Structural linguistic gender categories and discursive materialization: A deconstructionist account

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Published: Oct 26, 2018
Keywords:
German, Basque, Croation, gender, discursive, deconstructionist

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Heiko Motschenbacher

Abstract

This article argues for a stronger re-integration of structural linguistic analysis into contemporary language and gender research by demonstrating its usefulness for poststructuralist discussions of gender. Aiming at a deconstruction of the binarisms female vs. male and grammatical gender language vs. natural gender language, it deals with lexical, social, grammatical, and referential gender as the major mechanisms of linguistic gender construction in personal nouns. These mechanisms are scrutinized in order to expose inconsistencies between and within these categories that strongly contest the stability of the above-mentioned binarisms. This is, to a large extent, done by means of structural analyses of data from Basque (for lexical gender), German (for social gender), and Croatian (for grammatical gender). The gender indexicality of the four categories is finally explained in terms of discursive materialization.

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Issue
Vol. 8 No. 3 (2008): Gender in Language: Classic Questions, New Contexts
Section
Articles

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