided a masculine gender article if the noun referred to a boy. Seaman argues that this is transfer of semantic gender distinction from English into Greek (ibid.). Examples like the one mentioned by Seaman are not found in the data from the Armenians. In fact, the opposite occurs: nouns, which are masculine or feminine depending on whether they refer to male or female humans, are assigned neuter gender. One can therefore ask whether these deviations are transferred from Armenian into Greek in the same way that Seaman argued that the deviation above is due to transfer from English. The process of assigning the neuter gender seems to indicate that this is the default gender for second language learners. The deviations in the CG of the Armenian speakers are not due to transfer: by choosing the neuter, speakers opt for that gender which is considered to be the unmarked gender in Greek. This use of neuter as default gender contrasts with the widespread use of masculine as default gender in many languages (see among others, Guellouz (2016) for Arabic, Muchnik (2016) for Hebrew)). This draws a peripheral use of default gender: the use of neuter seems to be a strategy to avoid semantic gender information or grammatical gender agreement. Being perceived as a mere phonological or morphosyntactical mark, but without gendered extra-linguistic reference, neuter appears as a periphery in the gender system. In this view, speakers make of neuter a “less gendered” category than masculine and feminine.



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The process of assigning neuter gender also appears in the Greek American data, and more specifically in the assignment of neuter gender for place names. In the non-CyAs I also remark the same tendency: speakers use the neuter gender for certain countries, cities or places. In Example (11), the noun refers to a village in Cyprus, and in Example (12) to a city, both of them feminine in CG. Form produced by the Armenian speakers Correct form (11) a′po to xa′lefka a′po tin xa′lefka from [the]-neu Chalefka from [the Chalefka]-fem.acc.sg ‘From Chalefka’ (12) a′po to viri′to a′po ti viri′to from [the]-neu Beirut from [the Beirut]-fem.acc.sg ‘From Beirut’

As we can see, speakers did not use the neuter gender for all place nouns. In some cases, rather than using the neuter gender for place-name nouns, they assigned the feminine gender incorrectly. For instance, there are cases where the speakers say sti ′livano-fem ‘in+the-fem Lebanon-fem’ instead of producing the phrase in the correct masculine form ston ‘livano ‘in+the-masc Lebanon-masc’ – ‘in Lebanon’. Therefore, although there were also some place-name nouns that were assigned the neuter gender, the CyA speakers exhibited an overall different tendency than Greek American speakers, ‘feminising’ place-name nouns stin ‘aðana-fem.acc.sg ‘in+thefem Adana’ instead of sta ‘aðana -neu.acc.pl ‘in+the-neu pl Adana’ – ‘in Adana’. The last three tendencies (successful gender correction (v), conscious gender confusion (vi), and subconscious gender ‘errors’ (vii)) that Greek American speakers exhibited demonstrate their ability to successfully repair gender deviations, but also their susceptibility to conscious error confusion and subconscious gender errors. The Armenians exhibited roughly the same tendencies. However, I also found in my data examples where Armenians were not successful in repairing gender deviations. A particular type of self-initiated self-repair was examined, which I have termed, deviant self-initiated self-repair. Speakers producing this repair repaired an element of their utterance that did not require repairing grammatically, for example: repairing the grammatical gender of a noun that was in the correct gender and giving it a deviant gender. The transcribed data revealed only eight deviant repairs produced in the same turn as the trouble source.17 The analysis of this repair type was first based on the analysis of single episodes as they appeared in conversation. Those single episodes revealed a type of 17. Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks “refer to that which the repair addresses as the ‘repairable’ or the ‘trouble source” (1977, 363).

