Gender Across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men (IMPACT: Studies in Language and Society

This is the first of a three-volume comprehensive reference work on "Gender Across Languages", which provides systematic descriptions of various categories of gender (grammatical, lexical, referential, social) in 30 languages of diverse genetic, typological and socio-cultural backgrounds. Among the issues discussed for each language are the following: what are the structural properties of the language that have an impact on the relations between language and gender? What are the consequences for areas such as agreement, pronominalization and word-formation? How is specification of and abstraction from (referential) gender achieved in language. Is empirical evidence available for the assumption that masculine/male expressions are interpreted as generics? Can tendencies of variations and change be observed, and have alternatives been proposed for a more equal linguistic treatment of women and men? This volume provides the basis for explicitly comparative analysis of gender across languages.