Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Grammatical gender languages (Stahlberg et al. 2007) mark gender on several linguistic items, including pronouns, nouns and their agreement targets (e.g. articles and adjectives). While grammatical gender is not always semantically motivated (e.g. in the case of inanimate nouns), “there is always a semantic core to the assignment system (Aksenov 1984: 17-18).” (Corbett 1991: 8). In many languages, this core is constituted by reference to humans: the grammatical gender of personal nouns (and, consequently, of its agreement targets) depends on their referent’s gender. However, as observed by Corbett (1991: 218), in some cases it is impossible for the noun (and its agreement targets) to reflect their referent’s gender. This might happen for different reasons: the referent is unknown, thus their gender cannot be determined; the referent is generic, hence it is impossible to ascertain the referent’s gender given that there is no specific referent involved; finally, the referent might be a group of people of different genders, so it’s impossible to determine a unique gender for the noun to correspond to. In these cases, some languages use one of the available grammatical gender forms. For example, in Italian (but also in Spanish, German, and French, among others), the masculine is used in all these cases by convention. That is, although its semantic core is tied to reference to men, the masculine is used even for unknown referents, who can turn out to be women or non-binary people; generic referents, so it should be applicable to anyone regardless of their gender; and to mixed-gender groups, thus it has to be able to refer also to the group members of genders other than the masculine. In this talk, I will investigate what enables the masculine form to work in these cases, using Italian as a case study. To address this research question, I’ll apply the linguistic tests for presupposition and implicature. Based on the results, I’ll argue that masculine forms in these languages defeasibly implicate that they also refer to women.