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repair that does not appear in native talk data based on my observations of selfinitiated self-repairs analysis in Greek conversation (Hadjidemetriou 2001). What is of importance here, is the way that Armenians depart from how grammatical self-repairs are used in native Greek interactions. It was this departure from grammatical self-initiated self-repairs as they appear in native speech – within the same turn as the trouble source – that prompted the analysis of deviant self-initiated self-repairs as they appear in the Armenians’ speech. In these eight cases, the repairs are initiated after the production of the modifier of a noun phrase and before the production of the head noun; the modifier in the repaired segment was recycled and produced in a deviant grammatical gender in the repairing segment. For example (the repaired segment is in bold and the repairing segment is in bold italics): (13) Utterance with deviant repair e′ci ′exi ′mian ′enan ekli′sian there has-3.sg one-fem.acc.sg one-neu.acc.sg church-neu.acc.sg Correct form e′ci ′exi [′mian ekli′sian] fem.acc.sg ‘There’s a church there’

The group of deviant self-initiated self-repairs focuses only on which part of the repaired segment was recycled in the repairing segment and what deviation was produced, thus making the repair a ‘deviant repair’. The categorisation does not capture all the characteristics of the individual repairs, such as the appearance or non-appearance of repair initiations, whether the repair was produced in the middle of a long turn or short turn, or the topic the particular turn where the individual repairs were initiated. In similar examples, Seaman (1972) talks about “subconscious gender ‘errors’”. In such cases, when speakers show no hesitation or concern “before or after uttering an erroneous gender form, chances are that the mistake has gone undetected’, or as he calls this ‘blissful ignorance of the correct Greek form” (Seaman 1972, 160). However, the presence of sound stretches can have conversational significance. As a matter of fact, Kormos (1999, 330) claims that at the beginning of L2 acquisition, learners make more errors and repair a smaller proportion of these errors than advanced learners do, what is due to metalinguistic awareness. When language skills develop and metalinguistic awareness increases, speakers tend to make fewer mistakes and also exhibit a higher correction rate of their erroneous output. O’Connor (1988, 258) also demonstrates that advanced learners make self-repairs which are anticipatory in nature, whereas less proficient learners



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employ more corrective repairs, without finding any particular difference between advanced and less proficient learners in terms of frequency or number of repairs. The data from Armenian speakers also showed that lexical, grammatical and phonological deviations in gender appear even in advanced learners and may not even be repaired. This finding contradicts Kormos (1999, 330) who claims that the more advanced learners shift from lower lexical, grammatical and phonological mistakes to problems at the discourse level. The actual process of repairing is not an element of dysfluency. Repairs appear in both L1 and L2 speech and, particularly in L1 speech, they are not viewed as characteristics of dysfluency. Whether or not repairs in L2 speech are seen as characteristics of dysfluency depends on the nature of those repairs. Criteria for differentiating include whether repairs are grammatical or otherwise, whether the deviant output, grammatical or otherwise, is repaired at all and also the time taken to detect deviant output and initiate the repair. In conclusion, further studies into the acquisition of grammatical gender by L2 learners of Greek would offer an insight into grammatical gender usage and attainment in L2 users of Greek. For instance, examining bilingual speakers of Greek or CG and comparing them with speakers of a language with similar characteristics as Armenian, i.e. having no grammatical gender (for instance, the bilingual Turkish Cypriot speakers with Cypriot Turkish as L1 and CG as L2). However, it is likely that even when more data are available on the use of grammatical gender in L2 users of Greek, these future studies, like the present study, will confirm the claim made by Dewaele and Véronique that “gender assignment and/or agreement remain problematic for learners at all levels” (2001, 275).

