DISNEY’S SEXIST LANGUAGE: FEMINIST STYLISTIC APPROACH IN BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (2017)

Through the feminist stylistic on Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (2017) Live-Action remake, the paper argues that Walt Disney is not as inclusive and progressive as rumoured, but sexist. The study aims to uncover the characteristics of sexism in the context of linguistic derived from a gender-specific term. This study is qualitative research. The objects and data of this analysis are determined by purposive sampling. The object of this study is the text that appeared in the film Beauty and the Beast (2017) on a live-action remake. The data for this study are lexical items (single word, chain of words, and part of a word) that relate to gender-specific. The data analysed using the linguistic determinism theory of Sara Mill's feminist stylistic framework. This study reveals the presence of sexism at the word level. The findings are Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (2017) Live-action remake shows the use of generic-noun and generic-pronouns appear in a sexist way, diminutive naming of gay and female characters, and negative terms used to portray female characters.

The status of the narrator in Modernist fiction

This article explores hitherto unexplored complexities in the positioning of the Modernist narrator. Taking as a starting point Banfield’s ‘empty centre’ technique, the article re-evaluates the difficulties posed by this phenomenon and develops a more thorough and a sounder understanding of ‘the empty centre’. Some of the evidence for a new theory of ‘empty centre’ passages comes from pragmatics and naturally occurring discourse data. In particular, an investigation of the impersonal uses of generic pronouns, which Monika Fludernik (1993. The fictions of language and the languages of fiction: The linguistic representation of speech and consciousness. London: Routledge; 1996. Towards a natural narratology. London: Routledge) had established as key to our understanding of the technique, sheds new light on the nature of the ‘empty centre’ technique and leads to a new understanding of the status of the Modernist narrator. I propose that it is most plausible that the reader will naturalise examples of ‘the empty centre’ as stemming from the narrator. I also argue that we need to construct a new understanding of the status of the Modernist narrator which takes into account some of the central tenets of the Modernist aesthetic, those concerning subjectivity and the possibility of objectivity. Thus, what emerges from the analysis is that the self, and the narratorial figure by extension, can no longer be endowed with the power of omniscience. I will develop my theoretical explanation of ‘the empty centre’ and the positioning of the narrator in Modernist fiction with reference to a variety of examples, mainly drawn from Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.

The Problem of Teaching of English Pronominal Pronouns in Genderless Society as Applied Linguistic Domain

The paper demonstrates one of the most recent problems in research of grammatical and natural genders in language. The targets of the article are to research gender representations in English from the perspectives of speakers in genderless society and the ways EFL professionals identify the existence of gender-related problems of teaching and learning of English pronominal usage in EFL settings. Literature review discusses how the field of language and gender is becoming re-conceptualized under the influence of theory of language of signs in society construction. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the generic pronoun and he/man approach have been used to perpetuate negative attitudes towards women, exclude them or relegate them from stereotypical roles. The objectives of this paper are to identify the use of gender-insensitive English language use and to suggest ways of making the gender-exclusive language a gender-inclusive one. In order to figure out the awareness and convention of generic pronouns among Georgian speakers of English, a questionnaire was conducted and distributed among EFL professionals working at higher educational institutions in Tbilisi, Georgia. According to the research findings, genderless languages are sexist to a specific degree and representatives of genderless languages might apply biased forms of discourse.

Truly Minimal Pronouns

Tis paper examines the properties of inclusive generic constructions, focusing on languages where the inclusive generic pronoun is a null category. We investigate empirical data from a set of languages with and without agreement to test Phimsawat's (2011) hypothesis that the inclusive generic pronoun lacks all phi-features, and therefore has the least restricted reading, due to there being no restriction on the reference. We show that this hypothesis cannot hold true universally, as phi-features trigger agreement in inflecting languages. We show that there is a correlation between presence of agreement and restriction to human reference for null inclusive generic pronouns, based on comparison of a set of languages without agreement (Tai, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Sinhala) with a set of languages with agreement (Finnish, Brazilian Portuguese, Hebrew, Basque, and Tamil). An explanation in terms of feature architecture is proposed for this correlation. A prediction for generic PRO is discussed and shown to be inconclusive or false.

An Investigation of Different Language Choice through Personal Pronouns in the Twitter

This study aimed to find evidence regarding the use of personal pronouns in the discourses produced by males and females. Personal pronouns were chosen as the object of analysis, as several studies has suggested them as one of the features that may distinguish the gender of the authors. This study analysed publically available corpus, Rovereto Twitter N-Gram Corpus (RTC), utilized by Herdagdelen (2013). It is gender-of-the-author tagged, which makes the author’s gender analysis easier. The corpus was analysed using AntConc (Anthony, 2014). From AntConc’s concordance analysis, it was found that women utilised more personal pronouns, especially the ones that can create closer bond. On the other hand, men have greater tendency to distant themselves using generic pronouns than women. In conclusion, men and women in this study may use personal pronouns differently. Keyword: Personal Pronoun, Twitter, AntConc

What do(es) you mean? the pragmatics of generic second person pronouns in modern spoken Danish

In modern Danish, the most frequently used pronoun for generic reference is man, developed from the noun man(d) ‘man’. Recently, though, the second person singular pronoun du has gained ground, in parallel to similar recent developments in other languages. A large-scale, longitudinal study of the LANCHART corpus of spoken Danish has documented a rise in the use of generic du in Copenhagen (and later in the rest of Denmark) during the period from the early 1970s, where generic du was practically non-existent, till the late 1980s where du comprised around 25% of all pronouns with generic meaning. However, recordings from the 2000s show that the use of du has peaked and is now decreasing or stabilizing at a lower level.This article focuses on intra-individual and intra-conversational variation within the LANCHART corpus with the aim of uncovering the pragmatic effect of using du instead of other generic pronouns. All passages in the recordings have been coded according to macro speech act, activity type, type of interaction and genre as well as enunciation. The results of a statistical analysis using mixed models show a number of correlations as to the use of generic du (in comparison with man), and by and large support the claim that generic du is used as a resource for construing involvement, arguably by exploiting the ambiguity of du between a generic and a specific second person meaning. These quantitative results make up the point of departure for corroborating qualitative analyses of the discourse framing of the use of generic pronouns.

Chairperson or chairman? – A study of Chinese EFL teachers’ gender inclusivity

Given the potential influence of teachers’ linguistic practice on children’s language use and gender role development, the present study seeks to examine the extent of linguistic discrimination present in teachers’ language. A total of 215 Chinese EFL teachers were invited to participate in the survey, which included a series of elicitation tests on their selection of English words for occupational titles, and the choice of generic pronouns anaphoric to people of unknown gender. The findings revealed that, while gender-biased language is still widely used, non-sexist linguistic reform has had an impact on Chinese EFL teachers, some of whom have expressed a concern with regard to avoiding sexist language. The study also found that choice of generic pronouns co-varied with such factors as semantic meaning, word structure and the gender stereotypes associated with particular occupations.