Search results for "masculine rule"

Legislative drafting and gender: some linguistic insights into English and Italian

2022

Languages vary widely in terms of gender systems showing differences in the number of classes, underlying assignment rules and how and where gender is marked. The legislative drafting policy conventionally known as the ‘masculine rule’, whereby ‘he includes she’, raised opposition in the 1970s (under the pressure of feminist movements in the United States and Europe), and the adoption of plain English style forced legislative drafters to basically avoid sentences of undue length, superfluous definitions, repeated words and gender specificity with the aim of achieving clarity, minimising ambiguity, and enhance gender-neutrality. Given the prevalence of English as lingua franca, an increasing…