Language and Gender

The class teaches grammatical gender systems in their typological, psychological and social aspects. More specifically. We will study the typology of grammatical gender systems in a wide variety of languages (how many genders, predictability of gender assignment to nouns, gender agreement) as well as the referential biases associated with grammatical genders.

We will also discuss the link between grammatical gender and social gender, recent evolutions of pronouns in European languages (new words or new morphological paradigm cells), closest conjunct agreement, particularly in the Romance languages. We will also deal with recent evolution in 21st century of Western languages with proposals for a less androcentrist communication.

On successful completion of this course, students should be able to:                  

• Identify the major gender systems in the world’s language
• Discuss the predictability of grammatical gender
• Discuss the interpretability of grammatical gender
• Identify the major gender agreement types (in European languages)
• Identify the major innovations in gender neutral communication
• Discuss the relationship between social and grammatical gender

An introduction to morphology, syntax and/or language typology is not required but will be helpful.