Manipulating (anti)presuppositions in the Spanish gender system

Abstract

Spanish has a marked gender system. Expressed in binary terms, the system has only one grammatical gender dimension specified as [+/- feminine]. Semantically, [+feminine] triggers a [female] presupposition, modeled as a partial identity function, whereas [- feminine] is semantically vacuous. Among other facts, this explains why masculine in Spanish can be used to denote mixed sets of male and female individuals (e.g., los chicos_{[masculine, plural]} ‘the kids’ can denote mixed gender groups) or why semantically generic DPs use the masculine form even in the singular (e.g., cuando el niño no se alimenta… ‘the kid_[masculine] is not fed…’). Cases in which the male meaning is forced in certain contexts of use is the byproduct of usual anti-presuppositional inferences (derived from Maximize presupposition!). Because of this system, the grammatical masculine form is used in more contexts than the feminine form, giving rise to the well-known sociological reaction that at least for some, the system reproduces patriarchal attitudes. The so-called inclusive strategy intervenes the gender system by adding a new inclusive morpheme (the -e vowel). The new system consists, then, of a tripartite division (chico, chica, chique ‘kid_{M/F/I}’) in which, now, both feminine and masculine are strongly presuppositional, with the “inclusive” being unmarked. This talk discusses the linguistic (essentially, semantic and pragmatic) and non-linguistic implications of the inclusive strategy and compares it with another strategy of linguistic intervention, namely, reclamation, i.e., the use of slur words by members of the target of derogation. As I will discuss in detail, the two strategies contrast in several respects. For instance, whereas the inclusive strategy manipulates presuppositions to restrict the masculine form to less contexts of use, reclamation manipulates use-conditional meanings (or, alternatively, presuppositions in some non-multidimensional views) to give the slur word more, not less, contexts of use.