Emma Kious :)

Few other linguists have held noun class to be responsible for all of the world’s ills; but few have warmed to its virtues either.” (Dye et al., 2017:2)

~ reading notes

“Baudouin de Courtenay described gender as a deformity, an unfortunate historical accident that was responsible for a range of human afflictions, including nightmares, pathological behavior, erotic and religious delusions, and sadism (Kilarski, 2007)

More experiments from our students looking for native speakers of English but also for second language speakers of English. These are speeded acceptability judgment experiments on some English constructions. Here is the first link ...
ibex.llf-paris.fr/ibexexps/Psy...

New favourite, chuckle-inducing paper: Fiengo, R., & Lasnik, H. (1972). On non-recoverable deletion in syntax

“Anti-gender-inclusive language is the register trying to re-stabilize those epistemes, linguistically, politically and socially” : this register “looks spontaneous but is highly patterned and transnationally coherent”

He concludes that debates on point médian/inclusive morphemes are not just orthographic quarrels but "sites where epistemologies of gender are negotiated: inclusive language is both linguistic innovation and symbolic disruption of deep gender epistemes”

With such enregistement, we get staged figures of personhood: the reasonable, apolitical language guardian (looking at you, Académie Française) vs the dangerous activist

- grafting (ideological maneuver, reversal in the semiotic field where the oppressor becomes the oppressed, cf the portrayal of homosexuality as an "active minority that becomes dominant without being the majority" + mention of a “harassment promoted by homosexuals [that] relies on heterophobia” )

Looking at things through the lense of enregisterment processes such as :
- clasping (linking action to objects they name, e.g. “agressive feminist”);
- relaying (registers taken up by other groups, displaying alliances, e.g. the Vatican's opposition between "true and false" women’s emancipation);

Fascinating seminar from Rodrigo Borba on anti-gender-inclusive languages and the anti-gender register
→ registers as "cultural modes of action that link diverse behav signs to enable effects, inclusing persona, interpresonal relationships, and types of conduct" (Aga 2007)

linguists yearn for the cube

From Violi (1987): “Les expressions ling. ne sont pas d'innocents expédients gramm.[...] Le masc. devient une cat. universelle, un terme abstrait [confondu] avec la norme, par rapport à laquelle le fém. constitue le rebut, le trait marqué. Sans preuve contraire, l'être humain est de sexe masculin"

"Le genre grammatical est l'une des catégories grammaticales les moins logiques et les plus inattendues" (Meillet, 1921)

~ notes de lecture

“Accounting for the innovative use of they [...] requires an account of the status of gender features [...] I suggest that for innovative they users, gender has ceased to be a contrastive feature on pronouns, instead becoming a fully optional semantic feature.” (Bjorkman, 2017)

~ reading notes

"For a functional element, singular they enjoys a curious notoriety [...] Though sometimes discussed as though it were a 20th century innovation [...] it has been used [...] with quantificational, non-specific, and genuinely epicene antecedents, going back at least to the 1400s" (Bjorkman, 2017)

As far as empirically supporting this claim, I am unsure of what (if any) solutions have been brought forth, but will definitely be looking into it!

More generally, she also hinges a good chunk of reasoning on the fact that erasure in society may interact with this notion of social markedness
(she draws parallels between ethnicity in gender, with the idea that we must rethink the “traditional binaries of male/not male and White/non-White”)

Tretcher (2003) mentions the Myers-Scotton (1998) Markedness Model experiment, as well as several studies looking at ethnic markedness, from which she draws the gender analysis parallel

The reasoning from Sara Tretcher (2003) is that men are prototypical in human representation (this is congruent with what I’ve read regarding male humans as human exemplars I believe) “reduc[ing] the woman/female to the status of the "subsumed," the "invisible," or the "marked" one”

I went and had a look at Anne Pauwels (2003), cited by Papadopoulos in the paragraph I quoted above, and more specifically at Sara Tretcher’s chapter where she mentions this social markedness

“Feminist linguists […] have argued that the markedness of feminine forms in language is emblematic of women’s markedness in society, as the prescriptive shape of a language reflects the behavior and ideologies of its speakers” (Papadopoulos, 2022:42)

~ reading notes

(Van Raemdonck, 2024:2)

~ notes de lecture

“language can rejuvenate terms that have been out of use to emphasize their gender (Simon [1996] brings back to life the nouns ‘translatress’ and ‘translatrix’).” (Brisset and Oster, 2025:3)

~ notes from my readings
(please lets bring back -ess and -rix !!!)

“language ideologies are [...] much more than simple attitudes towards language – they describe, rationalise, and ~shape~ it” (Coady, 2020)

~ notes from my readings

“Too often, in the humanities, 'gender', 'feminine', and 'masculine' are considered as cultural categories removed from the concrete power dynamics that produce them” (Michard, 2003:63)

~ reading notes

Elmiger (2020) à propos de Luise F. Pusch (1988) et du féminin générique :

“Complexities arise, however, when we consider that gendered language talking about people reflects a social construct negotiated between speakers, not a discrete grammatical or semantic feature (Ackerman 2019; Conrod 2020; McConnell-Ginet, 2014)." (Gardner & Brown-Schmidt 2024:31)

~ reading notes

la dinguerie sexiste trouvée dans un article : "la main est de genre féminin parce qu’elle reçoit (donc, association à l’idée de passivité, de réception, d’attitude où l’on subit quelque chose) tandis que le pied est masculin parce que c’est un agent actif, voire agressif"

Title: SOME GRAMMATICAL VOICES FOR USE IN SCIENTIFIC WRITING ACTIVE VOICE e.g. Our team collected samples and then we tested them. CLICKBAIT VOICE e.g. We collected some samples... You won't believe what happened next! PASSIVE VOICE e.g. Samples were collected and tested. HAIKU VOICE e.g. Quiet science lab. Workers arrive with samples. The testing begins. PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE VOICE e.g. We did all the collecting and testing. No need to thank us. Just doing our job. CONSPIRACY VOICE e.g. Mysterious "Samples" were harvested and covertly "tested" by so-called scientists.

My latest @newscientist.com cartoon

“every border implies the violence of its maintenance” includes gender