Slavic Gender Linguistics (review)

As noted in its introduction, this eleven-paper volume is the first published English-language monograph devoted to gender linguistics issues in Slavic languages. As such, it provides a very useful and interesting introductory sampling of gender linguistics issues in morphology and discourse that are specific to individual Slavic languages, as well as a wealth of language data for other linguists to draw on. The volume title is a little misleading since nine of the articles are on Russian; in addition there is one article on Polish (Jill Christensen’s discourse study of Mrożek’s play Tango) and one on Czech (Jitka Sonkova’s examination of gender and age differences in the distribution of grammatical forms) but no representation of the modern South Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian/Croatian, and Slovenian), currently the least studied with respect to gender issues. With the exception of Laura Janda’s comprehensive comparative historical and cognitive study of the grammatical category of virility (i.e. male human) in Slavic languages, the articles do not compare data cross-linguistically but instead focus on issues within a single language.

Mills’s introduction is very useful both for its review of the state of gender linguistics in Russia as of the time the articles were written and for its concise English-language summary of the pioneering work of E. A. Zemskaja, M. A. Kitajgorodskaja, and N. N. Rozanova (1993) on phonetic, phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, and discourse-level differences between Russian male and female speech. (Although Slavic gender linguistics was published in 1999, the research for the articles was conducted mostly in the early/mid-1990s, shortly after the end of the Soviet era; one looks forward to a ten-year follow-up volume.)

As a whole, the articles are strictly nonpolemical, and the majority focus on identifying differences between male and female speech rather than on sociological or other causes for them. As is traditional in Slavic linguistics, the authors’ objective is to identify and analyze patterns in a given Slavic language rather than to study these data within the context of language universals. The articles should be of particular interest to general linguists, however, precisely because the grammatical phenomena that many of them set forth have not been identified or dealt with previously within the context of gender linguistics and do not have equivalents in English. Indeed, the volume clearly is aimed toward an audience of general linguists as well as Slavists: All examples are in Latin transliteration and, for the most part, with English glosses in addition to translations, while the analyses set out and explain grammatical constructions and language structure background clearly for the benefit of readers not familiar with Slavic languages.

The strategy behind the ordering of the articles is not transparent; more continuity might have been achieved by grouping them according to area of linguistics (for the most part, morphology vs. discourse). Moreover, the articles cover two other separate areas which might be differentiated formally in the volume: female vs. male speech patterns, which are to some extent a matter of choice for the speaker (as illustrated here by Igor Sharonov’s identifications of gender-specific preferences among communicatives (expressive interjections, common phrases, etc.); and intractable grammatical constructions, particularly those involving grammatical gender (see, for example, Roman Jakobson’s 1971 article on the masculine as the unmarked grammatical gender in Russian and Rothstein 1973).

Five of the articles, including Janda’s, focus on morphological phenomena. Sonkova uses a computer corpus of formal and informal dialogues among 50 native speakers from various sociological and demographic groups for a statistical study of gender and age differences in the distribution of parts of speech, verb tense forms, pronoun types, and relative clauses in spoken Czech. Bernadette J. Urtz examines the effects of word order and iconicity on grammatical gender/number agreement between subject nouns and third-person past tense forms, in Russian constructions equivalent in...