French gender inclusive doublets and the fine structure of the nominal domain

Collaborative work with Caterina Donati (LLF, CNRS - Université Paris Cité) and Marie Flesch (LLF, CNRS - Université Paris Cité)

In this presentation, we present a formal syntactic analysis of gender inclusive doublets in spoken French. In a gender inclusive doublet construction, constituents containing overt (i.e. pronounced) gender marking can be doubled, where one occurrence has masculine marking and one has feminine marking. Consider the example in (1), spoken by the the feminist journalist, Victoire Tuaillon, on French television:

(1) De toute façon, en tant que humain humaine, on peut pas vivre seul, non? On est forcément en relation les uns les unes avec les autres.

"In any case, as humans (human_M human_F), we can't live alone, no? We are necessarily in a relation with each other (lit. the ones_M the others_F)"

Gender inclusive doublets are instances of an innovative linguistic practice coming from feminist and LGBT+ activism and has been studied in the sociolinguistics literature (see, for example, Elmiger 2015, Abbou 2017, Burnett & Pozniak 2021). As these works describe, the doublets are used as a way of avoiding having a single masculine marked expression referring to people of all genders, i.e. avoiding en tant que humain `as a human_M'. Although many francophones are supportive of gender inclusive language, others are skeptical or even critical.  While much of the criticism is clearly related to the social and political questions that this linguistic practice aims to address (reducing gender equality and/or deconstructing the gender binary), it is true that the sentences in (1) have a property that is unusual for French: there are two nominal predicates (humain humaine) and two DPs (les uns les unes) where we normally find only one. From a theoretical perspective, gender inclusive doublets thus raise questions with respect to how syntactic selection works in such utterances, possibly challenging Chomsky (1986)'s Projection Principle.

The main goal of this presentation is to argue that French gender inclusive doublets are not only of interest to sociolinguists, but also to theoretical syntacticians. We will show that, despite their roots in feminist linguistic activism, these constructions not only obey general grammatical constraints that have been observed cross-linguistically, but also reveal new properties of the fine-grained structure of the spoken French nominal domain.  We claim that, contrary to appearances, gender inclusive doublets do not challenge the Projection Principle since, as we will argue, a doublet contains only a single noun phrase. We propose that the illusion of multiple noun/determiner phrases in utterances like (1) arises from the doubling of interpretable phi features, which are then spelled out as chunks of nominal (or other) structure. We arrive at this proposal through a study of grammaticality and interpretation judgements with native speakers and a quantitative study of linguistic variation in the Cartographie linguistique des féminismes (CaFé) spoken corpus (Abbou & Burnett 2024).

References

Abbou, J. & Burnett, H. (2024). Devenir féministe à Paris et Montréal: Récits de vie dans le corpus CaFé. in press in H. Blondeau, M. Laforêt & W. Remysen (eds). 80 ans des corpus montréalais. Presses Universitaires de l'Université de Montréal.

Abbou, J. (2017). (Typo) graphies anarchistes. Où le genre révèle l’espace politique de la langue. Mots. Les langages du politique, 53-72.

Burnett, H., & Pozniak, C. (2021). Political dimensions of gender inclusive writing in Parisian universities. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 25(5), 808-831.

Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin, and use. Praeger.

Elmiger, D. (2015). La répétition de noms communs de personnes pour éviter le masculin à valeur générique. Le discours et la langue, 7(2), 97-112.

