Masculine Pronouns Research Articles

Semiotic Violence

Semiotic Violence

Masculine pronouns are not only for boys: Japanese girls breaking traditional relationships between gender and language in a school context

Abstract Based on a longitudinal ethnography at a Japanese junior high school, this paper explores how ideologies of Japanese women’s language are subverted through girls’ everyday linguistic ideological work of breaking presumed linkages between female gender and language. Girls at Sakura Junior High School employed masculine and non-traditional first-person pronouns and created new sets of indexicalities. The ethnography tracks how the girls did this in three important ways: 1) They used the most masculine pronoun, ore, and attached positive metapragmatic meanings (such as “cool,” “powerful,” “independent,” and “assertive”) to their use of this pronoun. In doing so, they established a powerful ore register and persona for girl users. 2) They also interpreted their use of boku, a plain masculine pronoun, as gender-appropriate for girls, whereas they negatively regarded boy users of boku as weak mama’s boys. 3) They attached strongly negative metapragmatic meanings to feminine pronouns and created an unfavorable feminine register and persona for these pronouns from which they disaligned themselves. The girls’ persistence in aligning masculine and non-traditional registers did not point to any evidence of their desire to take on a male identity, but rather to their creation of positive indexicalities about masculine pronouns and to their engagement in the social capital of maleness that accompanies male speech. Consequently, girls’ ideological work contextually constructed new indexical fields where girls established their own space in which they severed the naturalized relationships between language, identities, and social categories.

Antecedents of a novel gender-neutral pronoun: a corpus-based approach to pronoun reference in Swedish

This paper provides a corpus-based perspective on the issues of pronominal systems and pronoun reference. Specifically, the paper examines the antecedents of Swedish third-person singular animate pronouns, with a particular focus on the recently introduced gender-neutral pronoun hen. Using Swedish Twitter corpora from 2015 to 2017 ( c. 1.6 billion words), the study provides a comparison of the general antecedent types as well as the specific antecedent lemmas used with each pronoun. The results show that, whilst there are considerable similarities between the use of hen and the more established gender-equal expression han eller hon (‘he or she’), hen is used substantially more often with nouns that refer to close personal relationships. In this regard, hen also bears closer resemblance to the feminine pronoun than to the masculine pronoun. Generally, the analysis demonstrates that language users are assigning a distinct set of functional properties to hen, making it a complement to the ‘old’ gender-specific and gender-equal pronouns, not a replacement.

Who do you think they are? An exploratory analysis of face-based impressions formed by cisgender, transgender and gender nonbinary individuals.

Background: Individuals make first impressions of others based on how they look. Facial cues trigger gender social categorisation and elicit gender stereotyping. However, it remains unclear to what extent such impressions are influenced by the perceivers’ gender identity and gender beliefs. Methods: We recruited cisgender and transgender and nonbinary (TGNB) participants (N = 195). Participants were shown three morphed faces (prototypical male versus. prototypical female versus. androgynous) and, for each target, were asked to create a sentence describing their first impression. (within-participants design). To do so, they had to choose from a list of pronouns, professions, and personality traits. Participants also reported how confident they were in their first impression and rated the gender of the targets. Results: Results showed that overall participants perceived the prototypical male target as masculine while both the prototypical female and androgynous targets were seen as feminine. Participants also felt more confident when forming an impression about the prototypical male target. Further, impressions were influenced by perceivers’ gender identity. Cisgender participants formed stronger stereotypical impressions of the prototypical male and female target than TGNB participants. In particular, cisgender participants were more likely to use masculine pronouns for the prototypical male target and more feminine pronouns for the prototypical female target, but less neutral pronouns for the androgynous target, than TGNB participants. The difference is pronoun use was mediated by cisgender participants stronger endorsement of gender binary beliefs. Conclusions: These findings provide new insights into face-based stereotyping and show the importance of considering different stereotype components and individual differences such as gender identity and beliefs.

