Le langage sexiste en question. Une autre piste de recherche
In the fight against gender stereotypes, some feminists stipulate that language, commonly considered as mentalities mirror, is, quite as other behavioral acts, disdaining towards women. Marini Yeguello (1979) insists in this way chiefly on grammatical and semantic asymmetries and tries to show by means of arguments that the lower status of women and their dominance by men in patriarchal societies result in the language structure itself. In this regard, a number of terms which have negative meaning such as mort, disgrace, etc., are feminine while those that have positive one and various names of prestigious professions such as doctor, professor, ingénieur, etc., are masculine. Therefore, it is obvious that absorption of feminine gender by masculine gender is nothing but a reflection of men dominance over women and such a result of cultural construct of roles according to sex considerations. Although we recognize the importance of fighting against all forms of stereotypes, especially gender stereotypes, we think that many of the linguistic arguments are to be revised. Thust our main interest is to focus, in a linguistic perspective and in accordance with the conception of language as a collective memory, on metalinguistic expressions such as proverbs and idioms which function, with respect to their semiotic status, both as means of stereotypical images consolidation and as its transmission vectors across different generations within a particular social group. Our argumentation is crucially based on the French and Moroccan Arabic data.
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