Gender Across Languages: The linguistic representation of women and men. Volume 1

Description

John Benjamins, 2001. — xiii, 328 pages. — (Impact: Studies in language and society). — ISBN: 9027218412; 9027218404; 1588110826; 1588110834. This is the first of a three-volume comprehensive reference work on “Gender across Languages”, which provides systematic descriptions of various categories of gender (grammatical, lexical, referential, social) in 30 languages of diverse genetic, typological and socio-cultural backgrounds. Among the issues discussed for each language are the following: What are the structural properties of the language that have an impact on the relations between language and gender? What are the consequences for areas such as agreement, pronominalisation and word-formation? How is specification of and abstraction from (referential) gender achieved in a language? Is empirical evidence available for the assumption that masculine/male expressions are interpreted as generics? Can tendencies of variation and change be observed, and have alternatives been proposed for a more equal linguistic treatment of women and men? This volume (and its follow-up volumes) will provide the much-needed basis for explicitly comparative analyses of gender across languages. All chapters are original contributions and follow a common general outline developed by the editors. The book contains rich bibliographical and indexical material. Languages of Volume 1: Arabic, Belizean Creole, Eastern Maroon Creole, English (American, New Zealand, Australian), Hebrew, Indonesian, Romanian, Russian, Turkish.The linguistic representation of women and menShifting sands: Language and gender in Moroccan ArabicBelizean Creole: Gender, creole, and the role of women in language changeCommunicating gender in the Eastern Maroon Creole of SurinameEnglish – Gender in a global languageA corpus-based view of gender in New ZealandSpreading the feminist word: The case of the new courtesy title Ms in Australian EnglishA corpus-based view of gender in British and American EnglishGender switch in Modern HebrewGender in Javanese IndonesianDeconstructing gender – The case of RomanianDoing gender in Russian: Structure and perspectiveThe communication of gender in Turkish