Не пей с ним или с ней? К вопросу интерпретации Сир 9.9

In this paper, the author deals with the problem of Biblical literary criticism on the example of one of the problematic readings of Ben Sira (9:9). The majority of translations of Ben Sira are made either from the Greek sources or from Greek and Hebrew sources, achieving a certain textual compromise. The Greek text is usually corrected on the basis of the Hebrew text, however there are cases where the Hebrew text is corrected on the basis of the Greek one, and the emendations are introduced. Such an approach ignores the fact that Biblical books existed and were transmitted in various recensions, which were altered independently. Therefore, there reconstruction of the common archetype is hardly possible. The example of Ben Sira 9:9 contains a regulation for a young man to drink wine during a banquet, however, this regulation varies in different sources. There are not so many written evidences about banquets in Judea in the time prior to the events described in the Maccabean books, so the Ben Sira is one of the principal sources of information. The Greek text prohibits to drink wine and to talk to a married woman during a banquet, the restriction presupposes a married woman was admitted to such events and to be able to choose freely who to converse with. The Latin sources prohibit to recline with a married woman and to drink wine with her. The Hebrew text advises to avoid drinking wine with a husband and conversing with him. Most of the translations ignore the witness of the Hebrew text, a popular vocalized reconstruction of the original contains an emendation on the basis of the Greek text: the masculine pronoun is replaced with feminine one. The detailed analysis of the pericope Ben Sira 9:1–9 suggests the Hebrew text is apparently primary one, and the Latin and the Greek translations reflect social realties of Roman and Greek banquets respectfully.

Keeping the Faith

Abstract In many cultures, women are the “keepers of the faith,” despite the fact that masculine pronouns are often used to identify deity or deities in most of the world’s major religions. In addition, many foundational leaders of these faiths were male—Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammed, and Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha). This double issue of Religion and the Arts seeks to explore the ways in which contemporary artists who identify as women or are non-binary or third gender engage with spirituality, both in the context of different faith traditions and as unaffiliated spiritual seekers. The essays include: Scholarly explorations of contemporary artists’ engagement with religion and/or spirituality in the context of cultural roots; faith, religion and/or spirituality as a source of inspiration in art making for women artists, inclusive of trans and gender non-conforming people; relationships between religious traditions and gender fluidity as explored by contemporary artists; consideration of how women and gender non-conforming artists around the world are grappling with religiosity in their cultures and personal artistic practices; and the role of contemporary art made by women and/or gender-fluid artists in encouraging dialogue around religious belief.

Competitive use of the locative constructions in the Eastern Aukštaitian subdialect of Vilniusand Southern Aukštaitian subdialect: causes and tendencies

This article is a continuation of previous studies of the interaction between the locative inessive and illative constructions in the Eastern Aukštaitian subdialect of Vilnius and Southern Aukštaitian subdialect. This study focuses on one aspect of the interaction between the locative inessive and illative constructions – the competitive use of the locative constructions. The article presents the types of such use, discusses the reasons of their formation and the tendencies of their functioning. The morphological and semantic aspects of the competition of the constructions studied are discussed using the comparative and descriptive research methods, the research is based on the principles of cognitive semantics and perceptual dialectology.
 Three competitive types of the use of locative constructions are distinguished: 1) in trinary locative constructions verb + pronoun (less frequently – adjective/numeral) + noun, pronoun is used in the illative case, and noun is used in the inessive case; 2) in binary locative constructions, the inessive of the prototypically used noun is replaced by the illative; and 3) in binary locative constructions, the illative of the prototypically used noun is replaced by the inessive. One of the possible motives for the formation of this use is the assimilation of the inessive and illative forms tam and tan of the masculine pronouns after the morphological and systematic shortening of the paradigmatic cases. According to the pronoun example, the competition could also spread in locative constructions with numerals and adjectives. Another possible motive is the identical ending -a of masculine plural inessive and illative cases, e.g., kambariuosa and kambariuosna; laukuosa and laukuosna. However, these morphological arguments do not explain why in some cases inessive and in other cases illative forms are chosen in the constructions, and therefore the paper makes a further assumption that the competitive use of locative constructions may have been caused by the closely interrelated semantic functions of the inessive and the illative, and the strong semantic potential of the verb.
 The data of subdialects shows that the competition of locative constructions is an ongoing process in the Eastern Aukštaitian subdialect of Vilnius and Southern Aukštaitian subdialect, but it is difficult to predict the future tendencies of the use of competitive locative constructions. The assumption is made that this could depend not only on morphological and semantic linguistic factors, but also on the linguistic attitudes of ordinary language users.

