Is Italian a Sexist Language? “Nomina Agentis” and the So-called Overextended Masculine (original) (raw)
Related papers
CARLONI Notes on the Gender Issue in the Italian Language 200427 118066 1ff2ytt
VOYAGER, 2017
This article wants to highlight the most important aspects of the gender issue in Italian; it also aims to suggesting a strategy for linguistic policies that could counterbalance the perceived discriminatory effects of some lexical and grammatical features of the language. The Italian language – like other Indo-European languages – classifies the gender of nouns into masculine and feminine. Concordances with linguistic elements within and outside of the syntagma are dependent on this classification. There are many points of discussion and research tied to the classification of masculine and feminine, some of which are illustrated in this article. The aim is not to answer all of the questions around the issue, but rather to focus on the following matters: how did the masculine/feminine opposition take place in the field of linguistics? Is this difference purely morphological or is there a semantic issue? If it is, how does is it demonstrated? Finally, is there evidence for the predominance of one gender over the other and what are the strategies for its attenuation?
Fuori dal Binario: Linguistic Gender in the Italian Context
This thesis explores linguistic gender both fundamentally and with specific regard to the Italian language. Grammatical, lexical and connotative gender exist within thousands of languages across nearly all language families and work in unison with our cognitive frameworks to inculcate all speakers a rigid gender binary. Starting with an analysis of linguistic gender and then looking at Italian as a case study, my thesis aims to define the use of linguistic gender within the Italian language and how that system may or may not be changing to accommodate a more fluid understanding of gender. In order to track possible changes to Italian, I examine both textual and media representations of transgender and non binary persons, as well as regulations established by the European Union and other governmental agencies with regard to gender neutral language used for official purposes. Such regulations are examples of verbal hygiene which is the driving force for prescriptive language change, and it is through the process of verbal hygiene that linguistic accommodation can occur for those who do not fit within the existing gender binary.
Feminine-specific job titles: a research on sexism in the Italian language
Modern Italy, 2021
This article analyses the instruction on non-sexist use of the Italian language given by Italian language teachers at different levels of education (Nitti 2018). The objective of the research is to evaluate, via language models presented in class, the preparation of materials, and attitudes to correction, the level of engagement in the use of non-sexist language by teachers who transfer their personal orientation into their teaching practice. The survey was conceived as a follow-up to the Conference on Italian Language and Sexism, held at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia on 30 March 2017. Questions were formulated following Raccomandazioni per gli usi non sessisti della lingua by Alma Sabatini (1986) and proposals by academic institutions and territorial and legislative bodies. The research falls within the study of educational linguistics, and its aim is to approach contemporary linguistic phenomena through specific theoretical-applicative tools and paradigms of socioling...
Gender Inclusive Language in Italy: A Sociolinguistic Overview
Jomela - Mediterranean and European Linguistic Anthropology, 2023
The debate on inclusive language in Italy is reaching wider audiences through social media. While scholarly investigations on the use are still at the embryonic stage, experts and scholars are attempting to put forward the reasons why a more inclusive language could benefit (Italian) society. Specifically, in the last few years, the debate has moved from masculine and feminine forms to ways in which a grammatical gender language can become inclusive. This means to overcome the binary (feminine / masculine) and to propose strategies to include non-binary identities and others in the LGBTQIA+ community. Abbou (2011) argues that the use of gendered language is motivated, mostly from the widely studied perspective of how people are talked about and referred to (see also Formato 2019). In advocating this position, we discuss how motivation can be used by the LGBTQIA+ community to position themselves. Motivation appears at the crossroads of grammatical patterns and a social gendered imaginary. Based on this, we present the main linguistic strategies that have emerged, the-u, the asterisk *, and the schwa /ə/, all replacing the morphological gendered inflections. In exploring such strategies, we aim to shed light on how language is employed to widen the understandings of gender and sexuality. In addition to that, we engage in the verbal hygiene debate, started by Cameron in her seminal work (1995), and presenting a political scenario in which opposition to inclusive language and a push for it, co-exists.
Linguistic markers of sexism in the Italian media: a case study of ministra and ministro
Available at: http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/cor.2016.0100 This paper examines the way that the Italian media use language to refer to female ministers in the last three governments. While Italian is a gender-specific language (e.g., a root of the job titles can be followed by either feminine or masculine morphemes, singular and plural), it is common to use masculine forms to refer to and address women. Ministro is one of those cases where masculine forms replace feminine ones – a practice which could be construed as sexist, is only rarely challenged in institutions, and to which attention has only recently been paid in academia (Fusco, 2012; and Robustelli, 2012a, 2012b). The investigation presented here focusses on how grammar is translated in a way that reproduces women's invisibility in a sexist society. A corpus-based quantitative analysis of feminine and masculine forms of ministr– used in three widely read printed Italian newspapers (Corriere della Sera, Il Resto del Carlino and La Stampa) is undertaken. Newspaper articles were collected in the period 2012–14 to cover the Monti technocratic government (three female ministers), and left-winged Letta (seven female ministers) and part of the Renzi (seven female ministers) political governments. This paper contributes to the literature on language reform and sexist language in traditionally male-inhabited physical and metaphysical (stereotypes, prototypes) spaces such as the institutional public sphere.
2016
Michela Baldo introduces the theme of the AAIS 2016 roundtable, that is those discourses of gender and sexuality circulating in Italy oriented in a homophobic, transphobic, sexist and misogynist way, but also the ways in which language can become a tool to fight discrimination. The author subsequently introduces queer linguistics, a branch of linguistics that aims to challenge essentialist, hegemonic and naturalized notions of gender and sexuality, and that can be useful in unmasking the work of heteronormativity in the formation of public discourses. In order to illustrate the productivity of such a paradigm, the legal and media language used in a case of rape, the so-called “stupro della Fortezza da Basso” is investigated. The paper shows how the “non linear life” of the victim, a judgment based on her presumed disinhibited bisexuality, works towards undermining her reliability as a witness.
The Representation of Gender and Inflectional Class in Italian: A Reply to Kučerová 2018
Linguistic Inquiry, 2022
In a recent article, Kučerová 2018 (henceforth K18) puts forward a novel theory of the morphology and interpretation of nominal gender in Italian. This paper takes issue with this theory from both empirical and theoretical standpoints. We first show that several generalisations presented as empirical support for it are in fact incorrect. We then point out a series of fundamental challenges for the theory. First, the proposed three-way classification of nouns misrepresents the full range of facts, because it does not take into account plural morphology or the interdependencies of CLASS and GENDER features. Second, the account of gender mismatch in terms of “semiconservativity” fails to capture the Italian data, once the full paradigm is considered. Finally, K18’s use of Phase Theory to model contextual valuation of gender faces an insurmountable lookahead problem.