LANGUAGE USE AND GENDER IN THE ITALIAN PARLIAMENT Federica Formato BA Foreign Languages and Literatures (University of Naples, ‘L’Orientale’) MA Language, Society and Communication (University of Bologna) This thesis is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Linguistics and English Language Lancaster University MAY 2014 I, Federica Formato, declare that this thesis is my own work, and has not been submitted in substantially the same form for the award of a higher degree elsewhere. ABSTRACT This thesis deals with gender construction in the Italian parliament. The increase of female politicians in the public sphere in Italy and throughout the world justifies the investigation of their language use, in relation to that of their male counterparts. In this project, I analyse the use of three linguistic phenomena: 1. forms of address; 2. Noi forms; and 3. Violence metaphors. The common aim of the investigations into these three linguistic phenomena is to examine the construction of gender at its intersection with political roles in 13 parliamentary debates on the topic of violence against women occurred in the Camera dei Deputati (Lower Chamber) during Parliament XVI, which ran from 2008-2011. The findings concerning the use of institutionalised forms of address reveal that both gender groups still tend to mostly use masculine unmarked terms when addressing female politicians (in singular and plural forms). More positively but still not wide-spread, the analysis shows that (semi-) marked forms are slowly appearing, e.g. Signora Ministro, where only the (marital) status form is replaced with the feminine form. The findings for noi forms indicate that both male and female MPs tend to associate themselves with other politicians. In addition, female MPs also tend to construct themselves as ‘female politicians’ and as ‘women’, perhaps in a quest for visibility and legitimation of their position in the Camera dei Deputati (and) in a male chauvinist society. The investigation of Violence metaphors is interesting for their relation to the topics of debate and the gender bias that describes these metaphors as ‘masculine’ (Philip, 2009; Koller, 2004; Koller & Semino, 2009). Female MPs employ more Violence metaphors than their male counterparts in these debates. The investigation of Ground Confrontation metaphors further reveals that the scenarios constructed by female and male politicians equally present violence as an abstract phenomenon for which no one seems to be responsible. 3 Table of Contents ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................... 3 Table of Contents ........................................................................................................... 4 List of Tables ............................................................................................................... 10 List of Figures .............................................................................................................. 12 Glossing conventions ................................................................................................... 13 1. Chapter 1, Rationalising the thesis ................................................................... 17 1.1. Introduction ................................................................................................... 17 1.2. Analysing the Italian language: previous studies and grammatical gender .. 24 1.3. Research Questions ....................................................................................... 27 1.4. Outline of the thesis ....................................................................................... 32 2. Chapter 2, The Italian context: women in the public (and private) spheres 37 2.1. Introduction ................................................................................................... 37 2.2. Women and politics in Europe ...................................................................... 38 2.3. Italy ................................................................................................................ 40 2.3.1. A brief overview of Italian politics since the 2008 election .................. 40 2.3.2. Feminism and modern culture: Italian women ...................................... 42 2.3.3. The cult of feminine beauty and (Berlusconi’s) sexualisation of politics... ............................................................................................................... 43 2.3.4. Female politicians in Italy: the Dipartimento delle Pari Opportunità and the Camera dei Deputati ....................................................................................... 46 2.4. Gender (Im)balance: women in public and private space ............................. 50 2.4.1. The 1977 law and the follow-up ............................................................ 50 2.4.2. Equal opportunities in the Italian constitution ....................................... 52 2.4.3. The Quote rosa (Gender Quotas) ........................................................... 53 2.5. Violence against women ............................................................................... 56 4 2.5.1. Violence against women in Italy: femminicidio ..................................... 58 3. Chapter 3, From sex to gender in the public sphere ....................................... 60 3.1. Language, spaces, men and women .............................................................. 60 3.2. Gender and language study: a brief chronicle ............................................... 61 3.2.1. The ‘(male) dominance’ and ‘(cultural) difference’ approaches to investigating and interpreting language and gender in talk .................................. 63 3.2.2. The shift to post-structuralism ............................................................... 65 3.2.3. Language as ‘discourse’ ......................................................................... 67 3.3. ‘Doing Gender’ and Identity ......................................................................... 69 3.4. Language and (working) spaces. Communities of Practices and the public sphere: does gender matter? ..................................................................................... 71 3.4.1. (Gendered) Communities of Practices (CofP) ....................................... 74 3.4.2. Male-oriented workplaces and practices. ............................................... 76 3.4.3. Women and language in leadership and the (institutional) public sphere…. ............................................................................................................... 78 3.5. Language and politics .................................................................................... 82 3.6. Language and the parliament ........................................................................ 83 3.6.1. Language, gender and parliament .......................................................... 85 4. Chapter 4, Methodology and data selection ..................................................... 89 4.1. From literature to methods ............................................................................ 89 4.2. Researching language and gender ................................................................. 90 4.2.1. (Correlational) Sociolinguistics ............................................................. 91 4.2.2. Corpus Linguistics ................................................................................. 93 4.2.3. Taking a critical perspective on gender ................................................. 95 4.3. The dataset: parliamentary debates ............................................................... 97 4.3.1. The transcripts of the parliamentary debates ....................................... 105 4.3.2. The rationale for the dataset ................................................................. 107 4.4. The dataset: the corpora and the speakers ................................................... 108 5 4.4.1. The corpora .......................................................................................... 108 4.4.2. The speakers ......................................................................................... 110 4.5. Glossing and translations ............................................................................ 115 4.6. Final remarks ............................................................................................... 116 5. Chapter 5, Forms of address: literature review and methodology .............. 118 5.1. Forms of address: chapter introduction ....................................................... 118 5.2. Sexism in language and forms of address: a review ................................... 119 5.2.1. Sexism and the English language ........................................................ 120 5.2.2. Politics and reform of sexist use of English ......................................... 123 5.2.3. Sexist language (and gender-inclusiveness) in Italian ......................... 126 5.2.4. Sabatini’s Raccomandazioni per un uso non sessista della lingua italiana................................................................................................................127 5.2.5. After Sabatini: (resistance to) language changes ................................. 132 5.2.6. Sexism in the workplace and use of gender-inclusive language ......... 135 5.2.7. Forms of address in parliament ...........................................................