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Seaman, David P. 1972. Modern Greek and American English in Contact. The Hague: Mouton. Stephany, Ursula. 1997. “The Acquisition of Greek.” In The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition vol. 4, ed. by Dan I. Slobin, 183–333. Mahwah; London: Lawrence Erlbaum Ass. Towell, Richard. 1987. “Approaches to the Analysis of the Oral Language Development of the Advanced Learner.” In The Advanced Language Learner, ed. by James A. Coleman, and Richard Towell. London: CILTR. Trudgill, Peter. 2002. Sociolinguistic Variation and Change. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tsimpli, Ianthi M. 2003. “I kataktisi tou genous stin elliniki os defteri glossa” [The acquisition of gender in Greek as a second language]. In Genos [Gender], ed. by Anna AnastasiadiSimeonidi, Angeliki Ralli, and Despina Chila-Markopoulou, 168–189. Athens: Publications Pataki. Tsimpli, Ianthi M., and Aafke Hulk. 2013. “Grammatical Gender and the Notion of Default: Insights from Language Acquisition.” Lingua 137: 128–144. doi: 10.1016/j.lingua.2013.09.001 Tsokalidou, Petroula. 1996. Το φύλο της γλώσσας. Οδηγός μη σεξιστικής γλώσσας για τον δημόσιο ελληνικό λόγο [Gender in language. Guide for non-sexist Language in Greek Public Language]. Athens: Syndesmos Ellinidon Epistimonon. Unsworth, Sharon. 2008. “Age and Input in the Acquisition of Grammatical Gender in Dutch.” Second Language Research 24(3): 365–395. doi: 10.1177/0267658308090185 Unsworth, Sharon, Froso Argyri, Leonie Cornips, Aafke Hulk, Antonella Sorace, and Ianthi M. Tsimpli. 2014. “The Role of Age of Onset and Input in Early Child Bilingualism in Greek and Dutch.” Applied Psycholinguistics 35(4): 765–805. doi: 10.1017/S0142716412000574 Valiouli, Maria. 1997. “Grammatical Gender Clash: Slip of the Tongue or Shift of Perspective?” Linguistics 35: 89–110. doi: 10.1515/ling.1997.35.1.89

Lakota men’s and women’s speech Gender, metapragmatic discourse, and language revitalization Jessica Fae Nelson University of Arizona

Although most words in Lakota [a Siouan language] do not indicate gender, some can be used by speakers to mark their own gender. Recently perceptions of the use of gender-indexing words have shifted, altering the ranges of sociolinguistic expression available to speakers. Scholars have argued that speakers are able to take advantage of shared understandings about norms for gender-indexing words in order to construct alternative social meanings (see Trechter 1995; Agha 2005). I compare metapragmatic discourse about Lakota gender-indexing assertion enclitics from two different time periods in order to analyze changes in perception about this kind of gendering speech. I argue that in the current context of Lakota language shift and revitalization, metapragmatic discourses are erasing some of the indirect indexical links of gender-indexing words, and attributing other meanings that limit the potential that speakers have to use such words to communicate a broader range of social meanings in Lakota.1 Keywords: Lakota language, gender, metapragmatic discourse, indexicality, enregisterment

1. Introduction At times it seems that the revitalization of languages involves as much talk about the language in question as talk in the language being revitalized. Second language learners of the Lakota language, for example, encounter many messages 1. For their indispensible help in developing these ideas I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this book, the participants of IGALA7, Sandrizona and the 33rd Siouan and Caddoan Languages Conference, and especially Jan Ullrich, Ben Black Bear, Jordan Haug, Joon-Beom Chu, Jane Hill, Qing McFatter, and Natasha Warner. All errors and shortcomings are my own. doi 10.1075/pbns.264.10nel © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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as they learn the language that go beyond the structure and function of words and address metapragmatic (Silverstein 1993) questions of how the language should be used and who should use it in what ways. Often, gender is the explicit focus of such commentary. Stories circulate about men who unknowingly said something “like a woman”. Basic phrases taught to learners are described as what women say, or what men say. As Jocelyn Ahlers (2012, 310) reminds us, language revitalization inevitably involves a “reclaiming and reconstituting” not just of language but also of social roles, including gender roles. My focus here is on the (re)construction of normative speech frameworks that are part of such a “reclaiming and reconstituting” of gender roles, as well as the (re)construction and reification of gender. For example, both Trechter (1995) and Agha (2004) use a male speaker’s use of a Lakota feminine-indexing declarative statement enclitic, shown in Example (1), below, to show the ability of speakers to use linguistic variables already “enregistered”, or associated with some social meaning, in order to create alternative meanings in the context of speech practice, specifically because of their shared metapragmatic understandings of expected patterns of use. According to Agha (2004), the man’s “contrary to stereotype” enclitic use allowed him to create “the performance of an affective, caring persona stereotypically associated with women (…)” (32–33). (1) Wáη lé wáη hiyú welé.2 interj[surprise.man.speaking] 3sg.come encl[assertion.woman.speaking] ‘Hey look who’s here!’ (interj = interjection, encl = enclitic)

