Feminine Personal Nouns in the Polish Language. Derivational and Lexicographical Issues

Agnieszka Małocha-Krupa

doi:10.5788/31-1-1630

Abstract

The paper is dedicated to issues related to designations of women in the Polish language from the second half of the 19th century until the present time. The socio-cultural history of a group of Polish feminine personal nouns (referred to as feminitives or feminatives) which denote women's social and/or occupational status is discussed. It is argued that feminine personal nouns have been directly dependent on various ideologies: women's emancipation, socrealism and feminism. Ideologies have impacted the use of feminatives, by intensifying or limiting their use in discourse during a particular period, and the attitude of language users to ideologies has influenced the way in which feminatives are perceived. While presenting the richness of the repertoire of gender exponents in contemporary Polish, the possibility of the incorporation of feminine personal formations into dictionaries of general Polish in a scientific and objective manner is investigated. A similar idea was proposed at Wrocław University, as a result of which a group of female lexicographers compiled Słownik nazw żeńskich polszczyzny [Dictionary of Polish Female Nouns]. Some of its innovative lexicographical assumptions (description, not prescription, a discourse-centred method) are discussed in this article. The text corpus presented in the article enables the reader to trace the history of feminine personal nouns in Polish, i.e. their disappearance and re-appearance in the language.

Highlights

Feminine personal nouns, their stylistic value, normative assessment, and — more broadly — ways of expressing information about the feminine gender in the Polish language have been debated on for over 120 years
During the last twenty years, quite a few linguistic monographies have been devoted to the complex issue of feminine personal nouns in Polish, including: Małgorzata Karwatowska, Jolanta Szpyra-Kozłowska: Lingwistyka płci
For a very long time feminine personal nouns have belonged to the standard repertoire of issues igniting contentious, frequently affective debate, dependent on numerous extra-linguistic parameters

Summary

Introduction

Their stylistic value, normative assessment, and — more broadly — ways of expressing information about the feminine gender in the Polish language have been debated on for over 120 years. During the last twenty years, quite a few linguistic monographies have been devoted to the complex issue of feminine personal nouns in Polish, including: Małgorzata Karwatowska, Jolanta Szpyra-Kozłowska: Lingwistyka płci. That is why on 25 November 2019 the Council for the Polish Language (a consultative and advisory institution with regard to the use of the Polish language, established in 1996 by the Executive Board of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN)) published a communique on feminine forms of names of professions and titles, in which they state as follows: Feminine Personal Nouns in the Polish Language 103. My reflection, which arises from more than a dozen years' excerption of feminine material and its scientific examination, primarily focuses on designations that are synthetic names of female professions, titles, academic degrees, social statuses (sometimes I analyse feminine possessive names, surnames of wives and daughters, as well as attributive names)

How we explicate information about gender in the Polish language

Codification of feminine person nouns as a challenge to lexicography

A dictionary of female nouns

Findings

In conclusion