The contemporary debate on inclusive and non-sexist language has many aspects of interest for the citizen, as well as for the linguist. On the one hand, any suggestion that helps us to reflect on chauvinist features that are present in our society is welcome. On the other, from the technical point of view, most general works on the topic, starting from Gheno’s seminal book (2019), tend to merge at least three concepts that are completely different for the linguist: namely, gender, agreement and inflectional class.
The scope of the talk is to show that these notions are not only different from the theoretical point of view, as we all know, but they also have a largely different history. The notion of gender is well established already in Greek grammars and so is also the notion of inflectional class, albeit in a rather practical, pre-theoretical way. On the other hand, the notion of agreement was not identified clearly before the Middle Ages or the early Modern Era, when the adjective started to be treated as a third major word-class on au pair with the verb and the noun class, just on the assumption that adjectives agree, while nouns may have a gender but do not agree (Alfieri 2023). In the talk, therefore, we will describe the various steps through which the “modern” adjective class emerged from the time-honored class of epithets and the notion of agreement — distinct from that of gender and inflectional class — was identified as one of the ley features for opposing the class of adjectives to the class of substantives.
Clearly, the confusion among the notions of gender, inflectional class and agreement does not undermine the value of the debate on inclusive language in general. However, a better awareness of the linguistic notions that are discussed in the debate can prove useful for the scholarly and non-scholarly public.
Alfieri, L. 2023. The contribution of the speculative grammar to the definition of the adjective class. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 33(1): 9–44.
Alfieri, L. 2014. The birth of a grammatical category: the case of the adjective class. Studi e Saggi Linguistici 52(1): 145–175.
Gheno, V. 2019. Femminili singolari. Il femminismo è nelle parole. Firenze: Effequ.