(Trechter 1995, 10)

In Agha’s words, speakers can use what he calls a “larger entextualized structure” of speaking norms in order to achieve “entextualized voicing effects” (2005, 48). However, what happens if the secondary indexical meanings are not understood by the intended audience, and the “counter-to-stereotype” enclitic use is instead seen as merely incorrect or even un-Lakota? The successful creation of alternative social meaning in this interaction is partly dependent on the interpretation of the other interlocutor(s) in the interaction, which in turn relies on a shared metapragmatic awareness of how Lakota speech can and should be used. According to 2. I use the orthography used in the New Lakota Dictionary (Ullrich 2008) and by many, but not all, Lakota Language teachers and learners. Many are roughly equivalent to IPA, with the following exceptions: “h” signifies that the previous phoneme is aspirated; “’” represents a glottal stop /ʔ/, used in the formation of plosives; “η” represents the nasalization of the previous vowel; when nasalized, /a/ and /i/ are also centralized to /ʌ/ and /ɪ/; “h”̌ and “ǧ” represent unvoiced and voiced velar fricatives /x/ and /ɣ/, respectively; “č” represents unaspirated /t͡ʃ/; “š” represents /ʃ/; and “ž” represents /ʒ/.



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recent metapragmatic discourse about Lakota speech, as I hope to demonstrate below, the male speaker in this example could easily become another figure in the stories about men who innocently and incorrectly used “women’s speech”, limiting his potential creative use of Lakota gendered speech. In this chapter I present data on metapragmatic commentary on Lakota gendered speech, or speech attributed with social meaning about a speaker’s gender, from two different time periods. First, I will examine patterns of language use in the quoted speech of narratives documented in the early 1900s, as an example of implicit metapragmatic commentary. Then, I will look at recent examples of more explicit metapragmatic discourse in the form of excerpts from widely-circulating language-learning materials and a popular radio program. I argue that differences between the metapragmatic discourses of these two time periods, the early 20th century and present-day early 21st century, reflect changing perspectives on language and gendered social roles, and that this is revealing of how metapragmatic discourse can influence language change and affect ranges of semiotic expression, especially in a context of language shift and revitalization. I conclude by drawing some tentative conclusions about what metapragmatic discourses within contexts of language shift and revitalization can reveal about: (1) the relationship between metapragmatic discourse and language shift; and (2) sociolinguistic processes such as indexicality (Silverstein 1976; Errington 1985; Ochs 1992; Hanks 1999) and enregisterment (Agha 2005, 2007). In focusing on metapragmatic discourse I draw on Silverstein’s (1993) illustration of this concept as language that takes as its semiotic object “events of using language” (35). I also distinguish between explicit metapragmatic discourse, which Silverstein characterizes as “the typical form of folk-metapragmatic discourse [consisting] both of canons of linguistic etiquette and of rules of usage…” (42), and implicit metapragmatic discourse, which can be discourse that serves as a model of what is seen as appropriate linguistic behavior without explicitly describing what that behavior should be. The quoted speech from early 20th century narratives that I analyze here are one example of such implicit metapragmatic discourse. These functions of metapragmatic discourse are inextricably linked to the indexical nature of language and to processes of enregisterment. Recent work on these topics has demonstrated their significance to studies of language and social meaning-making. Taking Peirce’s (1932) semiotic distinction between the index, icon and symbol as a starting point, Silverstein shows that the social aspects of language can be studied according to certain kinds of: indexical values, and that (…) any notion of language has to be inclusive enough to comprise these distinct modes, in particular (…) the indexical modes that link speech to the wider system of social life.  (Silverstein 1976, 53)

260 Jessica Fae Nelson

Assif Agha (2005, 56) builds on this concept of indexicality, exploring processes of “enregisterment”, in which “particular voices and figures are metadiscursively linked to performable signs, such as utterance types”. In other words, socially recognized personas are indexically linked to ways of using language through metadiscursive processes. This understanding of language’s role in the formation of semiotic registers is fundamental to work that focuses on the use of linguistic features in the (re)construction of social identities and negotiation of perceived boundaries between social groups (see, for example, Mendoza-Denton 1996, 2008, 2011; Zhang 2008; Eckert 2012). Here, I am interested in the metapragmatic discourses through which certain Lakota words have become indexically linked to the personas of idealized male and female Lakota speakers. As discussed briefly above, one of the key issues that I explore is the question of what happens when the metapragmatic (re)construction of social personae and concepts of correct speech interferes with the range of sociolinguistic options that are available to speakers through enregistered Lakota speech repertoires.

