1Gender is a complex notion, encompassing multiple meanings and interpretations, whether linguistic (i.e. lexical and grammatical), political, or ideological (broadly construed as a range of perceptions and representations that justify linguistic practices). It is a crucial area for negotiating power issues within language and discourse, as “language ideologies are [...] much more than simple attitudes towards language – they describe, rationalise, and shape it” (Coady [2020]). The current debates on the value and motivation of gender within language have thus highlighted deep divisions, both among researchers and within society at large, revealing ideological foundations, which are investigated by various fields such as gender studies, linguistics and translation studies.

3In English, nominal gender is marked morphologically, especially through affixation: Tournier [2004: 53] lists “feminine suffixes, such as -ess, -ette, -trix...”, through which the feminine operates as a derivative of the masculine, the former being secondary to the latter. Mignot [2017: 70; 227] adds the -ine and the less common -a, -ia and -en suffixes to the list. This morphological derivation, which can be found in other languages such as Spanish, Greek or Russian, may imply an underlying form of devaluation that has also been noted by sociolinguists (Holmes & Wilson [2017: 348]): “The male form is the unmarked form, and therefore [...] implicitly the norm.” Tournier underlines the limits of this categorisation for affixes, which leads to increased “dubious [...] or approximate labelling”; in addition, these depreciative characteristics can be strengthened by their polysemy: the -ette suffix, he states, can be used for diminutives (kitchenette), imitations (flannelette), as well as feminine forms [2004: 54]. The potential derogatory connotations of these semantic categories may then influence each other in discourse, marking, at the very least, an asymmetry between masculine and feminine terms, due to those “minimizing suffixes” (Mignot [2017: 70]).

4Besides, if the feminine of actor is actress, why are nouns such as director or doctor considered epicene and then require an adjective (female director) or an additional noun (woman or lady doctor) to be turned into feminine forms? Huart [1989: 30] has analysed this process:

To get to ‘woman doctor’, one starts from the class of ‘doctors’, within which a subclass of doctors, who belong to the female sex, is formed. Identifying is thus not the same as establishing an equivalence, in which the word order would be irrelevant – in language, there is always a locator and a located term. [...] When we say: She’s a woman doctor, that doctor is singled out as a type of doctor who is not quite like the others.

5Compounding, which is very productive in English, therefore raises questions of the same semantic order as affixation, even regarding the choice of locator and located terms: why is barmaid the feminine form of barman, whereas policewoman is the feminine form of policeman? The question of the motivation underlying this type of compounds also comes up in the case of gendered neologisms (Foubert & Lemmens [2018]). Relevant issues include linguistic and discursive strategies implemented to transform language in order to eradicate identified sexist biases (Chevalier et al. [2017]; Gardelle [2019]), and, outside of official normative terminologies and policies, the question of neologisms, which sometimes stem from activism, and which may enjoy a wider circulation as they become more popular. Some terms have become popular, such as ‘bartender’, which neutralises the opposition between ‘bartender’ and ‘barmaid’, ‘spokesperson’, which includes both ‘spokesman’ and ‘spokeswoman’, and ‘server’, in lieu of ‘waiter’ or ‘waitress’. This leads to specific challenges in translation: while “spokesperson” is indeed epicene, the French language does not provide any satisfactory solution for referring to bar and restaurant staff without resorting to gendered terms or periphrases. From a comparative and/or translational perspective (Raguet [2008]; Flotow et al. [2021]), the mechanisms involved in translating gender from English into other languages may be investigated. The potential shifts from one gender to another (neuter to masculine/feminine and vice versa – exemplified, for instance, in the French controversies around the gender to be attributed to the English loanword COVID), or de-gendering and/or inclusive writing strategies may also be studied. Metaphorical gender may also be considered, such as the feminine gender assigned to ships in English, and the way in which these genders are preserved or may change from one era to another (Curzan [2003]), or from one language to another: for example, the metaphorical gender of fork/knife in English (Cameron [1992: 82]) translates into the same grammatical gender in French (fork is construed as a metaphorical feminine and knife as a metaphorical masculine), unlike salt in the salt/pepper dichotomy [ibid.: salt is metaphorically associated with the feminine in English]). This leads to a whole variety of situations highlighting the “trouble” (Butler [1990]) generated by the multiple definitions of “gender”.

6The categories and discourses inherent to the idea of a gendered lexicon may also be deconstructed: could it be possible, then, to move away from a binary apprehension of gender through the lexicon? Researchers in queer linguistics and sociolinguistics, for instance, aim to expose “how linguistic practices reflect, reproduce and validate the heteronormative order” (Leap [2013: 643]), by analysing the lexicon used for gendering and de-gendering. To circumvent these mechanisms, existing terms can be used, and neologisms can appear to develop a non-binary lexicon (they/them/themself, or the rarer ze/zir, fae/faer or Mx), which can bring about diachronic or synchronic studies in order to identify the ways in which they have been formed. On the other hand, language can rejuvenate terms that have been out of use to emphasize their gender (Simon [1996] brings back to life the nouns ‘translatress’ and ‘translatrix’).

