現代英語におけるジェンダーの問題 : 英語の通性代名詞について

概要

論文の詳細を見る
The pronoun 'he' has been considered grammatically correct when referring to a person without clarifying the person's sex. In the 1970s, however, the feminist movement rapidly spread over US and other English speaking countries and the equal treatment of women and men in language came to be strongly required. As reported in Ishikawa (2001), most newspapers and publishers of school textbooks established their own writing guidelines in 1980s. Their writers are now said to avoid using the generic 'he', which can be a sexist expression, because it makes women invisible. In this paper, aiming to find out the standard usage, we will examine the pronouns referring to a person whose sex is unknown. In Chapter 2 we will survey related researches that have been done so far. In Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, the frequencies of the pronouns used in academic papers written in 1960s and in 1990s will be statistically examined. The aim of Chapter 5 is to compare the result with that of Ishikawa (2000) to identify the standard form of the generic pronoun.