Gender neutral language in French: Difference between revisions

While human collective nouns — such as ''l'auditoire'' ('the audience') or ''le public'' ('the public')— inherently carry the semantic feature [+human], their relationship to natural gender/''Sexus'' diverges from that of individual personal nouns. Unlike fixed-gender epicenes (e.g., ''la sentinelle'', 'the sentry'), where a specific individual referent does indeed posses a gender/''Sexus'' that the noun's morphology simply ignores (rendering the form ''Sexus''-independent), collective nouns denote a macro-entity. In formal semantics, a multitude functioning as a single constituent does not inherently possess a natural gender. Thus, in collective nouns, the semantic feature of ''Sexus'' is not merely omitted, but is rather structurally completely absent (∅). In this respect, human collective nouns operate similarly to inanimate objects (e.g., ''la chaise'', 'the chair'): they are assigned a [[wikipedia:Grammatical_gender|grammatical gender]]/''Genus'', but the semantic category of natural gender/Sexus is inherently inapplicable to them.

To accurately classify the grammatical strategies for making French more gender-inclusive or gender-neutral, it is therefore necessary to distinguish between

# ''Sexus''-applicable nouns

## Gender-specific nouns

### morphologically gendered nouns, where the noun gets its Sexus-specification through derivation from gender-marked agentive suffixes (compare ''acteur'' vs. ''actrice'')

### lexically gendered nouns (sœur, mari, fille)