GENERICS PROBLEM AND SOCIAL MEDIA: THE USE OF PERSONAL PRONOUNS IN FACEBOOK APPS

• Authors: MAGDZIARZ Konrad
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Sexist language is a language that represents women or/and men differently and/or unequally. One such representation is visible in the usage of pronouns. Referring to a person of unspecified sex/gender by masculine forms (which, conventionally and grammatically is advised) leads to asymmetry, i.e. masculine is a norm and feminine is invisible. Because of that, gender-neutral pronouns have been introduced to the language. However, none of these has become popular enough to start to be used by an ordinary English user. And thus, a problem appears. If one wishes to avoid sexist language, what should (he/she/s/he/they/ze/one/...) do? This article intends to examine, basing on Facebook, how social media deal with this problem of generics.

Keywords

EN

non-sexist language; gender; singular they; generics; Facebook

• Publisher: Inter Litteras Research Centre, STEFAN CEL MARE University, Suceava, Romania; STEFAN CEL MARE Publishing House
• Journal: Concordia Discors vs Discordia Concors: Researches into Comparative Literature, Contrastive Linguistics, Cross-Cultural and Translation Strategies
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 5
• Pages: 85-103

Contributors

author

MAGDZIARZ Konrad

• Opole University, Poland