Second Call for Papers for a special issue with Theme: "Anthropologies of Gendered Language in Italian communities" (original) (raw)

The third gender of Old Italian

We demonstrate that Old Italian had a three-gender system within which the neuter still qualified as a fully fledged gender value. To substantiate this claim, we adduce evidence showing that (a) Old Italian had three distinct sets of controllers, each of which selected a separate agreement pattern; (b) to each one of those three controller sets, including the neuter, nouns were assigned belonging to different productive inflectional classes and (c) the neuter still selected at least one dedicated agreement formative, thereby still displaying traces of its original status as a target gender. This novel evidence from Old Italian squares well with what is known about past stages of other Romance varieties. Also, we briefly address the consequences of our results both for a reconstruction of the Latin-Romance transition and, more broadly, for the theoretical and methodological approach to the study of the diachronic development of gender systems.

Fragments of Linguistics Works from the Italian Genizah - 2014

in Vidro, N., I.E. Zwiep, J. Olszowy-Schlanger (eds), A Universal Art. Hebrew Grammar across Disciplines and Faiths, (Studies in Jewish History and Culture Series), Brill, Leiden-Boston, 2014, pp. 137-161.

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.

Is Italian a Sexist Language? “Nomina Agentis” and the So-called Overextended Masculine

International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences

Italian is often accused of being a sexist language because the masculine form always prevails; feminine names are always a minority (compared to the masculine ones); very often, one word, used in the masculine form, has a positive connotation, but the same word, in the feminine, has a negative one. There are many kinds of sexism (linguistic, behavioural, political, implicit, and criminal) as well as many ways it can be conveyed in the real world. This paper will focus on the linguistic form. The Italian language makes extensive use of the so-called "maschile sovraesteso" or "universale" (overextended or universal masculine). In sentences where the nouns are all masculine or all feminine, the adjective keeps the same gender in the plural form. However, if nouns have different genders, the adjective follows the masculine plural form. For example: "Ho fatto amicizia con un ragazzo ed una ragazza spagnoli" (I made friends with a guy and a girl, both Spanish). "Spagnoli" is the Italian adjective for Spanish used in the plural masculine form. The gender does not change even if there are five girls and only one guy. The choice for the masculine plural form does not depend on the numerical majority. To prefer the masculine plural form in case of the coexistence of masculine and feminine singular nouns is discriminatory. Using the so-called universal masculine is a sexist way to write Italian.

Manual of Romance Sociolinguistics] 18. The languages and dialects of Italy.pdf

This chapter provides a critical overview of the sociolinguistic situation in Italy focusing on the relationships between the standard language and the many Italo-Romance varieties that contribute to the linguistic landscape. Following discussion of terminology, recent developments concerning the status, spread and vitality of the dialects are examined using a variety of quantitative and qualitative data. This method highlights how in many regions the use of traditional Italo-Romance dialects has strongly decreased at the same time as dialects have remarkably improved their position as far as attitudes and representations are concerned. Dialect has a particular use in the new domains of digital communication. Using Auer's Cone model and referencing different diglottic relationships, types of linguistic repertoires existing in present day Italy are also illustrated. Certain contact phenomena between Italian and dialects are also explored. Finally, a tentative evaluation of the endangerment/vitality degree of some dialects is sketched out.

A selected critical bibliography of Italian sociolinguistics

International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 1989

What we present here is a bibliographical 'map' of the main trends of Italian sociolinguistics.lt is therefore selective in nature (there are about 500 titles), with the more recent works, books äs opposed to articles, being favored. A mainly descriptive comment is at times provided. The titles have been set out in sections, with inevitable subjectiveness in the distribution, which mark out the principal 'highways' of a 'city' in continuous and chaotic expansion; such is the field of sociolinguistics, which has pervaded and continues to pervade almost all the fields of linguistic research. As can easily be seen, the field concerning speech-act theory in the tradition of Searle and Austin has been left out altogether, although it occupies a position of relevance in the Italian linguistic-philosophical culture thanks to the translation of the main works of these two scholars and the work of Italian specialists (such äs M. Sbisä and others). Also left out are works on text linguistics, be they Italian (for instance, Garavelli Mortara, Atti XV Congresso SLI 9 Folena) or foreign translations (Weinrich, Dressler and Beaugrande, Van Dijk, Schmidt, Conte, etc.). Works on discourse analysis, either in Italian (Violi and Manetti, and others) or foreign (Gardin, Brown and Yule, etc.), have been omitted and thus also general works on pragmatics, be they Italian or Italian translations (Conte, Stati, Mininni, Schlieben-Lange, Levinson, etc.). 1.0. Bibliographie surveys For the reader who wants Information on the developments of sociolinguistic research in Italy over the past 25 years (that is, from the well-known Storia linguistica dell'Italia unita by T. De Mauro, first edition 1963), there are several bibliographical surveys with diverse critical-bibliogra

Gender and lexical access in Italian

1995

Gender marking is a pervasive phenomenon in many of the world's languages, but its role in lexical and grammatical processing is still poorly understood. In most of the languages that incorporate some form of productive gender marking, the relationship between grammatical and semantic gender is indirect at best. To offer one widely cited example (e.g., , who can explain why, in the German language, the term for the flute (die Flöte) is feminine, whereas the term for the little girl (das Mädchen) is neuter? Or why the term for the ocean is neuter in German (das Meer), feminine in French (la mer), and masculine in Italian (il mare)? 1 If gender serves no systematic semantic function, why do these languages continue to mark gender on nouns and most of their modifiers? This investment is not without a price, since gender marking and gender agreement require a substantial degree of coordination between grammar and lexical selection in real-time processing, and they present a challenge to first-and second-language learning (for discussion of these points, see

Language and Gender in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Renaissance Quarterly, 2022

The early modern Mediterranean was a space of expansive linguistic mixing, and multilingual discourse was a common response to the exigencies of communication within this context. There is a growing body of scholarship on male multilingualism; however, women have been largely overlooked. This article argues that far from marginalized outsiders, as they were often depicted, women were active participants in the Mediterranean linguistic ecology. They developed communication strategies and techniques to navigate language difference in trade, travel, work, diplomatic, and domestic settings. The numerous and varied spaces that they occupied were not barriers but doorways to their participation in the multilingual Mediterranean.