Reference Research On Gender-inclusive Personal Nouns In German

Any language does not lack the expression means referring to the person,especially the group including men and women.The reference of both genders in the language has already become an important subject of the linguistic research.The reference is a kind of relationship between the linguistic expression and the referent.The speaker or writer uses linguistic expression to enable the hearer or reader to identify the reference.It involves four elements:speaker,referring expression,hearer and referent.Regarding the referring expression as the center and then expanding,we can get an insight into the relationship of three aspects:(1)referring expression and referent;(2)expression and hearer;(3)expression and speaker.By focusing on these three aspects,this research carries out a dynamic and multidimensional comprehensive survey on reference phenomena of gender-inclusive personal nouns in German from the viewpoint of cognition and pragmatics.The first one is referring expression and referent.In German,the expression for referring to the group with both genders has gone through the feminist linguistic reform.Traditionally,German as a language which is characterized by with a complete grammatical gender system,takes the masculine form as the standard in place of neutral context when referring to human regardless of sex.Namely,when it comes to person with unknown gender or the personal gender is not important,this personal noun is more likely to appear in the masculine,which is called "generic masculine".On account of the biological sex concept achieved by grammatical gender,the masculine nouns can also refer to women.During the conceptualization,people endow the grammatical gender of the nouns with metaphorical meaning of sex.Besides,people map the value experience of "male is superior to the female" into the grammar system and form a "masculine superiority belief ’ in the grammatical category of nouns.According to "masculine superiority belief ’ and gender perception based on "male is the prototype of human being" and"human = male",the masculine noun form possesses the function of marking mixed groups with both genders,including female.However,the generic usage of masculine nouns,which has been criticized by the feminist linguistics,leads to masculine bias and makes female invisible in the thought of the language users.With the reform of the language,some alternative expressions of generic masculine have come into being in German,that are mainly represented by male/female splitting form and neutralized form.The second one is referring expression and hearer.Various expression forms referring to both male and female do not present the equal mental representation of both genders in the interpretation of recipients.Identifying the referent of personal nouns is a language processing based on the construction of the situation model.According to "scenario mapping and focus approach",gender information enter the situation model through the integration of the language information and related background knowledge,in which the person is mapped from the explicit focus into role slot marked with female or male in the implicit focus of the scenario,making the referent gender to be identified consequently.In the constructed situation model,the gender-related information comes from the linguistic and nonlinguistic factors,including the grammatical gender of the personal nouns,context,singular and plural of the nouns,male as prototype of human being in the cognitive structure,social gender stereotypes,and gender typicality of the whole context.All of them have impact on the mental representation of the hearer in the process of interpretation.Thus,with the activation of the language input and/or background knowledge,the gender information related to the referent comes into the situation model.In the process of understanding,all gender-related cues interact together,check and balance each other,guided by the principle of relevance.These gender-related factors are activated and manifested in the individual’s cognitive context at different degrees.In this way,they influence and restrict the identification of referent gender of personal nouns.It is gender relatedness in cognitive context that contributes to gender bias in the cognition of recipients.The third one is referring expression and speaker.To avoid the arbitrary use of language expressions,this study selected articles from the feminist magazine EMMA as corpus,which devote to the promotion of gender fair language.Through the analysis on 36 articles,it is found that there are some variation patterns and influence factors in the textual usage of gender-inclusive personal nouns.The evaluation of role value,which is generated in the conceptualization process for groups of people,as well as the cognitive relation between grammatical and natural gender have impact on the discourse producers’ selection on referring forms of person.The generic masculine forms are always used for the roles with negative value evaluation,while gender equitable forms tend to refer to the roles with positive and neutral value evaluation.Such evaluation of roles is endowed by the lexical semantic,discourse context,situation context,and cultural context.The evaluation in the discourse also signs the producer’s intention and opinion,and is the way of the speaker to show off himself/herself and present his/her own viewpoint to the recipients.From the aspect of the discourse structure,the language expressions that repeatedly refer to the same individual or groups with uncertain gender may have variation of referential form in the discourse.The male/female splitting form is generally applied for the first reference in the discourse.In the later reference,it may also be used again,or perhaps is replaced with the generic masculine noun.The different importance degree of the referent in the discourse topic also has impact on the selection of its referential form.In the discourse with several forms of gender inclusive personal nouns,the splitting form marks the individuals and groups that are in the central of the discourse theme,while generic masculine nouns always mark the thematically unimportant individuals and groups.In addition,the explicit gender information in the context can exclude the fuzziness of the referent.Namely,it gives the discourse recipients a clue that the reference here includes both male and female.Under such circumstance,the discourse producer will give preference to the generic masculine form.The selection of the referential forms at the discourse level also follows the principle of relevance.The discourse producer selects the pragmatic strategy according to the communicative intention,so as to ensure the successful transmission of the intention and discourse meaning and the generation of contextual effect.The producer will try to select the optimal relevant referential forms,and make it possible for the recipients to recognize his/her intention with minimum cognitive effort.In the multidimensional research on the reference of gender inclusive personal nouns,no matter the formation of the language expression form for referring to the entity or the language recipient’s understanding on the referential form and the language sender’s selection on it,all of them depend on the human conceptualization and mental processing on the entity during the physical engagement and social experience.Finally,the author points out the practical significance and enlightenment of this research,as well as the prospect for the future research.