He, him, his: Masculine language in professional guidance and assessed equity and inclusion of women and LGBTQ+ people in the profession

Three experiments examine how the use of masculine language in professional guidance affects assessments of the equity and inclusion of historically marginalized gender and sexual orientation groups in the accounting profession. Experiment 1 manipulates the pronouns used in auditing standards as masculine vs. gender-inclusive, and finds that masculine pronouns reduce accounting professionals' assessed equity and inclusion of women and LGBTQ+ people in the audit profession. Participant gender also has an effect, with women making lower overall equity and inclusion assessments. In Experiment 2, college students read a neutral-language accounting job ad as well as professional guidance that uses masculine vs. gender-inclusive pronouns, and assess the accounting profession's equity and inclusion of women and LGBTQ+ people. Masculine pronouns reduce students' equity and inclusion assessments, and this effect is stronger for women and LGBTQ+ participants. In Experiment 3, LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ U.S. residents assess the equity and inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in accounting. Pronouns have a stronger effect on LGBTQ+ than non-LGBTQ+ participants. Further, for LGBTQ+ participants, the effect of pronouns is not conditioned on participant gender; however, pronouns affect non-LGBTQ+ women's, but not non-LGBTQ+ men's, assessments of LGBTQ+ equity and inclusion.

Masculine generic pronouns as a gender cue in generic statements

ABSTRACT An eye-tracking experiment was conducted with speakers of Dutch (N = 84, 36 male), a language that falls between grammatical and natural-gender languages. We tested whether a masculine generic pronoun causes a male bias when used in generic statements—that is, in the absence of a specific referent. We tested two types of generic statements by varying conceptual number, hypothesizing that the pronoun zijn “his” was more likely to cause a male bias with a conceptually singular than a conceptually plural antecedent (e.g., Someone (conceptually singular)/Everyone (conceptually plural) with perfect pitch can tune his instrument quickly). We found male participants to exhibit a male bias but with the conceptually singular antecedent only. Female participants showed no signs of a male bias. The results show that the generically intended masculine pronoun zijn “his” leads to a male bias in conceptually singular generic contexts but that this further depends on participant gender.

Нормативни статус прилога гдје, куда, камо и замјенице који

In this paper, the author considers the distribution of the adverbs gdje, kuda, kamo in interrogative and dependent-complex sentences. He also comments on the repartition of accusative singular forms of the masculine pronoun (koji) in the conjunctive service, attribute function and independent use with the meaning of the interrogative pronoun. The author paid special attention to: (1) the alternating use of the adverb gdje with the meaning of kuda and kamo and vice versa, and the loss of the difference between gdje and kamo to the detriment of the latter and (2) the reduction of two accusative forms referring to the living and the inanimate to the one who has a pronoun that has when referring to a being - kojega / koga.

Examining the contingency between emotional words and genders: Evidence from the media corpus of #MeToo movement

Gender inequalities are linguistically constructed and indexed through the strategic use of language representing the power structure in the physical world. Recently, #MeTooIndia, an Indian version of the global feminist movement, provided a scholarly opportunity to explore the gender stereotypes of emotional expressions. Even though some researchers have studied the sociocultural dimensions of #MeToo, the corpus-based linguistic analysis of this movement has yet to be explored significantly. Therefore, the current study investigated the discursive association of emotional representation of masculine and feminine genders in media texts. Given the societal nature of Indian patriarchal ideologies, power and gender stereotypes, we hypothesize that Indian mass media, as a powerful political actor, may attribute more positive lexicons to the masculine pronoun he and more negative markers to the feminine pronoun she. Textual genres of #MeToo were extracted from the print media by using the corpus framework of collocational and concordance methods. Our results revealed that, though the news of #MeToo heightened the feminine actor and largely produced the pronoun she in the referential position, the narratives of texts assigned more positive emotive markers to the masculine social actors. Overall, this study concludes that #MeToo as a gender movement has faced strategic linguistic resistance against feminine sexual victims, favouring the masculine actors.

Sexism in Indonesia’s Tenth Grade EFL Companion Textbook

<em>The present study investigates the kind of sexism reflected in the companion textbook used in Senior High School: the frequency of female and male occurrences, the female and male titles, the graphic depiction of females and men, the masculine pronoun tendency, activities, and social-domestic roles throughout the description phase. It also examines how occupational gender stereotypes are portrayed in textbooks. This analysis was conducted by applying Fairclough's three-dimensional analysis and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics. Finally, this research indicated that textbooks had a sexist mindset characterized by gender marginalization, gender subordination, gender stereotypes, cultural sexism, and sex-based work segregation. The textbooks were biased toward females by depicting females less frequently than males in pictorial representation (58.48 vs 33.97 percent); the titles Mr. and Mrs. were used inconsistently, and there were 12 instances of masculine pronoun tendency, representation of activities, and social-domestic roles that perpetuate female subordination. The research also found that there were considerably fewer images of women than males in the public domain, suggesting that women in traditional gender roles such as cooking and caring for children were far more prevalent. In terms of occupational gender stereotypes, the survey indicated that male jobs were more prevalent and diversified than female ones. In terms of social duties, men were found to have a greater selection of occupations than females</em>.

