Constructing and reconstructing patriarchy: Sexism and diachronic semantics

Abstract

Research on sexism in English correlates semantic change with the feature <+ female > . First, terms for women undergo pejoration, unlike corresponding terms for men. Second, predicates indicating male domination proliferate. Third, sh— “feminine” pronoun forms may have developed because English shifted to “natural gender.” Finally, linguistic data provide evidence that patriarchy has not been an unbroken tradition among speakers of Indo‐European languages. But these “anomalies” cannot be explained within a patriarchal paradigm; instead, feminist diachronic semantics may help to correlate cultural change with semantic change, and observer bias with linguistic analyses.

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