Indexicality, Utility and Conceptual Spaces: Variation and Change in Grammatical Gender in the Debates of the French House of Representatives

In this presentation, we give a new study of the role that social meaning and speaker ideologies play in variation and change in g(rammatical) gender in French. More specifically, we study noms de métiers et de fonctions 'professional nouns' which have the following g-gender assignment pattern: when they are used to refer to socially female individuals, they can have either masculine or feminine g-gender (i.e. le ministre or la ministre for a female minister); whereas, when they are used to refer to socially male individuals, they can have only masculine g-gender (only le ministre for a male minister).

We present (to our knowledge) the first quantitative study of the linguistic and social factors that condition the use of masculine vs feminine g-gender with reference to women, focusing on variation in the transcripts of the debates of the Assemblée Nationale (AN, French House of Representatives). This corpus features intra-speaker variation in g-gender use, as shown by the examples in (1), both said by Jean-Marc Ayrault.

(1)        a.    Madame le ministre de l’environnement, plus de 6 000 personnes ont défilé, samedi dernier, dans les rues de Nantes, pour protester contre l’autorisation donnée par le Gouvernement à EDF de remblayer la zone humide du Carnet dans l’estuaire de la Loire.  (M. Jean-Marc Ayrault, 29/01/1997)
            b.    Monsieur le président, madame la ministre, mes chers collègues, tout à l’heure, le président Bayrou me reprochait d’avoir dit que nous étions venus pour voter le projet de loi de finances. (M. Jean-Marc Ayrault, 19/12/1997)

The use of grammatical gender in expressions referring to women has been the subject of enormous amounts of prescription and language planning in France and within the Assemblée Nationale itself (see Houdebine 1987, 1998, Burr 2003, Viennot 2014, among others). These efforts can be naturally divided into two phases of activism: First, in 1986, Prime Minister Laurent Fabius legislates the use of feminine grammatical gender and (certain) feminized forms in the AN and similar government institutions. However, we show in our data that this prescription had little to no effect on the speech of the politicians at the time (see also Yaguello 1989, Brick & Wilks 1994 for non-quantitative observations). Second, in 1998, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin issues a statement reiterating Fabius' policy. We show that, unlike 12 years earlier, use of the feminine form (eg. la ministre) successfully replaces use of the masculine form (eg. le ministre) within the space of a year in the AN. This striking difference raises the question: What changed from 1986 to 1998 which allowed the feminine form to take over, possibly aided by (the exact same) language policy?

Our main proposal in this talk is that changes in the use of feminine grammatical gender and differences in the effectiveness of Fabius/Jospin’s language policy are the result of changes in social gender ideologies that occurred in France between the mid 1980s and mid 1990s. To make this claim maximally explicit, we develop a formal model of the relationship between ideological structure and language use and interpretation based on current work in game theoretic pragmatics (particularly Franke 2009 and Frank & Goodman 2012). More specifically, we use Gärdenfors (2000, 2014)'s Conceptual Spaces framework to formalize speaker ideologies and Burnett (2017)'s Social Meaning Game framework to capture the link between ideological structure, social meaning and language use. Using this model, we show that the failure of Fabius' policy and Jospin's subsequent successful use of this policy is predictable from independently motivated assumptions concerning 1) the social meaning of French g-gender (following Livia 2001, McConnell-Ginet 2013), and 2) changes in social discourses surrounding the properties of female politicians associated with the Parité ('equal representation') debates in the late 1990s (Ramsay 2003, Scott 2007, Julliard 2012, among others). We therefore conclude that tools from formal semantics and pragmatics can be helpful to understanding both the relationship between social change and linguistic change, and the conditions under which language policies can be effective.

(This talk reports on joint work with Olivier Bonami)

References

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