2. Background The Lakota language (sometimes spelled ‘Lakhota’) is classified as one of the Dakotan languages of the Mississippi Valley Siouan branch of Western Siouan languages of the Siouan-Catawban language family (Mithun 1999, 503). It is one of the few languages of Native North America to still have a speaker base in the thousands. David Rood estimated Lakota speakers to number 6,000 – 7,000 speakers in 1992 (Legendre and Rood 1992, 503). This estimate is still often heard in academic circles. However, communities are currently shifting to English as fewer and fewer children grow up speaking Lakota. It is difficult to estimate the exact state of shift among communities that include speakers on and off reservations in North and South Dakota, Canada, and even more distant from these main locations of Lakota language use. Based on self-reporting in the 2000 United States Census, the Lakota Language Consortium (2004) estimates that in 2000 only 15% of Lakota people in the United States spoke Lakota. They estimate that the Lakotaspeaking population has decreased roughly 30% since then, and that the average age of fluent speakers was around 65 in 2011. The average age of fluent speakers continues to rise as younger generations grow up speaking predominantly English. Transmission of the language is complicated by factors both practical and ideological. Long distances often separate Lakota speakers living in the rural regions so that even though these regions have the highest concentrations of speakers they might be isolated from each other. As speakers have less contact with each other, or use the language less often or in more restricted contexts, their fluency diminishes.



Lakota men’s and women’s speech 261

A lack of employment opportunities in these regions, especially on reservations, also means that many speakers and would-be heritage language learners have more immediate concerns regarding their family’s well-being than linguistic fluency. The perspective of younger generations is another important factor in Lakota language shift. Marion Blue Arm explains that while younger people on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota can often understand Lakota but not speak it fluently, the youngest generations can “barely understand the language and (…) tend not to speak it because it is not ‘cool’” (2002, 1). I would argue that it is also likely that many community members share language ideologies currently hegemonic in the United States in which monolingualism is idealized and bi- or multilingualism is seen as problematic for speakers’ language fluency and cognitive development. Another contributing factor might be that Lakota is increasingly seen as a private language. It seems that many fluent speakers use the language mainly with other fluent speakers with whom they are familiar, outside the presence of predominantly English-speaking people, including their own children and grandchildren.3 There has been widespread interest in revitalization of the Lakota language since the cultural empowerment mobilization in the 1960s-70s, and before.4 However, the overall success of these projects is unclear. Even at conferences and meetings organized specifically to address Lakota language revitalization English is often the predominant language used for most communication. My intention here is not to point fingers or to paint a dismal future for the Lakota language, but to highlight the importance of metapragmatic discourse at this critical point in Lakota language revitalization. What all of this means is that outside of certain specialized contexts many younger Lakota people are exposed to more talk about the Lakota language in English than they are exposed to or participate in talk in the Lakota language. What kinds of messages are they getting about the Lakota language, and more specifically, about proper ways of using gendered speech? I analyze below metapragmatic discourses about the appropriate 3. There is a large literature on language shift and the restriction of the use of non-dominant languages to specific spheres of language use. See, to give only a few examples, Errington 1985; Grenoble 2006; Messing 2007. 4. The actions of the American Indian Movement, one of which was the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, have played a part in politically charged social divisions among Lakota communities between groups and individuals who take a more or less “traditional” stance. Famed political leader Russel Means and the still-imprisoned Leonard Peltier have featured prominently in these events. See Taylor (1996) for a discussion of some of the related sociopolitical consequences of this history. It has been my experience that language revitalization activists avoid making direct references to this social divide. Powwows, stick games, and ceremonies have continued to be extremely popular, especially among younger people, and except for the latter do not seem to be considered a part of this social divide.

