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Jean does the dishes while Marie fixes the car: a qualitative and quantitative study of social gender in French syntax articles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2019

Célia Richy  and
Heather Burnett Open the ORCID record for Heather Burnett [Opens in a new window]
Célia Richy*
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
Heather Burnett
Affiliation:
Université de Paris, LLF, CNRS
*
*Corresponding author: Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article addresses the question of gender bias observed in constructed examples of French syntax articles. Drawing our inspiration from Macaulay and Brice (1997) and Pabst et al. (2018)’s studies of English, we investigate the way women and men are depicted in constructed examples in syntax articles in French. We looked at grammatical functions, thematic roles and lexical choices and found a strong male bias in the use of gendered noun phrases (i.e. more references to men than to women; men are more likely to be in a subject position as well as being referred to via pronouns, and more likely to be agents and experiencers). Furthermore, women and men are not related to the same lexical choices. Besides, since French is a grammatical gender language where masculine gender can also be intended as gender neutral, we designed a second study to investigate masculine marked noun phrases (ambiguous masculines, AMs). When we compared AM noun phrases to female and male arguments in terms of grammatical functions and thematic roles, we found that, in production, they were different than true masculines. We discuss the implications of our results for the meaning of ‘gender neutral masculines’ and for practices anchoring gender discrimination.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 47 - 72
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

†

We thank Anne Abeillé, Olivier Bonami, Pascal Gygax, Barbara Hemforth, Shiri Lev Ari, Marie-Claude Paris, Anna Thornton, audiences at Université Paris Diderot, SSLP Berlin and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

References

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