“Can we stop cleaning the house and make some food, Mum?”: A critical investigation of gender representation in China's English textbooks

This study offers a critical investigation of gender representation in China's English textbooks to examine potential gender bias. We analyzed a series of middle school English textbooks in Jiangsu Province to examine the feminine-masculine pronouns ratio, occupational/social roles and activities associated with people of different gender. Approximately balanced occurrences of feminine and masculine pronouns were identified in the corpus, suggesting rising gender-fair awareness. We further scrutinized the gender roles and activities by coding all female and male characters’ occupational/social roles and identifying associated activities thematically. We observed that gender disparity is still pervasive as females were frequently assigned with familial relationships and engaged in less physically-demanding activities, whereas males were portrayed in wider social roles and frequently depicted in sport-related activities. Thus, we suggest a critical approach both in identifying and subverting gender stereotypes in textbook design.

The Shifting Sub-text of Japanese Gendered Language

Sociolinguists (e.g., Holmes, 2008; Meyerhof, 2011) generally describe Japanese as a language with gender-exclusive elements. Personal pronouns, sentence-ending particles and lexicon used exclusively by one gender have been cataloged in English by researchers such as Ide (1979), Shibamoto (1985), and McGloin (1991). While there has been some research showing that Japanese women’s language use today is much more diverse than these earlier descriptions suggested (e.g., studies in Okamoto and Shibamoto Smith, 2004) and that some young Japanese girls use masculine pronouns to refer to themselves (Miyazaki, 2010), prescriptive rules for Japanese use still maintain gender-exclusive elements today. In addition, characters in Japanese movies and TV dramas not only adhere to but also popularize these norms (Nakamura, 2012). Thus, Japanese etiquette rules and media texts promote the perpetuation of gender-exclusive language use, particularly by females. However, in the past three decades, Japanese society has made significant shifts towards gender equality in the legal code, the workplace and education. I therefore decided to investigate how Japanese women use and view their language in the context of these changes. I draw data from three focus groups which I conducted in 2013 and 2019, and which comprised female university students who went through the Japanese school system after the Japan Teachers’ Union adopted a policy of gender equality. The goal was to determine whether Japanese women’s language use is shifting over time. The study suggests that Japanese women are slowly changing the gendered nature of Japanese, using very few of the traditional elements of onna kotoba (women’s language), and slowly adopting such traditionally masculine features as the use of omae and kimi as second-person pronouns, omitting bikago honorifics, and employing masculine lexical items such as umai, ku, hara, and kuso, which were until recently considered taboo for females to use. Although these trends are not yet evident in most public contexts, the language use and views of the participants in this study suggest that the shift in Japanese usage is steadily ongoing and forms a sub-text of Japanese language use.

Pronoun Variants in Standard Lithuanian: Diamesic Dimension

The paper deals with variants of personal pronouns, specifically the third person singular nominative case jis/jisai ‘he’ and ji/jinai ‘she’ in Lithuanian. The existence of such variation has been so far ignored by most linguists. The variation of the use of these short and long variants is analysed within the language “architecture” framework first introduced by G. Berruto (1987) and involving different dimensions, of which the diastratic, diaphasic and diamesic are discussed in more detail. The use of pronouns is studied using the data from eight different written and spoken Lithuanian corpora and the proportions of such use are compared. The analysis shows that the variation in the use of pronoun variants is overwhelmingly associated with the diamesic dimension, i.e., the written language typically uses the short variants only while in the spoken language all four pronoun variants are used. The proportion of the long variants increases as the spontaneity of speech increases. There is a difference, however, in the use of masculine and feminine forms as the long variant of the masculine pronoun is used in one third of the cases while the long variant of the feminine pronouns is found in as much as 80 percent of cases in the spoken variety. Other dimensions do not seem to impact this variation to a notable extent given the data available.