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use of the language, with particular attention given to the influence that these discourses can have on ongoing changes in perception of social categories and Lakota language patterns of use.

3. Methods I refer to Lakota gendered speech, or words that are attributed with social meaning about a speaker’s gender, as “men’s” and “women’s” speech, language, or words, or “gender endings”, to reflect how they are called by Lakota speakers and heritage language learners. Despite the categorical distinction implied in this way of referring to gendered speech, most of the Lakota language does not structurally mark gender. However, Lakota speakers can optionally index their own gender through words that are considered to be appropriate for either men’s or women’s use, or that are at least considered to be more often, or more correctly, used by speakers of a specific gender.5 There is a broad range of interjections, for example, that can serve this purpose (see Ullrich 2008). However, these are rarely the topic of conversation. By far the gender-indexing words most often mentioned are the phrase-final enclitics used for marking questions, commands, and to optionally add assertion to declarative statements. These are sometimes called “gender endings” by Lakota speakers and heritage language learners. Table 1, below, illustrates how question, command and assertion enclitics are portrayed in current language revitalization discourse, while Table 2 illustrates actual patterns of use, based on information from the New Lakota Dictionary (Ullrich op. cit.).6 Table 1.  Question, command and assertion enclitics as portrayed in current language revitalization discourses Question

Command

Assertion

women’s

he

ye

men’s

hwó (huwó)

yo

yelé kštó yeló

5. It was explained to me by fluent Lakota speakers that the use of a broad range of enclitics in general, whether or not they are gendered, is considered to be a feature of adult speech. Children are, however, expected to use what are considered to be appropriately gendered words if they use gendered words at all. 6. This dictionary is the most comprehensive Lakota language resource in that it is based on available historical records and other textual sources, and has also been (and continues to be) systematically verified, and added to, by a broad range of fluent speakers.



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Table 2.  Question, command and assertion enclitics according to current patterns of use* Informal question

Formal question

Command

Assertion

−

−

women’s

so (previously men’s) he se (archaic)

huwé (archaic)

ye

men’s

−

hwó (huwó)

yo

(many options) kštó kštó (previously gender neutral) ye (archaic) yelé (archaic) yeló

gender-neutral

* Those marked as “archaic” have largely fallen out of use. Kštó is increasingly used by women.

As can be seen from the Tables 1 and 2, speakers are currently reanalyzing this subset of gender-indexing enclitics according to a morphologically-based /e/ to /o/ paradigm, with the notable exception of kštó.7 According to Ullrich (personal communication 2011), this represents a return to a previous paradigm that was functional sometime in the past, at least for these enclitics (with the exception of kštó). This can also be seen from the archaic enclitics included in Table 2. In addition, the formerly gender-neutral kštó is being gendered, and the informal/formal distinction between question enclitics is being dropped. It is important to remember that these figures, and the metapragmatic discourses they represent, focus on only a small subset of the expressive range of enclitics in Lakota. In this chapter I will focus on enclitics used on declarative statements, including but not limited to the assertion enclitics featured in Tables 1 and 2, above, since they are often the topic of metapragmatic commentary. Declarative statement enclitics are optional in Lakota and there are many to choose from. Each imparts its own pragmatic meaning(s), and not all index speaker gender. For example, yélakȟa is translated roughly as ‘must have’ or ‘evidently’, while the use of k’uη denotes a strong assertion and also implies that the addressee should already be aware of the information communicated in the statement (Ullrich 2008). Neither directly index gender. For example: (2) Túηweniš léčheča šni k’uη. never this.way neg encl[strong.assertion.prior.knowledge] ‘He was never like this, as you know.’  (encl = enclitic)

(316)

7. According to Jan Ullrich (personal communication 2011), the inclusion of kštó can be traced directly to materials developed by Rood and Taylor as part of the University of Colorado Lakhóta Project (see Rood and Taylor 1976; Rood 1976), for which only two Lakota speakers were consulted. Ullrich explains that this pattern then began spreading through the Lakotaspeaking community after being included in White Hat’s (White Hat and Kampfe 1999) language-learning materials.