7Another dimension of gendered lexis deals with its connotative and metaphorical dimensions, the negative connotations of which can be studied, for instance, in collocations and extensions of their semantic fields. These effects are explored by Antoine [2014] for the metaphorisation of the female sex, Antoine [2021] on the designation of lesbianism or the expressions relating to menstruation, by Holmes & Wilson [2017: 347] about animal or food imagery in the description of women and men, or by Chamberlain [1988] for gendered metaphors applied to the lexicon of translation. Other promising fields of investigation include proverbial expressions, frozen phrases and/or de-fixation strategies, taboo words (Crespo-Fernàndez [2019]), slang terms, swear words (Azzaro [2019]), and even, in lexicography, the selection of dictionary examples, which may reveal the stereotypes conveyed by language. The Collins Cobuild Advanced Dictionary (2009), for instance, offers the following examples for ‘nurse’: “She has spent 29 years as a nurse” for the nominal form and, for the verbal form, “All the years he was sick my mother had nursed him” and “She rushed home to nurse her daughter back to health”. The profession and the burden of care are thus presented as exclusively female, even though its definition, “A nurse is a person whose job is to care for people who are ill”, is tentative enough to avoid any mention of gender. As for its figurative meaning, sentences such as “Jane still nurses the pain of rejection” and “He had nursed an ambition to lead his own big orchestra” clearly assign pain and resentment, i.e. negative emotions, to the female subject, and ambition, a rewarding quality, to the male person.

8It comes as no surprise, then, that all three contributions for the present issue deal with the topic by drawing on the sociolinguistic question of power: the power of words and the power of speakers. Whether studying the words one uses or the words which designate people, the authors unanimously agree: words are a reflection of society, as many researchers have already shown, but the phenomenon is especially salient concerning words of and on gender.

9As stated explicitly by Ann Coady in her research about the semantics of “woman”, “semantics is not neutral: defining woman is also a struggle over social recognition, policy-making, and power”. Drawing on dictionary and scientific definitions, newspaper style guides, online surveys, news corpora, semantic textbooks, philosophy articles and quotes from public figures, Coady illustrates how the shifting meanings of the word “woman” reveal underlying ideological struggles: contemporary premodifiers reflecting the current negotiations over gender assignation (cis- and trans-, in particular); implicit meanings assigned to the words woman and female which legal systems have been (often unsuccessfully) attempting to stabilize – Coady shows that the interpretation of these words can have real consequences on human rights when they become embedded into the law; contested definitions which have led to various expansions of meaning… All these examples “reflect broader tensions in feminism and gender politics”. The second part of the article examines how various semantic theories (componential analysis, natural semantic metalanguage and prototype theory) and feminist philosophical approaches have dealt with the issue, offering an enlightening overview of their proficiency and shortcomings on the matter.

10The social impact of gender on words usage can also be seen through the use of lexical corpora, whether American or English, which is drawn on by Aure Espilondo in her analysis of “pussy” and Yuri and Myroslava Kovaliuk, who explore idiomatic expressions from a gendered point of view.

11Aure Espilondo thus attempts, using the Corpus of Contemporary American English, to gain insight into the polysemy of the word “pussy”, used as a slur, and of its tentative reappropriation, highlighting what she calls a “pussy paradox”, i.e. the existence of a multilayered meaning of the word that “makes for a particularly violent insult, but […] also increases its likelihood of being reappropriated by the people it targets”. To this end, Espilondo, who has been working on the reappropriation of sexist slurs in French and in English, first discusses the concept of “reappropriation” in that context, before taking on the multiple meanings and connotations of “pussy”, as a slur or a slang word, also referring to some of its French equivalents. She then proceeds to examine the corpus under study, in particular its “Spoken” and “TV/Movie” sections, which contain “a much wider […] array of occurrences”, to test her hypotheses regarding the slur and its reappropriations. The results, while recognizing the limits of the COCA corpus, along with the weakness associated with the feminine connotation of “pussy”, also suggest a “multi-layered reappropriation process that involves a wide range of people from the feminist and queer communities” which currently remain under the author’s scrutiny.

12Yurii and Myroslava Kovaliuk, in their quantitative study of the differences in the use of idioms by males and females in the British National Corpus, examine, using Critical Discourse Analysis/Discourse Studies, “how figurative language usage varies across male- and female-authored texts in different genres” and “may serve as an indicator of prevailing gender norms and cultural values”. After presenting their theoretical framework, which highlights the crucial importance of “discourse as a form of social practice” and “the relationships between language, discourse, power and ideology” in the definitions of “gender”, “ideology”, or “hegemonic masculinity”, the authors show that most idioms are “discourse-embedded” and as such, “reflect and contribute to gendered structures of power”. Using a complex corpus-based database, ten different semantic groups are then examined in light of their gendered associations, yielding statistical results that suggest, in varied and nuanced outputs, that “idiom usage is not only quantitatively uneven between male and female authors but also qualitatively skewed in favour of male discursive presence across key institutional genres”: while male idiomatic usage tends to be more widely distributed, female idiomatic usage “tends to be more limited in scope and register”, which, as the authors point out, offers a quantitative corroboration to the more general “critiques of gendered linguistic marginalization”.

13This thematic issue is followed by the “Varia” section of the journal, which includes two papers. The first one is a phonological study which considers Arabic loanwords in British and American English and, more specifically, their stressing in pronunciation dictionaries. Pierre Fournier notes that very few differences related to this criterion are to be found between the donor language and the receiver language systems in the corpora he has extracted from the Oxford English Dictionary, the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary and the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary. He then questions this peculiarity by studying three competing frameworks. He concludes his research by arguing that the “stress preservation principle” offers the most relevant explanatory framework to account for the low variation rate he has evidenced, which is mainly due to the impact of the phonological properties of the specific donor language explored here.

14The second paper in the “Varia” section offers a new approach on the countability of nouns, showing that the usual two-way demarcation between mass nouns and count nouns is more complex than the canonical individuation criteria may suggest. Drawing on the universal packager and the universal sorter operations framework, Kurt Erbach exemplifies, with novel data, how a given noun may shift between different semantic categories depending on the linguistic co-text and the usage context in which the nouns occur, thus questioning the taxonomy criteria commonly used in linguistics and lexicology. Consequently, he recommends the treatment of “count” and “mass” as “metalinguistic prototypes” instead.