Multilingual perspective in Gender and Language. Realization and processing of gender in different Romance languages: an interdisciplinary approach for the field of education and public communication

ongoing

There are various lines of study on gender in natural languages, which have been approached from varied perspectives; not only grammatical but also lexicographic, pragmatic, discursive, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic. Spanish, Portuguese and Italian are all considered as languages with grammatical gender, and binary gender paradigms. One of the studied phenomena is whether for speakers of languages ​​with obligatory gender markings and binary gender paradigms, the generic interpretation bias is no longer as arbitrary as some traditional grammatical studies assume. Another key problem ​​is the interpretation of the generic masculine. In Romance languages such as Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, the masculine gender can also function as a generic, that is, to refer to entities with different genders, but the univocal reference as a generic has been questioned from sociolinguistic and pragmatic approaches.Within this framework of gender binarism and masculinizing bias, some linguistic communities have begun to use and disseminate various gender-inclusive forms as [-x], [-e], [-ə], [-u], [*]. Currently, the discussion focuses on the notions of gender (rather than sex) and binarism, in line with current advances and discussions on sex-gender diversities and dissidences. In grammatical gender languages, the most recent proposal is focused on the morphological gender markings that nouns carry and are projected to other words due to agreement requirements. In this Project we proposed to develop a line of interdisciplinary and multilingual studies that allows us to reflect and deepen our knowledge about the complex relationships between morphosyntactic aspects of the grammatical gender category in Romance languages, associated sex-gender representations, psycholinguistic processing of gender, construction and circulation of meanings linked to gender identities and the phenomenon of variation in the uses of each language in different communities of speakers.