Martina Rosola

Proposals for gender-fair language in Italian include Alternative grammatical Gender Encoding Devices (AGEDs) such as the schwa (ə) or asterisk, potentially also accommodating non-binary identities. These solutions, though, often pose challenges for oral communication, accessibility, and social acceptance, as they may be perceived as external to the Italian language system. We examined the possibility of employing diphthongs—integral components of standard Italian phonology—as more internalized AGEDs by testing whether replacing typical masculine or feminine word endings (-o/-i (M), -a/-e (F)) with various diphthongs (e.g., ai, eu) could produce forms interpreted by native speakers as more gender-neutral. We conducted a within-subject experiment, where Italian participants (N = 424) were asked to rate words ending in diphthongs (1) along a five-point scale from feminine to masculine and (2) as singular, plural or unclear for number. Results revealed a significant Diphthong × Number Judgement interaction, with certain diphthongs interpreted as more gender-neutral than others. Specifically, diphthongs that excluded or combined the sounds typically associated with masculine and feminine grammatical genders were rated as more neutral. These findings suggest that select diphthongs could serve as AGEDs, potentially offering an accessible, linguistically coherent pathway toward more inclusive and gender-fair Italian language practices.

This study focuses on the growing importance of gender-fair language and explores innovative strategies proposed also in other languages to avoid gender-specific endings. We present a set of guidelines for the annotation and reformulation of gender-(un)fair texts and their application to a corpus of 1,024 portions of university administrative documents in Italian. Overall, the guidelines presented in this study prove to be valuable both practically and theoretically. They help identify and address non-inclusive expressions while highlighting the complexities of obscuration and visibility in gender-fair language reformulation. In addition, the statistical analysis of the created corpus shows how administrative texts tend to contain gender-unfair language, especially the masculine overextended expressions, showing the need to adopt specific and complete guidelines that lead (and support the staff training) to the use of a more gender-fair language.

I generici esprimono affermazioni generali come “I leoni ruggiscono”, e vengono comunemente usati per esprimere stereotipi, come “Le donne sono emotive”. Queste costruzioni sono oggetto di un dibattito interdisciplinare che spazia dalla filosofia del linguaggio alla linguistica e alla psicologia. Introduciamo il tema discutendo i test che permettono di distinguere i generici, le loro proprietà linguistiche e le principali teorie sulla loro semantica. Offriamo poi una panoramica delle loro implicazioni cognitive: i dati sull’acquisizione, l’ipotesi che siano generalizzazioni automatiche, la relazione con l’essenzialismo e l’asimmetria inferenziale che ne caratterizza l’interpretazione. Concludiamo con il dibattito sul ruolo dei generici nella discriminazione. Generics express general claims, such as “Lions roar”, and are commonly used to express stereotypes, such as “Women are emotional”. These constructions sparked an interdisciplinary debate, ranging from philosophy of language to linguistics and psychology. We introduce generics by discussing the tests for distinguishing them, their linguistic properties, and the main theories on their semantics. We then offer an overview of their cognitive implications: the data on acquisition, the hypothesis that they are automatic generalizations, their relation to essentialism, and the inferential asymmetry characterizing their interpretation. We conclude with the debate concerning the role of generics in fostering discrimination.

This paper reflects the application in education of an autocorrector for Italian designed to make it easier to adopt gender-fair language consistently in administrative documents. Sexism in Italian produces important effects in educational contexts as confirmed, for example, by research analyzing school texts. The literature highlights how certain gendered expressions influence our cognition, and how masculine terms evoke masculine images with the effect of excluding, depowering and make invisible women, non-binary and trans people. The analysis of sexism in Italian is thorough and several national and international bodies issued gender-fair language guidelines, that constitute a vast know-that on the subject. However, there is a lack of operational tools to facilitate their implementation, bridging the gap between the know-that and the know-how. This contribution aims to explore, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the pedagogical and training potentialities arising from the use of a gender-fair autocorrect in education. In particular, we argue that the benefit of such a tool is twofold: on the one hand, it produces fair texts and, on the other, it helps its users to develop the ability to recognize and replace sexist expressions.

