Generichein conversation?
| Autor: | Jeffrey L. Stringer, Robert Hopper |
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| Rok vydání: | 1998 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Quarterly Journal of Speech. 84:209-221 |
| ISSN: | 1479-5779 0033-5630 |
| DOI: | 10.1080/00335639809384214 |
| Popis: | The use of the pronoun he in circumstances of sex‐indefinite reference unduly emphasizes men over women, thereby both re‐constituting and signifying males’ micropolitical hegemony. To date this claim has been advanced primarily on the basis of imagined examples and of examples from writing. We searched for generic he in everyday conversation and found no clear instances of it. Speakers use they as an unmarked singular generic pronoun. We did find some possibly‐generic usages of he, especially: (1) referring to an unmarked masculine role occupant (e.g., a member of Congress), and (2) referring to a non‐human (e.g., a cockroach). We situate these findings within controversies about gender‐fair references to women and men, and conclude that conversational uses of he seem more various and complex‐and perhaps more anti‐female‐than we had supposed. We caution against facile generalization to conversational interaction of arguments based in written and imagined exemplars. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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