Grammatical gender and stereotypical gender associations with inanimate nouns in the ‘Germanic sandwich’

This pilot study is a contribution to the theoretical debate on the impact language has on general cognition. More specifically, we applied a Word Sketch collocator (an innovative NLP tool operating on large-scale corpora) to collect human adjective collocations of masculine, feminine, and neuter inanimate nouns in German, Dutch, and English to see whether there is a correlation between the grammatical genders of inanimate nouns and the adjective collocations most frequently used to describe those nouns. Later, in a series of online questionnaires, we examined the impact of grammatical gender and stereotypical gender associations on the perception of inanimate nouns (e.g., street, lamp, bottle) by testing the gender associations of their human adjective collocations obtained from the Word Sketch collocator in German (a grammatical gender language), Dutch (a language with a combination of grammatical gender and natural gender), and English (a natural gender language). In German, the results show that grammatical gender alone is not a decisive factor in causing masculine or feminine gender associations of inanimate nouns. Rather, it is the combination of grammatical gender and stereotypical gender associations of nouns that plays a role. In English, nouns associated with neutral, masculine and even feminine gender had significantly more neutral adjectival associations. In Dutch, nouns with common and neuter gender resulted in a higher proportion of masculine adjectival associations because these nouns are mostly referred to with common and masculine pronouns. We observed a special role played by stereotypical feminine associations of nouns in German, Dutch, and English.

The Meaning of Denotation, Connotation, and Myth used in Ariana Grande’s "God is a Woman" Song Lyrics

Ariana Grande was determined to be a light on her song lyrics and no one has needed that light more than Ariana Grande herself. Her song Lyrics were loaded with deep meanings. Ariana Grande sung about relationships, love, and dating, and through it all, there were moments of meaning spread throughout. The lyric writer wanted to suggest a certain mood or emotion. This study focused on God is a woman song Lyrics. The writer took song lyrics as primary data and used qualitative descriptive method that explained descriptively how the meaning used in Ariana Grande’s God is a woman song lyrics. The theory used in the study is semiotics, in particular, is the theory used by Roland Barthes. Roland Barthes developed his theory into two levels, namely Denotation as the first level in the sign, connotation as the second level in the sign which is accompanied by a myth (marking a society). The result of this study based on Roland Barthes Semiotic’s theory in a way of denotative it is about sex and how she claims the chemistry will be so incredible that the guy is going to think she is God and in a way of connotative Ariana Grande campaigned for a struggle for gender equality and she showed off women's energy and independence. While the myth is God is a woman which this sentence represents about gender differences in life. The answer to dismantling patriarchy is not raising a matriarchy in its place. But building our understanding of, as Ariana Grande puts it, "God as a woman," will help counterbalance almost every human's internalized beliefs that our creator is a man, a father, a guy in the sky. God is our mother, our father, our parents. Come to think of it, if God can be referred to with the masculine pronoun “he”, why is not okay for us to also used the female pronoun “she” when referring to God.

The male bias of a generically-intended masculine pronoun: Evidence from eye-tracking and sentence evaluation.

Two experiments tested whether the Dutch possessive pronoun zijn 'his' gives rise to a gender inference and thus causes a male bias when used generically in sentences such as Everyone was putting on his shoes. Experiment 1 (N = 120, 48 male) was a conceptual replication of a previous eye-tracking study that had not found evidence of a male bias. The results of the current eye-tracking experiment showed the generically-intended masculine pronoun to trigger a gender inference and cause a male bias, but for male participants and in stereotypically neutral stereotype contexts only. No evidence for a male bias was thus found in stereotypically female and male context nor for female participants altogether. Experiment 2 (N = 80, 40 male) used the same stimuli as Experiment 1, but employed the sentence evaluation paradigm. No evidence of a male bias was found in Experiment 2. Taken together, the results suggest that the generically-intended masculine pronoun zijn 'his' can cause a male bias for male participants even when the referents are previously introduced by inclusive and grammatically gender-unmarked iedereen 'everyone'. This male bias surfaces with eye-tracking, which taps directly into early language processing, but not in offline sentence evaluations. Furthermore, the results suggest that the intended generic reading of the masculine possessive pronoun zijn 'his' is more readily available for women than for men.

Wrenched from the Land: Activists Inspired by Edward Abbey ed. by ML Lincoln and Diane Sward Rapaport