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In order to analyze metapragmatic discourse on gender-indexing enclitics in Lakota I examine sets of data from two time periods: (1) quoted dialogues from narratives collected and recorded by Ella Deloria ([1932] 2006) in the first part of the 20th century, and (2) excerpts of publicly-circulating discourse taken from a popular radio program and from widely-used Lakota language learning materials. My choice of data was partly limited by what was available. In the future an analysis of more informal, interactive speech in Lakota would enrich our understanding of this topic. While recorded conversational Lakota speech from the early 20th century is not available, to my knowledge, the analysis of written letters, and especially those written in informal style, would be a step in this direction. While it may appear at first that the two data sets are too distinct to make a direct comparison, it is important to remember for the purposes of the topics explored here that both implicit and explicit metapragmatic discourse are useful in exploring the broader metapragmatic frameworks they are a part of, demonstrating the flexibility and usefulness of this kind of data. More specifically for this context, while the data-sets differ in terms of explicitness they both represent what for the time is/was some of the most widely-circulating metapragmatic discourse. In that way they are each most appropriate for an exploration of metapragmatic framework change. The first data-set, i.e. quoted dialogues, allowed for a quantitative approach, and I was able to quantify the patterns by which different enclitics are quoted in different speech contexts within each narrative. I used these patterns to set up and test a binary logistic regression statistical model in order to gauge how consistent these patterns of portrayed use are, which is reflected in the predictive capability of the statistical model, and draw some conclusions about patterns of expected use of gendered enclitics for this time period. I analyze the second data set more briefly, at the discourse level. I then compare the results of the analyses for these two data-sets and discuss the implications that they have for understanding the relationship between metapragmatic discourse and changes in perception of language and social categories in contexts of language shift and revitalization.

4. Implicit metapragmatic discourse: Early 20th century narratives 4.1

Methods

In order to assess previous expectations for the normative use of declarative statement enclitics, I carried out a quantitative analysis of the declarative statements in the quoted speech of narratives documented by Ella Deloria ([1932] 2006) between 1927 and 1931. Deloria provides little information about who provided the narratives she documented. However, we can assume from Deloria’s motivations to



Lakota men’s and women’s speech 265

document older styles of narrative that many were elderly. Possibly many were also men. Another relevant factor is that Deloria did not audio record the narratives she documented but wrote them down as they were dictated to her (Deloria [1932] 2006, v–vi). However, Deloria was herself a fluent Lakota speaker. She also intentionally preserved at least some of the speech variation contained in the narratives. Furthermore, it speaks to the genre of this kind of storytelling that the stories do not represent the voice and perspective of a single storyteller but those of the generations through which each narrative has passed. The extent to which the quoted characters’ enclitic use represents each storyteller’s own speech is less relevant to the question at hand than the fact that the overall pattern reflects what was perceived as normative and appropriate enclitic use at the time, at least for some speakers, something which Deloria herself was intent on documenting (op.cit., vii). When relating Lakota narratives that have been passed down through generations, narrators generally mark their statements with evidential enclitics such as škhé [ʃkʰɛ], lit. ‘they say’. However, quotes within the narratives are constructed as expected of normal speech in the contexts portrayed in the story. Excluding the stories that Deloria categorizes as taking place in mythic time, I recorded the enclitic use represented in 233 quoted declarative statements. Of these, 63 were attributed to female characters and 170 to male characters. These uneven numbers likely reflect the fact that this kind of story-telling may be a male-dominated speech genre: many of the stories involve male main characters, and dialogue between members of war parties or statements addressed to the people as a whole, something considered to be more appropriate for men to do, are featured often in the narratives as critical to the story plot. Conversations between spouses and family members, which are more likely to include female speakers, are portrayed to a lesser extent, and female main characters are fewer in number than male main characters. The consistency of the patterns of normative enclitic use in the narratives is immediately apparent. What is important here is the relationship between what would therefore have been expected enclitic use and the metapragmatic understanding that this represents. These expectations represent the normative framework of recognized, or enregistered, indexical relationships within which social meanings are (re)created. Even the mythical character Iktomi, who often provides counter-examples to appropriate behavior, does not once use an enclitic that is indexical of women’s speech. Instead, his speech is characterized by a general lack of assertion enclitics.8 A non-normative enclitic is only used once in all of the narratives analyzed, by a child-kidnapping non-human monster-like character who is also singing at the time (Deloria [1932] 2006, 234). Table 3, below, illustrates the enclitics used in the quoted declarative sentences in the narratives. 8. Please see note 4.

