Language

1. POSGRADO MIXTO
ADMINISTRACIÓN NACIONAL DE EDUCACIÓN PÚBLICA (ANEP)
UNIVERSIDAD DE LA REPÚBLICA (UDELAR)
ESPECIALIZACIÓN EN ENSEÑANZA DE LENGUAS EXTRANJERAS
MENCIÓN INGLÉS
ANÁLISIS LINGÜÍSTICO DE LA LENGUA EXTRANJERA
PROF. MGTR. MARÍA NATALIA GÓMEZ CALVILLO
UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE CÓRDOBA – ARGENTINA

2. • Profundización en enfoques imbricados en la Lingüística
Cognitiva: Semántica Conceptual y Gramática Cognitiva
• Relación Sociolingüística y Cognitivismo vía la Sociolingüística
Cognitiva
• Género social – Lenguaje inclusivo en inglés
• Aplicaciones de la Lingüística Cognitiva a la enseñanza de
lenguas segundas y extranjeras
UNIDAD 4. LINGÜÍSTICA COGNITIVA
22 y 23 de julio

3. Moreover, neither grammar nor style are politically neutral. Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an
inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself. (…) It would
be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that
grammar imposes upon thought, indeed upon the thinkable itself. But formulations that twist grammar or that implicitly
call into question the subject-verb requirements of propositional sense are clearly irritating for some. They produce
more work for their readers, and sometimes their readers are offended by such demands. Are those who are offended
making a legitimate request for “plain speaking” or does their complaint emerge from a consumer expectation of
intellectual life? Is there, perhaps a value to be derived from such experiences of linguistic difficulty? (…) Who devises
the protocols of “clarity” and whose interests do they serve? (…) What does “transparency” keep obscure?
Judith Butler in the Preface to Gender Trouble (1999)

4. LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL IDENTITY:
ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS
• Some other considerations connected to ways in which
language and social identity intersect.
• Another category, “gender,” which also becomes interlinked
with language.
• Meyerhoff (2006): “sex” - today increasingly resisted in
sociolinguistics - “gender”, as a social category (p. 201),
pertains not to the sex of the speaker, but to indicate “a social
identity that emerges or is constructed through social actions”
(p. 201).

5. • The field of language and gender is filled with dynamism.
• A lot of discussion about the pros and cons that are
connected to how the relationship between language and
society can be conceptualized.
• “The interplay between language and different social and
personal identities is a complex one,” and that if we are to
really understand “the social meaning of any instance of
language variation we need to start from the particular while
simultaneously keeping an eye on the broader context of that
variation” (p. 201).

6. • Work done examining these “webs of meaning with respect to
gender than with respect to any other social category” (p.
201).
• The dynamism of the field has been promoted by its close
connection to other areas of the social sciences and the
humanities, such as feminist theory, philosophy, sociology and
anthropology.

7. • A greater sensitivity, she says, to the fact that any feature that
is more likely to be used by women than by men must, by
definition, also be used by men, but simply less often (p. 206)
–this, of course, when studies spring from a binary division of
genders.

8. … Rather than taking the categories to be objectively and pre-
culturally determined, they are understood to be culture
specific, emerging through conventionalised activities and
relationships that individuals enter into throughout their lives.
Language can be seen as just one of those conventionalised
activities. This means that linguistic features that
probabilistically differentiate female and male speakers are
seen in a different light.

9. For one thing they are seen as being constitutive of different
group identities rather than merely reflecting them. A speaker
uses one variant more than another, not because he is male but
because in speaking like that he is constituting himself as an
exemplar of maleness, and constituting that variant as an
emblem of masculinity. And we might expect to find uses of
that variant to be particularly high or particularly foregrounded
in contexts where other, non-linguistic, practices that are
constitutive of masculinity are also foregrounded. (Meyerhoff,
2006, p. 206)

10. • So, this idea of “constituting identities” through language use,
which could be taken a synonymous with “discourse”, is one
which must allow for much reflection in the realm of language
teaching, isn’t it?

11. LENGUAJE INCLUSIVO
• Today in Argentina, there is a topic which sparks off heated
debates in different realms in which people question, or react
to such questioning, the identity-building role played by the
forms we prefer when we use a language: i.e., “lenguaje
inclusivo.”

12. • Gómez Calvillo (2020): awareness about the constitutive
character of discourse and, in particular, of the real and
concrete negative effects that are entailed in the recurrent use
of sexist and discriminatory linguistic forms is no novelty (p.
114).

13. • “Lenguaje inclusivo:” not disconnected from a network of
concepts
• Linguistics-related works, interested in the political function
performed by all languages.

