Grammatical gender reversals: A morphosyntactic and sociopragmatic analysis

Abstract

This work analyzes grammatical gender reversals (feminine to masculine and masculine to feminine) in various languages by examining them both morphosyntactically and sociopragmatically, and is, to the best of my knowledge, the first such twofold analysis of grammatical gender reversals. The morphosyntactic analysis is based on my previous works on expressive morphology. The sociopragmatic analysis is based on the sociopragmatic framework developed in Acton (Acton, Eric K. 2014. Pragmatics and the social meaning of determiners. Doctoral Dissertation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University) and presents a continuation and development of my earlier work on sociopragmatics of gender reversals (Steriopolo, Olga. 2019a. “A sociopragmatic analysis of grammatical gender reversals.” In: Con temporary means and methods in ELT and applied linguistics, eds. C. Can, P. Patsala, and Z. Tatsioka, ch. 26: 535–55. Tallinn: LIF – Language in Focus). Grammatical gender reversals result in an evaluative meaning of the noun. I argue that they crosslinguistically use the same syntactic structure, in which an evaluative head [eval] is projected above a categorized noun, n. The evaluative head [eval] changes the grammatical gender of the base to which it attaches, resulting in a gender reversal with an evaluative meaning. This meaning varies across languages and directly depends on the sociocultural context, such as how masculinity and femininity are perceived and valued within a given society. The data presented in this research are, in order of appearance, from the following languages: Russian, Israeli Hebrew, Lak, Polish, Lokono, Teop, Palestinian Arabic, Manambu, Tigre, Maasai, Oromo, Benchnon, Halkomelen, and Alamblak.

Metaphors and masculine language as breaking female stereotypes in dangdut songs lyrics with vulgar content

“…Men are not naturally born with masculine characteristics; Instead, culture shapes masculinity (Ijem & Agbo, 2022;López Maestre, 2020). The masculinity accepted by society has changed, giving rise to new perspectives and habits (Steriopolo, 2021). Masculinity in men has characteristics, namely, physical characteristics, functional characteristics, sexuality characteristics, emotional characteristics, intel-lectual characteristics, interpersonal characteristics, and characteristics in personal characteristics.…”

Is ‘he’ still here?

“…Talking to and about women with grammatically masculine linguistic forms (e.g. gendered nouns, pronouns, and verbs) occurs in various languages across the world, with varying social intentions and effects (for an extensive overview, see Aikhenvald 2016;Steriopolo 2021; see also e.g. Doleschal & Schmid 2001;Ferguson 1964;Hall 2002;Pet 2011;Tobin 2001;Weiss 1993;Wilmsen 1999).…”

‘It’ Is Not for Everyone: Variation in Speakers’ Evaluation of Sociopragmatic Pronouns in Limburgian

“…When languages use more than one pronoun to refer to women, the different pronouns tend to encode social or pragmatic information about the referent, in addition to basic grammatical ('3rd person') and semantic ('female') meanings. Such information often includes an assessment of the relationship between the speaker and the referent (Aikhenvald 2016;Corbett 1991)-much like the politeness distinction many languages encode in contrasting two or more second person pronouns (Helmbrecht 2013)-and is referred to as 'sociopragmatic gender' (Busley and Nübling 2021;Steriopolo 2021). 'Sociopragmatic gender' refers to the use of a linguistic item of a specific gender to express social information which goes beyond the mere indexing of the referents' gender or sex.…”