April 7, 2015

Guest speaker: Françoise Rose (CNRS/Université Lyon 2)

Our department is pleased to welcome Françoise Rose from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and Université Lyon 2. Her research interests include phonology, morphosyntax, Amazonian languages, typology, language documentation, and socio/historical linguistics.

On Tuesday, April 14, at 1 PM, she will be giving a talk reporting on work done with Peter Bakker (Aarhus University, Denmark): "The cross-linguistic diversity of categorical genderlects."

The location is to be announced; watch this space for updates.

While it is frequent for males and females around the world to have different linguistic usages, it is rare for males and females of the same community to have different grammars. This talk presents the rare cases of categorical genderlects attested around the world, i.e. cases where a language has variants used exclusively by speakers of one gender, or used exclusively with addressees of a specific gender. It starts with a general introduction to gender indexicality and then presents the inventory of the 96 languages that we have surveyed as showing categorical genderlects. The talk then focuses on the diversity of the phenomenon. Genderlects differ in respect to which of the speech act participants has their gender indexed. They also differ in the domain of the grammar that indexes the gender of the speech act participant: phonology, lexicon, morphology, or discourse markers.

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