Reviewed by: Wrenched from the Land: Activists Inspired by Edward Abbey ed. by ML Lincoln and Diane Sward Rapaport Vernon Owen Grumbling ML Lincoln and Diane Sward Rapaport, eds. Wrenched from the Land: Activists Inspired by Edward Abbey. U of New Mexico P, 2020. 304 pp. Paper, $24.95; e-book, $9.99. Correction 08.17.21: In the second paragraph masculine pronouns were mistakenly used. The online version of the article has been updated. This is a marvelous book. These words are perhaps inappropriate to open a review in an academic journal. But Wrenched from the Land not only presents valuable academic source materials for understanding the evolution of American environmental activism, it also offers delightful personal perspectives on Edward Abbey and how his words touched and impassioned important voices protecting the American West—and the whole earth. The range of voices, one of the book's great assets, comes from its provenance: thousands of pages of interviews ML Lincoln had amassed while preparing her tribute film Wrenched (2014). In 2017, says Lincoln in her introduction, as she was fuming over the policies of the new federal administration, she realized that she had access to words of "the heroes that carried the legacy of Edward Abbey's into the twenty-first century … a potent counter to anti-conservation politicians and climate deniers" (xiv). Many of these voices were obvious choices: Dave Foreman, Charles Bowden, Ken Sleight, Doug Peacock, Jack Loeffler, Ken Sanders, John De Puy ("Debris"), as well as Ken Sleight and Ingrid Eisenstadter, the models for Seldom Seen Smith and Bonnie Abzug in The Monkey Wrench Gang. But there are other voices that are less obviously connected: Derrick Jensen, author of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet (2011); Kieran Suckling, founder of The Biodiversity Institute, which, according to Lincoln, has sued the Trump administration 193 times; and Paul Watson, "captain" of The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, whose ships ram and sink vessels engaged in illegal whaling activity. One evidence of Abbey's continuing influence is Tim DeChristopher, the college-aged activist who in 2008 disrupted the Bureau of Land Management sale of oil leases near Canyonlands by bidding up the price with no intention of buying. He was sentenced to two years in prison, after his judge refused to allow him to argue the common law "necessity defense"—that burning oil would bring about greater harm in loading carbon than his [End Page 197] "paper monkeywrenching" ever could. DeChristopher wasn't born until a few years before Abbey died. When he read The Monkey Wrench Gang, he says, he was "old enough to understand it, but not quite old enough to realize it wasn't a handbook." Words from the introduction to Abbey's Beyond the Wall stuck in his mind: "Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul" (246). On the literary side Wrenched offers fascinating insights into the interaction of experience, autobiography, and fiction in how Abbey's books were assembled. Regarding verisimilitude, we hear Ingrid Eisenstadter recall that the original first chapter of The Monkey Wrench Gang described an actual destruction of Glen Canyon Dam—no one hurt, no one arrested, everyone drinking beer and dancing to "Hava Negila." She tells how she saw Abbey dump that scene as "unbelievable." She also recalls objecting to "his stupid obscenity in the book, which served no purpose at all" (177). The criticism she voices exemplifies another of this book's merits: It is not a simple adulation of the man. The interviewees repeatedly point out that they liked the man and his work despite flaws that they regularly acknowledge in the human being. Far beyond the literary and biographical pleasures, the interviews offer profound insights about humanity's crisis on the earth. In the later chapters we find Abbey's heritage articulated powerfully. Kieran Suckling says in his work he is trying "to combat the driving force of environmental destruction: too many of us consuming too many things. This force is driven by an almost universal and uninterrupted propaganda message coming from the media and industry about the necessity of growth" (192). What Abbey did, says Charles Bowden, was make a shift in people...

Gender representation in EFL course books explored through a corpus-based study: A case study

Introduction. Through this corpus-based case study, the authors examine gender representation in four English as a Foreign Language (ELF) course books, “Exploring English”, through a grammatical perspective. Particularly, the study observes the frequencies of pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’, the association of fourteen action verbs with a certain gender, and differences in gender representation between Course book 3 and 4. To analyse the issue, a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) corpus is compiled with texts selected and stored individually from each course book. Materials and Methods. A mixed approach is used to collect and analyse the data for this study. By using AntConc, the study firstly retrieves the numerical data which are further analysed and interpreted qualitatively. Results. The findings suggest underrepresentation of women. In addition, certain actions were associated with a particular gender. More specifically, noticeable was the positioning of feminine pronouns with domestic activities or chores such as cooking, while masculine pronouns were linked with actions such as paying bills or repairing cars. Although both genders participated equally in dialogues, the contextual analysis of pronouns suggests that the order of mention in sentences reflects masculine supremacy. Nevertheless, the last two levels of the course books suggest a similar representation of gender as hypothesised. Conclusions. The pronoun and verb analysis in this study revealed the uneven and biased representation of gender in textbooks which is concerning for the future of education. Yet, this is only a case study and findings cannot be generalized. Lastly, the authors consider that further analysis on gender representation in the course books from other grammatical aspects would provide even more comprehensive results. Keywords Gender representation; DIY corpus; EFL course books; Pronouns; Action verbs