Gender Markers in the English Picture of the World

Abstract

Gender is determined as an ideological frame that assembles the idea of what it means to be a man or a woman in a certain culture, a non-linguistic category with linguistic ways of actualization. The article substantiates the key theoretical problems concerning gender-marking based on English phraseology and their influence on the formation of the gender picture of the world. The objective of the current paper is to analyze gender-marked phraseological units of the English language, which are the basic matrices of the phraseological picture of the world of a given cultural community, and to identify the frequency and impact of gender stereotypes on the development of the national picture of the English-speaking community, such as word, phraseology, paremia, text, which contain background knowledge and ways to reflect these meanings in the national picture of the world. The paper’s main conclusion is that the semantic basis of gender markers on the material of English phraseological units predominantly consists of stereotypical-associative units, which are perceived as social activity and characteristics of the images of both sexes with certain asymmetry for male denotata. The connotations of words can illustrate this inequality and the double standards between men and women.

Modelling the Linguistic Worldview: Subject Field Scoping Review

“…All scholars agree that the semantics of a phraseological unit correlates with the culture code shared by the speaker and listener. For instance, the analysis of English gender-marked phraseological units revealed that gender stereotypes govern the national linguistic worldview formation to a great extent encoding the inequality between men and women (Humeniuk, 2021). The comparative study of the gender representation in Tatar and English phraseological units revealed that the female component in both languages frequently conveys a negative connotation (Khuzina & Mukhtarova, 2018).…”

“…Grammatical categories seem to reveal a connection with human cognitive activity, which was proved by the research results (8 papers). In particular, these studies examine the role of the grammatical category of animacy-inanimacy of nouns in creating the Russian linguistic worldview (Narushevich & Bak, 2021), gender markers in language (Gulik, 2015;Humeniuk, 2021;Khuzina & | Review Paper Mukhtarova, 2018) and the function of the Russian pronoun 'I' in phraseological units (Graneva, 2021) as well as the opposition of the Russian pronouns 'we' and 'they' (Revenko & Osetrova, 2019). The medieval linguistic worldview was analysed in terms of its influence on the morphological system of verb tenses in the modern Slavic languages (Shumilo, 2021).…”

“…The languages differ in the number of word classes, modes of verbalising the same concepts, language represents "a segmentation of the world which is not inherent in things but precisely in language" (Christmann, 1967). This accounts for the directions of research which has covered a wide array of linguistic worldview fragments, such as various lexico-semantic groups, idioms representing certain concepts; grammar forms and syntactic structures that govern the expression of the idea; ways of categorising things and phenomena as well as ways of conceptualising abstract notions (Mierzwińska-Hajnos, 2010;Daulet et al, 2019;Bolshakova & Gladkova, 2020;Humeniuk, 2021;Litvishko et al 2022). Studies have utilized either monolingual material or involved cross-linguistic analysis of worldview fragments (Barczewska et al, 2016;Alyoshin, 2018;Rudenka & Fang, 2018;Tóth, 2018;etc.…”