Gender, Language and the Periphery

Abstract

This volume aims to demonstrate that the centre/periphery tension allows for a theory of gender understood as a power relationship with implications for a political analysis of language structures, language uses and linguistic resistances. All of the 12 chapters included in this volume work on understudied languages such as Moldovan, Lakota, Cantonese, Bajjika, Croatian, Hebrew, Arabic, Ciluba, Cantonese, Cypriot Greek, Korean, Malaysian, Basque and Belarusian and they all explore from the margins different dimensions of social gender in grammar. The diversity of languages is reflected in the range of theoretical frameworks (linguistic anthropology, systemic functional linguistics, contrastive syntactical analysis to name a few) used by the authors in order to apprehend the fluidity of gender(-ed) language and identity, to highlight the social constraints on daily discourse and to identify discourses that resist gender norms. This book will be highly relevant for students and researchers working on the interface of gender with morpho-syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse analysis.