Talking About Women

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Author(s): Alina Villalva (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Copyright: 2021
Pages: 24
Source title: Handbook of Research on Translating Myth and Reality in Women Imagery Across Disciplines
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): Roxana Ciolăneanu (University of Lisbon, Portugal)and Roxana-Elisabeta Marinescu (Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Romania)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-6458-5.ch006

Keywords: Communication Studies / Education / Gender and Diversity / Information Science Reference

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Abstract

The reference to males and females in Portuguese is related to grammatical gender, but the relationship is not straightforward. The grammatical gender system is quite complex and semantically fragile, allowing a very low degree of predictability of the gender value, especially regarding inanimate nouns. Gender contrasts are also problematic. They only apply to some animate nouns and when they occur, they can be diversely fulfilled. Furthermore, this state of affairs is being threatened by social changes that are the output of increasing access of women to social and political rights, and especially to jobs and positions traditionally held only by men. On the other hand, words referring to men and women have a denotative meaning and different connotations. The definitions provided by some early and contemporary dictionaries will be compared. This comparison will demonstrate that these nouns are unevenly tackled. If dictionaries reflect canonical concepts, then the global understanding of male and female concepts are not that different from what they were three hundred years ago.

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