Uno
A corpus linguistic investigation of intersubjectivity and gender
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jld.40129Keywords:
gendered language, grammatical gender, Italian, extended intersubjectivity, masculine as a normAbstract
Generic masculines – masculine forms used for women – are employed in many languages, for example English (Mills 2008), French (Coady 2018), Spanish (Bengoechea 2011) and German (Motschenbacher 2016), providing accounts of how gender is made visible in the language through morphological, lexical and syntactic units. These accounts are also linked with how gender is seen in societies and culture, reproducing an imbalance between women and men. Specifically, language discrimination against women is based on the idea that speakers orient themselves towards androcentric language, recognising ‘men’ as a metonym for the group ‘human being’ (Alvanoudi 2014), causing a linguistic invisibility of women. Similarly, studies in Italian have also discussed the use of masculine forms to refer to, talk about and describe women (Cavagnoli 2013), or have shown how these are used in specialised (Nardone 2016, 2018) or media corpora (Formato 2014, 2016, 2019). This article investigates the use of a specific (and underexamined) generic masculine in Italian – namely, the indefinite pronoun uno.m.sg (in comparison with una.f.sg) labelled ‘impersonal masculine’ (Formato 2019:69) – in three subcorpora of the Perugia Corpus (TV, Web and Spoken; Spina 2014). Uno.m.sg is seen as constructing ‘extended intersubjectivity’, that is, the awareness of a general third party (3rdP) acting as the social bearer of the utterance (Tantucci 2013, 2016, 2017a). The results show that the masculine impersonal uno.m.sg is widely used in the three subcorpora and in several functions, confirming that grammatically gendered language is still employed within a ‘masculine as a norm’ order.References
Abbou, J. (2011) Double gender marking in French: a linguistic practice of antisexism. Current Issues in Language Planning 12(1): 55–75.
Alvanoudi, A. (2014) Grammatical Gender in Interaction: Cultural and Cognitive Aspects. Leiden: Brill.
Anscombre, J.-C. and Ducrot, O. (1983) L’Argumentation dans la Langue [The Argumentation within the Language]. Bruxelles: Mardaga.
Apperly, I. A. (2010) Mindreaders: The Cognitive Basis of ‘Theory of Mind’. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
Arppe, A., Gilquin, G., Glynn, D., Hilpert, M. and Zeschel, A. (2010) Cognitive corpus linguistics: fiver points of debate on current theory and methodology. Corpora 5(1): 1-27.
Benveniste, É. (1958) Catégories de Pensée et Catégories de Langue [Categories of Thoughts and Categories of Language]. Les Études Philosophiques 13(4): 419–429.
Bengoechea, M. (2008) Lo femenino en la lengua: sociedad, cambio y resistencia normativa. Estado de la cuestión [The feminine in the language: Society, change and normative resistance]. Lenguaje y Textos 27: 37–68.
Bengoechea, M. (2011) Non-sexist language Spanish policies: an attempt bound to fail? Current Issues in Language Planning 12(1): 35–53.
Bengoechea, M. (2015) Lengua y Género [Language and Gender]. Madrid: Síntesis.
Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L. A. and Phillips, W. (2003) Sex, syntax, and semantics. In D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow (eds), Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought 61–79. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bucholtz, M. (2014) The feminist foundations of language, gender, and sexuality research. In S. Ehrlich, M. Meyerhoff and J. Holmes (eds), The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality 23–47. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell.
Cavagnoli, S. (2013) Linguaggio Giuridico e Lingua di Genere: Una Simbiosi Possibile [Language of Law and Gendered Language: A Possible Symbiosis]. Torino: Edizioni dell’Orso.
Coady, A. (2018) The origin of sexism in language. Gender and Language 12(3): 271–293.
Corbett, G. (1991) Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Davies, M. (2010–) The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA): 400+ million words, 1810–2009. http://corpus.byu.edu/coha (accessed July 2011).
Diessel, H. (2006) Demonstratives, joint attention, and the emergence of grammar. Cognitive Linguistics 17(4): 463–489.
Earp, B. D. (2012) The extinction of masculine generics. Journal for Communication and Culture 2(1): 4–19.
Formato, F. (2014) Language Use and Gender in the Italian Parliament. PhD Thesis. LancasterUniversity, UK. http://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/people/federica-formato3c1ec1f2-ac4a-49da-a1fc-148468a26e67.html.
Formato, F. (2016) Linguistic markers of sexism in the Italian media: a case study of ministra and ministro. Corpora 11(3): 371–399.
Formato, F. (2019) Gender, Discourse and Ideology in Italian. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Fusco, F. (2012) La Lingua e il Femminile Nella Lessicografia Italiana tra Stereotipi e (In)visibilità [Language and the Feminine in the Italian Lexicography: Between Stereotyped Representation and Invisibility]. Torino: Edizioni dell’Orso.
Ghesquière, L. (2009) From determining to emphasizing meanings: the adjectives of specificity. Folia Linguistica 43(2): 311–343.
Ghesquière, L. and Van de Velde, F. (2011) A corpus-based account of the development of English such and Dutch zulk: identification, intensification and (inter)subjectification. Cognitive Linguistics 22(4): 765–797.
Goldman, A. I. (2006) Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gries, St. Th. and Stefanowitsch, ?. (eds) (2006) Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics: Corpus-?ased ?pproaches to Syntax and Lexis. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gries, St. Th. (2011) Corpus data in usage-based linguistics: what’s the right degree of granularity for the analysis of argument structure constructions? In M. Brdar, St. Th. Gries and M. Z?ic Fuchs (eds), Cognitive Linguistics: Convergence and Expansion 237–256. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hamilton, M. C. (1991) Masculine bias in the attribution of personhood: people = male, male = people. Psychology of Women Quarterly 15(3): 393–402.
