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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Le "neutre" d'une langue sans neutre

subject

description

The French language only includes two grammatical genders : masculine and feminine. But the word neutral is still used in two situations : to describe a precise category of pronouns, or to denote a specific property held only by the masculine form of some human-refering words. We will primarily question this property and attempt to situate it theoretically, historically and practically. This understanding of « neutral » is built on the idea that the masculine gender comes first and inherits from the latin neutral gender the ability to overcome, for this type of word, its link to the referent’s sex. We will thus rethink these traditional conceptions (and develop an alternative semantic description of grammatical gender) in order to uncover the intra- and extra-linguistic processes that participate in their construction.