SIEVIETE, VALODA UN DZIMUMSOCIALITĀTE SPĀNIJĀ. (Latvian)

Woman, Language and Gender Issue in Spain. (English)

In the recent years, the English term gender has become a keyword in the studies concerning the equality of male and female human beings. The supporters of the feminist movement were the first who started to analyse the social aspect of the issue in the 1970s. Later, anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and linguists turned to the studies of the gender issue as well. In the present paper, the gender issue in the Spanish language is treated both from the sociolinguistic standpoint and from the terminological and semantic aspect. Like in the English language, in Spanish there also exists the opposition sexo/género. Each of these words is polysemantic, and the main difficulty refers to defining the mutual relationships of these lexemes and comparing them with the correlation of sex/gender which exists in the English language. This is due mainly to its scientific and abstract nature, as well as the complex semantic. The semantic analysis of the Spanish lexemes sexo and género made it possible to reveal some difficulties which appear when translating these terms in other languages. The semantics of the word género partly differs from that of the English equivalent and overlaps in some aspects with the semantics of the biological term sex, which results in some problems when translating this term into the Spanish language and in the translations from Spanish into English, Latvian and other languages. Women's entering the labour force and their active involvement in politics created new challenges for linguists and the society how to reflect gender equality in the names of various professions and titles. When analysing the development of non-traditional grammatical forms (la letrado, la médico, la cónsul) and the use of compound forms of titles (mujer sacerdote, mujer torero) it can be concluded that agglutination processes are developing in the Spanish language; however, its structure is quite flexible, both at the grammatical and lexical level, and can react to the actual social changes and situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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