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Research has found humour and gender to be linked (Davies, 2006, Gendered sense of humor as expressed through aesthetic typifications. Journal of Pragmatics, 38(1), 96–113. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.200...

Generic masculines – masculine forms used for women – are employed in many languages, for example English (Mills 2008), French (Coady 2018), Spanish (Bengoechea 2011) and German (Motschenbacher 2016), providing accounts of how gender is made visible in the language through morphological, lexical and syntactic units. These accounts are also linked with how gender is seen in societies and culture, reproducing an imbalance between women and men. Specifically, language discrimination against women is based on the idea that speakers orient themselves towards androcentric language, recognising ‘men’ as a metonym for the group ‘human being’ (Alvanoudi 2014), causing a linguistic invisibility of women. Similarly, studies in Italian have also discussed the use of masculine forms to refer to, talk about and describe women (Cavagnoli 2013), or have shown how these are used in specialised (Nardone 2016, 2018) or media corpora (Formato 2014, 2016, 2019). This article investigates the use of a specific (and underexamined) generic masculine in Italian – namely, the indefinite pronoun uno.m.sg (in comparison with una.f.sg) labelled ‘impersonal masculine’ (Formato 2019:69) – in three subcorpora of the Perugia Corpus (TV, Web and Spoken; Spina 2014). Uno.m.sg is seen as constructing ‘extended intersubjectivity’, that is, the awareness of a general third party (3rdP) acting as the social bearer of the utterance (Tantucci 2013, 2016, 2017a). The results show that the masculine impersonal uno.m.sg is widely used in the three subcorpora and in several functions, confirming that grammatically gendered language is still employed within a ‘masculine as a norm’ order.

This chapter explores the construction of women victims of murder and manslaughter by men in English sentencing remarks. Sentencing remarks serve the purpose of summarising evidence, narratives, and justifications for the final sentence. It is here where victims will either be backgrounded or may receive final acknowledgement or ‘voice’. Data for this study is comprised of all sentencing remarks published online by the Courts and Tribunals Judiciary of England and Wales, 2012–2016, concerning adult women who have been killed by men: a total of 14 sentencing remarks containing approximately 30,000 words. We use XML to mark-up all references to victims in the corpus of sentencing remarks and Sketch Engine to carry out detailed investigations. Using frequency and concordance analysis, we discover that forename- only strategies are common for women victims in sentencing remarks, indicating social proximity and underlining the sense of vulnerability. Relational identification – e.g. wife – positions victims within expected/gendered roles and social hierarchies. Women victims are (perhaps predictably) disempowered in transitive processes. We argue that XML mark-up improves and enhances search-and-recall while enabling collocation in a small corpus. Furthermore, it has the potential to reduce subjectivity and optimise analysis time while being easily adaptable to other languages and contexts.

Italian female politicians are increasingly gaining access to the institutional public space, in some cases breaking the glass ceiling that has blocked them from reaching high positions. However, language used to attack them for their possible wrong doings or employed to represent themselves demonstrates that a rearrangement of a gendered xed order is constantly challenged by (those in) a culture and society that still sees women as mainly pertaining to the private sphere. In this article, I qualitatively investigate sexual terms, directly and indirectly sexist, used by a variety of actors (journalists, comedians, politicians) attempting to prove women’s unsuitability for political roles and, more broadly, for operating in the institutional public sphere. To examine these terms, I developed a framework which takes into consideration communicative functions (stereotypes, gossip and self-representation), aimed at providing a comprehensive and context-dependent investigation into how language is purposefully used to re-establish a known gendered structure (only men in the institutional sphere). Nexus analysis, borrowed from anthropologists Ron Scollon and Suzanne Scollon, is here performed in order to show how language is intrinsically linked to an ideologically gendered order which speakers seem to reproduce through linguistic practices. This article contributes to previous literature on Italy as a highly sexist culture as well as that on representation of female professionals operating in domains which have been historically inhabited by men. It also offers a methodological tool to investigate sexist terms employed in the media and in political spaces.

This paper examines the way that the Italian media use language to refer to female ministers in the last three governments. While Italian is a gender-specific language (e.g., a root of the job titles can be followed by either feminine or masculine morphemes, singular and plural), it is common to use masculine forms to refer to and address women. Ministro is one of those cases where masculine forms replace feminine ones – a practice which could be construed as sexist, is only rarely challenged in institutions, and to which attention has only recently been paid in academia ( Fusco, 2012 ; and Robustelli, 2012a , 2012b ). The investigation presented here focusses on how grammar is translated in a way that reproduces women's invisibility in a sexist society. A corpus-based quantitative analysis of feminine and masculine forms of ministr– used in three widely read printed Italian newspapers (Corriere della Sera, Il Resto del Carlino and La Stampa) is undertaken. Newspaper articles were collected in the period 2012–14 to cover the Monti technocratic government (three female ministers), and left-winged Letta (seven female ministers) and part of the Renzi (seven female ministers) political governments. This paper contributes to the literature on language reform and sexist language in traditionally male-inhabited physical and metaphysical (stereotypes, prototypes) spaces such as the institutional public sphere.

Italy is a fruitful epistemological site, apt to investigate gendered language in relation to a deep-rooted sexist culture and an imbalanced society. Women in private and public spheres are still evaluated and judged against ‘male as a norm’. Notwithstanding an increase in the number of women accessing political arenas, they are still seen as interlopers. In this context, language operates to reproduce the discursive status quo, leaning on ideological stances and imaginaries that re-establish a natural gendered order where women are perceived as inferior to men. Resisting voices are attempting to counterbalance this order. Feminist linguistics, discourse and ideology, are at the core of the investigation of gender made relevant through language explored through quantitative (mainly corpus linguistics) and qualitative methods.

Exploring the historical gendered fixed roles for women and men in the private, i.e. heterosexual relationships, demonstrates that these prove equally detrimental to women. The femminicidio, the crime in which men kill their on-going or former partners, is a widespread phenomenon worldwide as well as in Italy. Qualitative and quantitative language investigations show that politics is dealing with this issue as an abstract phenomenon which affects women. Reporting on the topic in Italian newspapers reproduces dangerous narratives which recount how male jealousy and hurt feelings are at the core of this gendered crime. Furthermore, specific language is used to bridge the gap between a void in the legislation and this systematic atrocity perpetrated by men against women.

Grammatical gendered languages, such as Italian have a lexical, morphological and syntactic system that allows for the formation of gender in the language. A classification of how the Italian gender-specific grammar works and how it is manipulated to serve the ‘male as a norm’ discursive status quo is offered in this chapter. Telling examples show how masculine and feminine nouns are seen through the theoretical framework of markedness, where the ‘usual’ and ‘known’ is unmarked—masculine turned generics—and the ‘unusual’ and ‘unknown’ is marked—feminine terms emerging from a changing society. Grammatical gendered patterns become social gendered phenomena in what can be labelled ‘masculine as a norm’, through unmarked masculines, versatile masculines and other language usages which tend to hide women.

Academia is paying attention to ‘masculine as a norm’ with the aim to unravel the intricate relation between language and a sexist and historically male-oriented society. Activists, among whom, politicians, are also raising their voices to challenge the discursive status quo of language which reproduces an imbalanced society. Feminist linguist Alma Sabatini bequeathed both academics and activists a series of leaflets containing examples of how to avoid sexism in the Italian language, written in the late 1980s. However, in investigating online commentaries and speakers’ attitudes towards gendered language, resistance in using marked feminine is still a major concern. Speakers point to several reasons for rejecting a fairer language: opposition to what is known, relevance to gender parity, and the un-aesthetic nature of these forms.