14. • Language as historically and situationally determined, for it is
in a dialectical relation with society, helping to reinforce and
reproduce the (cultural, political, and economic) social order,
while also emerging as a creative tool which may lead to
change in the status-quo (Fairclough, 1995).

15. • “Lenguaje inclusivo” in Spanish: a creative mechanism that
steps away from the normative, standardized, rule (and here
you can make connections with what we have studied about a
“standard” variety) that indicates that the masculine form is
the variant to be used for generic reference.
• Whether we like it or not, we cannot deny that “lenguaje
inclusivo” is symptomatic of issues that exceed language, but
that, at the same time, cannot be detached from language.

16. • The very crucial need we human beings have of naming
ourselves and others.
• And, given that the way we lead our lives is by no means
homogenous, the morpheme “e” in such uses as “todes son
bienvenides” is telling us something about a mode of
constituting gender identity that is disruptive not only in
linguistic terms, but also in non-linguistic terms.

17. • Now, what about English and the presence in it of gender-
inclusive linguistic forms?
• 1975: Robin Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place

18. • “Social gender” is not “grammatical gender”, which exists in
Spanish, but not in English.

19. • Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2003): “gender” as created, in
the same way as such categories as “class” and “race”, for the
view of gender is of a social construct: “gender is the means
by which society jointly accomplishes the differentiation that
constitutes the gender order” (2003, p. 14).

20. • Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2003)
• Gender schemas and ideologies: e.g., the assumption of
universal heterosexuality, figure as assumed background
knowledge in all communication (p. 6).
• “The gender order:” “a system of allocation, based on sex-
class assignment, of rights and obligations, freedoms and
constraints, limits and possibilities, power and subordination”
(p. 34).
• People follow networks of beliefs “by which they explain,
account for, and justify” (p. 35) their actions, and against
which they evaluate the behaviors of others.

21. • “Grammatical gender” is an element of Spanish inflectional
morphology, which means that, following Nueva gramática de
la lengua española. Manual, RAE (2010), it is manifested in the
variations that are present in nouns and pronouns which
denote “significant” meanings, as RAE puts it.
• “Escritor”/“escritora”: the nouns’ grammatical gender allows
for the differentiation of the referents’ respective sex
• “Mesa” or “mantel”: not truly significant.
• Grammatical gender: part of determiners and adjectives.

22. • The linguistic category “gender” in English is not inflectional in
nature but is “notional”, instead.
• It is linked to the conveyance of significant information,
following RAE’s explanation, with respect to the referent’s sex.
• This category in English is NOT, like in Spanish, an inherent
characteristic of nouns themselves, but is directly connected
to the meaning that these encode.
• “She” and “he”
• Interrogative pronouns (who, whom, what, which)
• The remainder of personal pronouns (I, you, it, they, we)
• Reflexive pronouns (himself, herself)

23. • The fact that a language may reproduce a gender order that
discriminates women and other gendered groups has been
brought to the fore through a lengthy historical process of
various works from the realms of (socio)linguistics, discourse
analysis, sociology, anthropology, among other fields within
the social sciences.

24. • Ehrlich’s (2004): movements favoring non-sexist language in
the 1970’s and 1980’s in the United States.
• The so-called generic use of “he” and “man” “readily evokes
images of males rather than females, have negative effects on
individuals’ beliefs in women’s ability to perform a job, and
have a negative impact on women’s own feelings of pride,
importance, and power” (p. 224).

25. • Bodine’s (1999) seminal paper in this respect
• In the first half of the 20th century: a movement in favor of a prescriptive
grammar in the United States.
• Different actors promoted the fixing of variants that evidenced an androcentric
ideology.
• The personal pronoun paradigm in English: great social significance, i.e.,
personal reference.
• The use of “they”, as a singular, third-person, pronoun which does not indicate
the sex of the referent, was completely habitual in the 17th century and at the
start of the 18th century.
• The continued presence today of attacks on “singular they” indicates that it still
upholds validity, together with the “he or she” variant.
• The attack on the part of feminist movements on the use of third person
singular pronoun “he” as a neutral pronoun evidences that it is extensively
employed as well.

26. • In September of 2019, Merriam-Webster dictionary – another
language standardizing entity, such as RAE in the Spanish
language arena – announced its acceptance of the use of
singular they, as an inclusive pronoun, for it is neutral with
respect to gender: “Though singular 'they' is old, 'they' as a
nonbinary pronoun is new—and useful”
(https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/singular-
nonbinary-they).
• Regarding English, about which there is no “language
academy”, a decision like this one was particularly welcome by
various feminist and diverse-identity circles.