From il and elle to iel and ael: the French Gender Revolution - A Semantic Model of Pronominal Grammar Changes in French

Abstract

In recent years, the emancipation of women and the increasing awareness of identities outside the gender binary of man and woman have been a central debate in western society. Since the 2000’s the French language has seen linguistic changes reflecting these societal changes. The most recent developments are the so-called Écriture Inclusive and the Écriture Neutre. Analysing these language changes, the present thesis focuses on two common neo-pronouns iel(s) and ael(s) emerging from these societally induced languages changes and investigates their effects on pronominal grammar in French. This research bases itself on a corpus study of the use of these neo-pronouns, creating he foundation for a re-worked model of pronoun resolution with in Discourse Representation Theory. Combining the works of Kamp & Reyle (1993), Van der Sandt (1992) and Hunter (2013) this thesis takes a presuppositional approach to pronoun resolution allowing for the inclusion of extra-linguistic information for their interpretation.