This event is part of the Romance Linguistics Seminar series organised by Professor Martin Maiden and the TORCH International Fellowship project in association with Dr Louise Esher, ‘Gender-neutral and gender-inclusive language: A view from linguistic theory’
Thursday 11 May 2023, 5pm - 6:30pm
47 Wellington Square, Ground Floor Lecture Room 1
Speakers:
Dr Xavier Bach (Trinity College & Christ Church College, University of Oxford)
Dr Louise Esher (CNRS Llacan & TORCH, University of Oxford)
This talk reports on research undertaken within a TORCH International Fellowship project investigating the development of ‘gender-neutral’ and ‘gender-inclusive’ strategies in language from the perspective of descriptive linguistics.
The lecture will compare the grammatical gender systems of French (Romance) and English (Germanic), and discuss how these typological parameters have influenced the gender-inclusive strategies developed by speakers of each language. French has two grammatical genders (masculine/feminine), broadly correlated with social gender for human referents, and grammatical gender is obligatorily marked on the majority of nominal expressions. This structural tendency overall favours ambigender expressions (e.g. les étudiantes et étudiants ‘female and male students’, le ou la collègue ‘the colleague, male or female’). By contrast, English does not have grammatical gender, and only a minority of lexical nouns with human referents specify social gender (e.g. policeman vs. policewoman); gender-neutral expressions (e.g. police officer) are not only possible, but ultimately preferred. Because the English expressions do not specify gender, they can readily be understood to include non-binary as well as binary genders. By contrast, in French, where ambigender expressions specify inclusion of both and only binary genders, reference to non-binary individuals is grammatically more complex.
