Language and the Culture of Gender: At the Intersection of Structure, Usage, and Ideology

Publisher Summary This chapter highlights that for contemporary Modern English, the structural category of gender fits into an expected and universal typology of categories of noun phrases. It is one from among the set of different but consistent ways that certain semantic configurations are expressible in language form. The traditional grammatical category of gender, or gender classes of noun phrases, for example, is a formal distinction from the analytic perspective of reference and predication. In fluidly stratified societies in particular, Labov and others have discovered robust results of just this sort of statistical variability. Feminist theory of language, and its analysis and prescription for linguistic reform, seems correctly and accurately to perceive the pragmatic metaphorical relationship between gender identity and status, though much is cast into the rhetoric of power in a more abstract and less culturally situated form. The linguistic change to be considered has resulted in the contemporary configuration of a different aspect of the structure of Modern English, that of so-called person and number.