Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research 2022, 23 (2): 21-39 | DOI: 10.13060/gav.2022.014  

Personal proper names are part of a community’s language inventory. To a large extent, they verbalise gender stereotypes, expectations and norms, power relations,  political circumstances, and how minorities are treated. In my paper I analyse the current socio-onomastic representation of gender-neutral names in the context of naming practices in the Czech Republic. More specifically, I examine what factors might explain the decreased use of these names, which, paradoxically, differ from other names in that they have an extended functionality. From a linguistic and legal perspective I inquire into how Czech naming practices stigmatise the sexual...

Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research 2022, 23 (2): 41-61 | DOI: 10.13060/gav.2022.018  

This paper deals with the current social context in which the gender-balanced functions of the Slovak language are being created. The rules that exist for creating and using gender-based Slovak are at odds with contemporary society. This paper examines the mechanism of language changes including gender-balanced language and makes observations about how they are perceived within the communication community in particular. Language is approached as a construct that is a reflection of society and social processes, while at the same time language influences some of these processes in return. Language changes occur more slowly than social ones, or rather,...

Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research 2022, 23 (2): 62-81 | DOI: 10.13060/gav.2022.013  

Criticising the use of the generic masculine, feminist and gender linguists have proposed different alternatives. In the Czech context, the following three types of alternatives can be distinguished: (1) feminisation, (2) neutralisation and paraphrases, and (3) making non-binary persons linguistically more visible. Empirical studies on the usage frequency of these alternatives, however, are lacking. This paper addresses this issue by analysing agentive nouns and the feminisation of surnames in selected Czech newspapers. The results show that in references to individual women almost exclusive use is made of feminine expressions. Mixed-gender groups...

Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research 2022, 23 (2): 82-113 | DOI: 10.13060/gav.2022.022  

This paper explores novel ways in which Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Studies (DHA – the discourse-historical approach), and Feminist Linguistics can be fruitfully combined and thus contribute to a new awareness and knowledge concerning language and gender in discourse. For the paper a large heritage corpus of texts on mountaineering (Alpenwort – Corpus of the Austrian Alpine Club Journal) is explored, which constitutes a type of discourse that has yet rarely been studied in the abovementioned fields. The corpus was used to analyse gendered nomination with the following questions in mind: What frequently occurring...

Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research 2022, 23 (2): 114-139 | DOI: 10.13060/gav.2022.015  

This paper explores how a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) approach can be utilised to investigate representations of gender as well as potential gender bias in radiology reporting, which constitutes a form of professional, medical discourse. The database collected for this purpose consists of three specialised German sub-corpora (332,901 cranial, thoracic, and whole-body computed tomographies, with more than 61 million tokens), which were extracted from a larger medical corpus called MedCorpInn that was built as part of an interdisciplinary project conducted jointly by the University of Innsbruck and Innsbruck Medical University. As...

Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research 2022, 23 (2): 140-166 | DOI: 10.13060/gav.2022.020  

This paper deals with a corpus-linguistic analysis of different text/media types in Slovene with the aim of finding out whether or not any of the communication channels covered by the corpora employed in our analysis serve as a means of unification against the concept of gender, thereby serving as a catalyst for creating and maintaining (new) speech communities. We aim to determine this by extracting the two most commonly misused concepts (terms) in Slovene, i.e. gender theory and gender ideology, and analysing their use in three different corpora of contemporary Slovene: the reference corpus Gigafida 2.0, the corpus of user-generated...