In the light of a study of the difference between political actors and ordinary citizens as language users, and based on three moral arguments (consequence-based, recognition-based, and complicity-based), we propose that democratic representatives have an imperfect duty to use gender-fair-language in their public communication.In the case of members of the executive, such as ministries, prime ministries, and presidents, such an imperfect duty could also be justified on democratic grounds. Their choice of using a gender-unfair language, we argue, can cast doubts on the fundamental democratic commitment to respect the agency of all present and future citizens as potential participants in the law-making process.

Generics are sentences that express generalizations about a category or about its members. They display a characteristic context-sensitivity: the same generic can express a statistical regularity, a principled connection, or a norm. Sally Haslanger (2014) argues that this phenomenon depends on the implicit content that generics carry in different contexts. I elaborate on Haslanger’s proposal, arguing that the implicit content of generics is complex and constituted by two different propositions. A first proposition, that I here call the robustness proposition, characterizes as robust the link between the category the generic is about and the predicated property. This proposition is relatively invariant and is, as I claimed elsewhere, a generalized conversational implicature. In this paper, I will argue that a second implicature, the ‘explanatory implicature’, arises which crucially depends on what explanation is called for in a certain context. Given its context-dependence, I conclude that this proposition is a particularized conversational implicature. While generics convey by default that the category and the property are strictly related, the specification of this relation hinges on the characteristics of the context in which the generic occurs.

The Harmful Feature of Generics provides an in-depth investigation into the role of generics in essentialization offering a thorough examination of its roots. Generics, sentences expressing generalizations about categories or their members, are a common means to express stereotypes: we typically say "Philosophers are absent-minded" rather than "Some/Many/Most philosophers are absent-minded". The present book shows that this correlation is no coincidence. As emerged from robust empirical literature, generics seem to foster social essentialism, that is, they lead people to believe that the categories they are about possess an underlying essence. In doing so, generics dangerously contribute to stereotyping. But what enables generics to essentialize? The author untangles this puzzle thanks to an interdisciplinary approach encompassing philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. She draws on Haslanger's (2011, 2014) hypothesis that generics implicitly convey that the target category and predicated property are strongly connected. Rosola refines this proposal and substantiates it through the linguistic tests for implicatures and presuppositions, concluding that generics convey a generalized and particularized conversational implicatures which form the basis for essentialist beliefs.

Generics express generalizations in the linguistic form «Ks are F», where K denotes a category or its members and F a property (for instance, «Tigers are striped» or «Women are emotional»). Generics seem to play a key role in fostering the belief that the members of certain categories share properties and dispositions due to a supposed common essence. It has then been argued that generics concerning discriminated social categories are especially insidious because they could favor prejudice on the same. However, it is still debated whether generics lead to essentialize more than quantified generalizations, such as «Most Ks are F». In this paper, we argue that we nonetheless have good reasons to consider generics as more problematic than quantified generalizations: if, on the one hand, there is no conclusive evidence that generics and quantified sentences lead to essentialize to a different extent, on the other hand, generics are particularly difficult to counter. Moreover, the properties predicated in generics are interpreted as widespread even though generics are also accepted based on limited evidence. This asymmetry in the interpretation of generics highlights a distinctive mechanism through which stereotypes can be transmitted and proliferate.

Grammatical gender languages mark gender on every noun and agreement target such as adjectives and pronouns. While the norm for personal nouns provides that the term’s grammatical gender corresponds to its referent’s gender, in certain circumstances, a discrepancy arises between the term and its referent’s gender. Taking Italian as a case study, I identify four such circumstances: reference to non-binary people, women and non-binary professionals in traditionally male-dominated fields, generic or unknown individuals and mixed-gender groups. Among these, I distinguish between usage discrepancies, which depend on how speakers (mis)use language, and structural discrepancies, which depend on structural features of the language. The latter is the case for reference to non-binary people as Italian lacks a grammatical gender corresponding to non-binary gender identities. I focus on this case and argue that it conveys a problematic representation of gender, giving rise to a specific instance of hermeneutical injustice: structural discrepancies depend on a gap in collective interpretative resources (namely, the lack of an appropriate grammatical gender) and put non-binary people at an unfair disadvantage in making sense of their social experiences. As I show, the effects of structural discrepancies possess all the hallmarks of hermeneutical injustice.