266 Jessica Fae Nelson

Table 3.  Declarative statement enclitics used in quoted character speech in non-mythic narratives documented by Deloria ([1932] 2006)

gender-marked

women’s men’s

gender-neutral

Enclitic

Semantic meaning / pragmatic function (Ullrich 2008)

yé

assertion

yelé

assertion

yeló

assertion

k’uη

strong assertion, ‘as you (should) know’

kiη

disagreement, disapproval, warning

tkhá̌

contrary to fact, would/should have

huηšé lakhá̌

surely, undoubtedly, must have evidently, must have, obviously

Notably absent from the narratives is any use of the enclitic kštó, the formerly gender-neutral assertion enclitic that is currently often used as an example of women’s speech. Also, it is clear that many expressive enclitics that do not index speaker gender were part of expected speech norms. What is not apparent from Figure 3 is that many statements did not include an enclitic at all, especially in the quoted speech of female characters. I will return to this point below. I coded the data according to whether or not a gendered enclitic was used for each quoted declarative statement. In order to account for some of the main aspects of the depicted speech context, in each case I noted (1) the gender of the quoted character, (2) whether or not the addressee character(s) were of the same gender as the quoted character, (3) whether the statement was directed at a group or an individual, and (4) whether or not the addressee(s) had a family relationship with the speaker. If no enclitic was used on a declarative statement that could have taken one the statement was counted as un-gendered. The uneven numbers of declarative statements in each speech context and the categorical nature (gendered vs. un-gendered) of the dependent variable “enclitic use” made it inappropriate for the data to be analyzed using ANOVA. Instead, I used a binary logistic regression analysis to test a model of expected enclitic use (gendered, un-gendered) using the factors speaker gender (male, female), addressee gender (same as speaker, different than speaker), addressee number (individual, group), and addressee relation (family, non-family) as predictors.9 This kind of analysis is a probabilistic model that measures the relation-

9. Binary logistic regression is a statistical test that can be used to explore complex relationships among sets of categorical variables, resulting in a predictive model. I use this method here as a way of better understanding the relationships among social and linguistic variables in speakers’



Lakota men’s and women’s speech 267

ship between a dependent variable, in this case, whether a statement enclitic is gendered or not, and independent variable(s), in this case, the aspects I noted about the depicted interactive context listed above. Since the statistical model is built from the patterns of enclitic use present in Deloria’s narratives, the degree to which the model is able to predict whether a gendered or un-gendered enclitic will be used in a given context represents the confidence that we can have in gauging to what extent either a gendered or un-gendered enclitic would have been expected for that context. In other words, the model represents the extent to which listeners at that time would have expected to hear either a gendered or un-gendered enclitic in the interactional context represented in a narrative, or even, by extension, in the everyday speech contexts (re)produced in the narratives. 4.2

Analysis and results

As I describe above, I conducted a binary logistic regression analysis to test a model of expected enclitic use based on the quoted speech in narratives documented by Ella Deloria ([1932] 2006) in the early 20th century. Because I was interested in testing whether a gender-indexing enclitic would be expected in different interactional contexts, I used a 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 design with the predictors speaker gender (male, female), addressee gender (same, different), addressee number (individual, group) and addressee relationship (family, non-family). The statistical model measured the relationship between the use of gender-indexing enclitics in declarative statements and each of the aspects of the interactional context used as predictors. A test of the full model against a constant only model was statistically significant, indicating that the predictors as a set reliably distinguished contexts of gendered enclitic use (X2 (4) = 91.722, p