‘The interrelation between social gender and grammatical gender: A novel socio-theoretical approach’

• Applicant: Dr. Olga Steriopolo
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2016 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 313605007

The main goal of this research is to analyze the interrelation between social gender and grammatical gender across languages. The main question that will be investigated is: How does the social gender as established in a given society affect the use of grammatical gender? This research will continue along the path laid out in previous studies on relations between language and society, most notably sociolinguistics and sociology of language. It will present a novel methodological approach to the study of gender and it will interrelate two different disciplines: sociology (the framework ‘sociology of gender’) and theoretical linguistics (the generative framework ‘Distributed Morphology’). The anticipated results of this interdisciplinary project will be of interest to theoretical linguists, language typologists, linguistic anthropologists, language-area specialists, language educators, sociolinguists, and sociologists, as well as the general public interested in gender.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants