Verso una tipologia di esponenti linguistici del genere femminile
L’italiano e il polacco a confronto
abstract
The present study focuses on the linguistic category of gender conceived as a set of any kind of linguistic means and devices encoding the information of the natural gender (sex) of a human referent. The semantic core of the examination is the extralinguistic and ontological ‘male vs female’ distinction. Our corpus-based analysis aims to describe and compare various linguistic markers of a female referent, as opposed to a male referent and to a group of mixed, male and female, referents, available in two Indo-European languages, i.e. Italian and Polish. The proposed typology of female gender indicators includes morphological, syntactic, lexical and contextual (semantic-pragmatic) cues.
Keywords: Natural gender • Linguistic coding • Italian • Linguistic gender • Female referent • Polish