Generics have been a vividly debated topic since the 1970s. Several aspects make them especially interesting, from their ubiquity to their tricky truth-conditions, from their distinctive cognitive implications to their (still debated) harmfulness in the social domain. This annotated bibliography aims to provide a guide to the massive scholarship on generics ranging through different fields. In linguistics and philosophy of language, generics are subject to inquiries for a number of reasons (see Linguistic Overviews). First, no one specific element in the linguistic surface identifies generics and, thus, a primary goal of a theory of generics is to provide a way to clearly distinguish them from nongeneric sentences. This enterprise includes providing a definition as well as tests for genericity (see Foundational Works on Genericity). Moreover, a vast number of theorists have attempted to specify the truth-conditions of generic sentences by appealing to semantic and pragmatic mechanisms (see Semantic Accounts, Pragmatic Accounts, and Normative Generics and Definitions). This task, however, has proven especially challenging, to the point that none of the theories proposed to date can account for the full range of data. Generics are further at the center of research programs in psychology revolving around their role in human cognition. Generics are a common means of expressing generalizations. They are further central to the development and shaping of our conceptual knowledge. A variety of developmental data show that generics are early acquired (see Acquisition of Generic Language). To account for this evidence, it has been hypothesized that generics express cognitively default generalizations (see Generics as Default Generalizations). Such a hypothesis led to several predictions, some of which found empirical support. Furthermore, several empirical studies investigated the relation between generics and essentialism, a cognitive bias that leads to believe that the members of certain categories share properties and dispositions due to a common essence (see Essentialism). Other studies concerned a distinctive asymmetry characterizing generics: they are taken to express broad generalizations but are, at the same time, accepted based on relatively weak evidence (see Inferential Asymmetry). Together with prior theorizing, these findings sparked a debate over the potential harmfulness of social generics, i.e., generics concerning social categories (see Detrimental Effects of Social Generics). In philosophy, the discussion revolves around the question of whether generics are especially harmful compared to other means of expressing generalizations, whether there are circumstances in which the use of social generics is useful, and how to effectively counter them to prevent their possible harmful effects (see Debate on the Use of Social Generics). In recent years, moreover, some scholars started exploring the use and interpretation of generics in the scientific domain (see Generics in Scientific Communication). For this work, Federico Cella was funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia under project UIDP/00183/2020 while he was a postdoc fellow at the NOVA Institute of Philosophy (NOVA University of Lisbon).

Disinformation poses a significant challenge to contemporary society, as it has the potential to undermine the stability of democratic systems, put public health at risk, and undermine the credibility of science. We explore the question of whether certain groups of people are especially exposed to disinformation and, in particular, we focus on older people. We examine the purported impact of cognitive and linguistic factors, such as source amnesia and the need for consistency, the decline of pragmatic skills in recognizing intentions and decoding figurative language, as well as motivational factors like the need for affiliation. Taken together, these empirical data suggest that there may indeed be specific vulnerabilities associated with older age. This hypothesis calls for finding ways to protect a category of people who already suffer from numerous other vulnerabilities.