Langacker, R. W. (1987) Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Theoretical Prerequisites, Volume 1. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Langacker, R. W. (1990) Subjectification. Cognitive Linguistics (1): 5–38.
Langacker, R. W. (1991) Cognitive grammar. In F. G. Droste and J. E. Joseph (eds), Linguistic Theory and Grammatical Description 275–306. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Levshina, N. (2015) How to Do Linguistics with R: Data Exploration and Statistical Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Marcato, G. and Thu?ne, E-M. (2002) Gender and female visibility in Italian. In M. Hellinger and H. Bussmann (eds), Gender across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men, Volume 2 186–217. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Martin, P. and Papadelos, P. (2017) Who stands for the norm? The place of metonymy in androcentric language. Social Semiotics 27(1): 39–58.
Mills, S. (2008) Language and Sexism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Motschenbacher, H. (2010) Female-as-norm (FAN): a typology of female and feminine generics. In M. Bieswanger, H. Motschenbacher and S. Mühleisen (eds) Language in its Socio-Cultural Context: New Explorations in Gendered, Global and Media Uses 35–67. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Motschenbacher, H. (2013) Gentlemen before ladies? A corpus-based study of conjunct order in personal binomials. Journal of English Linguistics 41(3): 212–242.
Motschenbacher, H. (2014) Grammatical gender as a challenge for language policy: the (im)possibility of non-heteronormative language use in German versus English. Language Policy 13(3): 243–261.
Motschenbacher, H. (2015) Some new perspectives on gendered language structures. In M. Hellinger and H. Motschenbacher (eds), Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men, Volume 4 27–48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Motschenbacher, H. (2016) A discursive approach to structural gender linguistics: theoretical and methodological considerations. Gender and Language 10(2): 149–169.
Nardone, C. (2016) Asimmetrie Semantiche Di Genere: Un’Analisi Sull’Italiano Del Corpus Itwac [Gendered Semantic Asymmetries: An Investigation into the Italian Corpus ItWac]. G/S/1 (3).
Nardone, C. (2018) Lingua, Genere e Lavoro in Italia e in Germania: Un’Analisi Comparativa su Annunci di Lavoro, sui Corpora ItWaC e DeWac e sulla Stampa [Language, Gender and Work in Italy and Germany: A Comparative Investigation into Job Adverts, in the ItWaC and DeWac Corpora and the Media]. PhD thesis, Università di Bologna and Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf.
Nuyts, J. (2001a) Epistemic Modality, Language, and Conceptualization: A Cognitive-Pragmatic Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Nuyts, J. (2001b) Subjectivity as an evidential dimension in epistemic modal expressions. Journal of Pragmatics 33(3): 383–400.
Nuyts, J. (2012) Notions of (inter)subjectivity. English Text Construction 5(1): 53–76.
Premack, D. and Woodruff, G. (1978) Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1(4): 515–526.
Sabatini, A. (1987). Raccomandazioni per un Uso Non Sessista Della Lingua Italiana, Commissione nazionale per la realizzazione della parità tra uomo e donna, Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri. Retrieved from http://www.innovazionepa.it/dipartimento/documentazione/documentazione_par i_opportunita.htm
Sabatini, A. (1993). Il Sessismo nella Lingua Italiana. Commissione Nazionale Per La Parità E Le Pari Opportunità Tra Uomo E Donna. Retrieved from http://www.funzionepubblica.gov.it/media/962032/il%20sessismo%20nella%20 lingua%20italiana.pdf.
Schiffrin, D. (1990) The management of a co-operative self during argument: the role of opinions and stories. In A. D. Grimshaw (ed.), Conflict Talk: Sociolinguistic Investigations of Arguments in Conversations 241–259. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spina, S. (2014) Il Perugia Corpus: una risorsa di riferimento per l’italiano. Composizione, annotazione e valutazione [The Perugia corpus: a resource for the Italian language. Composition, annotation and evaluation]. In R. Basili, A. Lenc and B. Magnini (eds), Proceedings of the First Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics 354–359. CLiC-it. Pisa: Pisa University Press.
Stefanowitsch, A. and Gries, St. Th. (eds) (2006) Corpus-Based Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Tantucci, V. (2013) Interpersonal evidentiality: the Mandarin V-? guo construction and other evidential systems beyond the ‘source of information’. Journal of Pragmatics 57: 210–230.
Tantucci, V. (2016) Toward a typology of constative speech acts: actions beyond evidentiality, epistemic modality, and factuality. Intercultural Pragmatics 132: 181–209.
Tantucci, V. (2017a) From immediate to extended intersubjectification: a gradient approach to intersubjective awareness and semasiological change. Language and Cognition 9(1): 88–120.
Tantucci, V. (2017b) An evolutionary approach to semasiological change: overt influence attempts through the development of the Mandarin ?-ba particle. Journal of Pragmatics 12: 35–53.
Tantucci, V. (2018) From co-actionality to extended intersubjectivity: drawing on language change and ontogenetic development. Applied Linguistics, amy050, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amy050
Tantucci, V. and Wang, A. (2018) Illocutional concurrences: the case of evaluative speech acts and face-work in spoken Mandarin and American English. Journal of Pragmatics 138: 60–76.
Tantucci, V. and Di Cristofaro, M. (2019) Entrenchment inhibition: constructional change and repetitive behaviour can be in competition with large-scale “recompositional” creativity. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.
Traugott, E. C. (2012) Intersubjectification and clause periphery. English Text Construction 5(1): 7–28.
Verhagen, A. (2005) Constructions of Intersubjectivity: Discourse, Syntax, and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
