Lexical change, discourse practices and the French press
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Fabienne H. Baider
Abstract
Widespread demands for women’s greater ‘linguistic presence’ in the Frenchspeaking world have resulted in policies of feminising professional nouns such as la députée “deputy-FEM” or la ministre “minister-FEM”. The feminisation policy has proven successful, as evidenced in the recent journalistic discourse of major French newspapers referring to women in politics (Fujimura 2005). However Pauwels (1998) and Cameron (2003) argue that the tendency to equate vocabulary with language leaves other language choices unchallenged, as, while use of feminine occupational terms may destabilise the use of the male generic, it may not make any difference in the discourse about women politicians. This paper addresses this concern through content analysis of a corpus of print media during the year 2006, focusing specifically on the discourse related to the two main presidential candidates, Royal and Sarkozy. We suggest that ‘social gender’ i.e., stereotypical expectations about who will be a typical member of a given category, may still affect linguistic representation of female leadership, despite any achievement of congruency between referential and grammatical genders.
Abstract
Widespread demands for women’s greater ‘linguistic presence’ in the Frenchspeaking world have resulted in policies of feminising professional nouns such as la députée “deputy-FEM” or la ministre “minister-FEM”. The feminisation policy has proven successful, as evidenced in the recent journalistic discourse of major French newspapers referring to women in politics (Fujimura 2005). However Pauwels (1998) and Cameron (2003) argue that the tendency to equate vocabulary with language leaves other language choices unchallenged, as, while use of feminine occupational terms may destabilise the use of the male generic, it may not make any difference in the discourse about women politicians. This paper addresses this concern through content analysis of a corpus of print media during the year 2006, focusing specifically on the discourse related to the two main presidential candidates, Royal and Sarkozy. We suggest that ‘social gender’ i.e., stereotypical expectations about who will be a typical member of a given category, may still affect linguistic representation of female leadership, despite any achievement of congruency between referential and grammatical genders.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Clefts in Cypriot Greek 13
- Lexical change, discourse practices and the French press 27
- Arbitrary subjects of infinitival clauses in European and Brazilian Portuguese 47
- Modal verbs in long verb clusters 59
- Changing pronominal gender in Dutch 71
- Meaning variation and change in Greek morphology 81
- Syntactic variation in German-English code-mixing 91
- Sources of phonological variation in a large database for Dutch dialects 103
- Broad vs. localistic dialectology, standard vs. dialect 119
- Intonational variation in Swiss German 135
- Morphological reduction in Aromanian 145
- Greek dialect variation 157
- Using electronic corpora to study language variation 169
- Language attitudes and folk perceptions towards linguistic variation 179
- Salience and resilience in a set of Tyneside English shibboleths 191
- New approaches to describing phonological change 205
- Variation and grammaticisation 215
- Towards establishing the matrix language in Russian-Estonian code-switching 225
- Index 241
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Clefts in Cypriot Greek 13
- Lexical change, discourse practices and the French press 27
- Arbitrary subjects of infinitival clauses in European and Brazilian Portuguese 47
- Modal verbs in long verb clusters 59
- Changing pronominal gender in Dutch 71
- Meaning variation and change in Greek morphology 81
- Syntactic variation in German-English code-mixing 91
- Sources of phonological variation in a large database for Dutch dialects 103
- Broad vs. localistic dialectology, standard vs. dialect 119
- Intonational variation in Swiss German 135
- Morphological reduction in Aromanian 145
- Greek dialect variation 157
- Using electronic corpora to study language variation 169
- Language attitudes and folk perceptions towards linguistic variation 179
- Salience and resilience in a set of Tyneside English shibboleths 191
- New approaches to describing phonological change 205
- Variation and grammaticisation 215
- Towards establishing the matrix language in Russian-Estonian code-switching 225
- Index 241