The aim of this paper is to explore some trans and feminist concerns about the gendered aspects of languages beyond English, focusing in particular on Spanish, Italian, and German. Historically, discussions about gendered language have often challenged the ways in which language can make women (in)visible by addressing the implicit and explicit androcentrism and sexism in our language. We call this the visibility project. Recently, questions surrounding trans-inclusiveness and the possibility of avoiding gender markers altogether have become more prominent, often highlighting the issue of pronouns (e.g. the singular "they*). We call this the gender-neutrality project. However, anglophone philosophy offers a very limited discussion on how either gender-neutrality or visibility strategies could be applied to languages more gendered than English. To address this, we start by showing how gender expresses itself in the grammatical structure of our three sample languages, and identifying some of the specific visibility and neutrality strategies that could be (or are already) applied to them. This leads us to articulate an "innovative project which constructs nuanced and novel ways to transform gendered grammatical structures. Depending on their application, these strategies can fulfil gender-neutrality goals in some cases and visibility goals in others. This highlights, among other things, the ways in which genderqueer people have attempted to shape their linguistic resources in different linguistic contexts, while also opening up avenues for new research when it comes to discussions of gender and language.

Gender-unfair language gives rise to injustice towards both women and non-binary people. Different strategies have been proposed to overcome this injustice, but which is the “best”? In this paper, I will approach this question from a normative perspective, taking into account practical and ethical aspects. I’ll first assess the feasibility and redundancy of the various strategies. Through this lens, no strategy stands out as the best, but each is best suited for specific contexts. I thus argue for a pluralistic approach relying on multiple strategies. I further propose to combine more of them in the same text. This solution is the most efficient, but not the fairest: when considering ethical aspects, most strategies turn out inadequate. Only gender-neutral paraphrases, namely what I call “conservative neutrality”, are truly fair both towards women and non-binary people. I conclude by proposing an adjustment to such a strategy to counterbalance its practical shortcomings. Whether such a proposal will be taken on board by speakers is an empirical question that goes beyond the scope of this paper: my goal here is to provide reasons that could guide speakers’ decisions rather than arguing for which strategies are more likely to spread.

In the light of a study of the di erence between political actors and ordinary citizens as language users, and based on three moral arguments (consequence-based, recognition-based, and complicity-based), we propose that democratic representatives have an imperfect duty to use gender-fair-language in their public communication. In the case of members of the executive, such as ministries, prime ministries, and presidents, such an imperfect duty could also be justi ed on democratic grounds. Their choice of using a gender-unfair language, we argue, can cast doubts on the fundamental democratic commitment to respect the agency of all present and future citizens as potential participants in the law-making process.

In this paper, we argue that, although neglected so far, there is a strong link between generics and testimonial injustice. Testimonial injustice is a form of epistemic injustice that “occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word”. Generics are sentences that express generalizations about a category or about its members without specifying what proportion of the category members possess the predicated property. We argue that generics are especially suited to cause testimonial injustice for three reasons. First, generics elicit an “inferential asymmetry” :1452–1482, 2010). That is, generics are accepted even if only a few individuals possess the predicated property but are, nonetheless, taken to refer to almost all the members of the category. This peculiar combination makes generics particularly apt to cause testimonial injustice. High resistance to counter-evidence is a crucial feature of prejudice, the cause of testimonial injustice, and the more highly predictive a generalization the more it will be employed in concrete situations, leading to instances of testimonial injustice. Second, generics seem to play a key role in leading people to develop essentialist beliefs : 273–301, 2010; Rhodes et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci 109: 13526–13531, 2012). Subjects holding such beliefs treat categories as warranting strong generaliations over their members. Therefore, they will be more likely to rely on prejudice while dealing with the category members. Finally, generics are outstandingly common in everyday speech. Hence, their noxious effects are amplified by their diffusion and should not be underestimated.

The sentences that contain empty definite descriptions are sometimes perceived to be truth-valueless and sometimes perceived to be false. Strawson offered an account of this phenomenon. However, his proposal is empirically inadequate, as shown by von Fintel. von Fintel proposes an alternative account based on a mechanism of belief revision. In this paper, I argue that sentences with multiple failing presuppositions pose a problem for von Fintel’s account. Furthermore, I discuss two variants of von Fintel’s theory proposed by Elbourne to see whether they fare any better than the original. The second variant yields an incorrect prediction for the cases at hand. However, the first variant can account for the problematic examples if the false presuppositions are processed in turn. I will propose a revision of this variant that enforces distinct applications of the mechanism for each presupposition.