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_LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGES (UDC 81)_
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18454/RULB.2021.26.2.3
ГЕНДЕРНОЕ ВОСПРИЯТИЕ НАУЧНЫХ ТЕКСТОВ
Научная статья
Мигранова И.Х. *
Башкирский государственный университет, Уфа, Россия
* Корреспондирующий автор (vk-migranova[at]mail.ru)
Аннотация
Статья посвящена изучению особенностей понимания реципиентами научных текстов с точки зрения тендерного аспекта. Рассматриваются тендерные стереотипы как модели и схемы восприятия научного текста, порожденного мужчинами и женщинами. Раскрывается содержание термина «лингвогендер», посредством которого описываются психосоциальные языковые особенности личности или гендерной языковой личности, под которой, в свою очередь, понимается определенная стереотипная модель. Подчеркивается необходимость методологической разработки проблемы пола с точки зрения осмысления ее биологического, социального, лингвистического аспектов. Описаны механизмы «приписывания» автору текста гендерных характеристик; при этом реципиент «приписывает» гендерность, проецируя особенности своего сознания на внешнюю и внутреннюю форму текста.
Ключевые слова: восприятие текста, гендер, лингвогендер, языковая личность, внешняя форма текста, внутренняя форма текста.
GENDER PERCEPTION OF SCIENTIFIC TEXTS
Research article
Migranova I.Kh. *
Bashkir State University, Ufa, Russia
* Corresponding author (vk-migranova[at]mail.ru)
Abstract
The article is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of the recipients' comprehension of scientific texts from the point of view of the gender aspect. Gender stereotypes are considered as models and schemes of perception of a scientific text generated by men and women. The content of the term "linguistic gender" is revealed, through which psychosocial linguistic characteristics of a person or gender linguistic personality, which, in turn, means a certain stereotypical model, are described. The necessity of the methodological development of the gender problem from the point of view of understanding its biological, social, linguistic aspects is emphasized. The mechanisms of "ascribing" gender characteristics to the author of the text are described; at the same time, the recipients "ascribe" gender, projecting the features of their consciousness onto the external and internal form of the text.
Keywords: perception of the text, gender, linguistic gender, linguistic personality, the external form of the text, the internal form of the text.
Introduction
The relevance of the work is determined by its inclusion in one of the promising areas of anthropo-oriented language learning — linguistic genderology and is associated with the need for theoretical understanding of a number of problems that have not received due attention so far.
Among such problems, we see the need to study the peculiarities of a person's understanding and comprehension of information in the form of various kinds of texts from a gender perspective. Currently, the study of the scientific text is acquiring special significance, which is associated with a number of factors, among which the process of globalization, covering all aspects of social life, including science; activation of intercultural scientific communication as a consequence of this process and a constant increase in the types of written information from various fields of knowledge, can be named.
Research of a scientific text, carried out in linguistics and related sciences, was primarily aimed at identifying its lexical-grammatical, semantic and stylistic features, studying its architectonics, analyzing various types of connections existing at the formal and semantic levels in the vertical and horizontal planes of the text. At the same time, to date, the gender factor in the perception of a scientific text remains poorly understood. As is known, gender is determined through the measurement of social relations that have developed in a particular culture. Gender as a scientific category is characterized by stability, but its components are constantly changing. This means that "gender-specific prescriptions may differ for different generations, social groups, certain ethnocultural and religious communities" [5, P. 197].
Of all deviants, gender stereotypes are increasingly used today. It should be noted that these stereotypes arise not on rational scientific knowledge but on certain gender bias which practically cannot be eradicated since they are associated with the mentality and traditions of the society [4]. Studies of the speech of men and women show that there are certain differences between how men speak and write, and how women do it [1]. All this together affects the characteristics of the recipients' perception of what men and women say or write.
Deconstruction is used as a meta-approach in gender studies, that is, a special strategy of attitude to the text, which includes both its deconstruction and its reconstruction [8, P. 75]. In this regard, it seems quite natural to introduce a new term — "lingvogender", through which it is possible to describe the psychosocial linguistic characteristics of a person or gender
linguistic personality. At the same time, the gender linguistic personality is considered as a stereotypical model, and linguistic gender is considered as one of its components.
The aim of our research is to establish differences in the perception of a scientific text written by men and women. It can be argued that the category of gender has a certain effect on the perception of certain words and concepts. In this regard, A.G. Fomin notes that gender is viewed as a cognitive category through which, by means of the formation of a network of associations based on gender, the entire surrounding reality is perceived and the cognition process is constructed. It is gender, according to the researcher, that largely determines the nature of interpersonal communication which is recorded at a deep level in the system of social institutions and determines the legitimacy of certain moral and ethical norms that prescribe the behavior of men and women [8].
These gender roles determine the existence of three gender personality types (masculine, feminine and androgynous), which cannot but affect the nature of speech activity. In the context of this study, we turn to the concept of S.L. Bem, considering the concept of androgyny which means that any person, regardless of their biological sex, is able to combine the primordially masculine and feminine qualities [2]. This state allows a person to less rigidly adhere to established gender-role norms and freely switch from traditionally female occupations to traditionally male ones, and vice versa. Androgyny can be correlated with the so-called "mobility" of the sexual role and designated as the integration of obvious masculine and feminine traits, which is peculiarly organized in accordance with individual personality characteristics and is often determined by a specific situation. Individuals who, in a familiar situation, consistently choose a masculine or feminine model of behavior, do not belong to the androgynous type. Androgyny means reaching a new level of mixing gender-role stereotypes, when a person does not adhere to the tradition of polar division of individuals in accordance with gender role. This phenomenon can be viewed not simply as a combination of what are considered opposite qualities, but as a new system for integrating existing stereotypes.
The development, perception and interiorization of such sex-role stereotypes can be conventionally described in three stages [2]. For example, the way a reader perceives a text is conditioned by what kind of "conceptual tools" he uses to comprehend the information contained in this text, which M. Talbot considers not fixed but dependent on many factors including social ones [9]. Depending on how the reader interprets the text, he will extract such information from it. Of course, there is a limit to arbitrary interpretations of the text, and this limit is the objective content of the text or concept [4].
In modern scientific literature, the following ideas about the aforementioned gender types have developed [2]:
1. Masculine gender type — a "social" type that feels comfortable in the environment of others, the goal in life is communication. This gender type is focused on the authority of strength and independence of behavior, has high individual achievements, prefers male authority, is intolerant of objections, prefers to defend own opinion and take leadership positions. Representatives of the masculine gender type are the least emotional, they perceive many processes and concepts in a dual way.
2. The feminine gender type prefers dependent, subordinate behavior, is cautious, does not like to show initiative and independence, deliberately limits the "research space", needs constant moral support from other people.
3. The androgynous gender type is free from rigid sexual typification and traditional norms, is able to really comprehend and evaluate situations, overcomes difficulties independently, is socially active and communicative, has good organizational skills and personal qualities of a constructive nature (protection, help), persistent, independent, has a high level achievements, values personal comfort. The androgynous gender type has a clear life purpose, really looks at things from the point of view of their functionality.
Based on the foregoing, we can conclude that, despite the active development of the theory of gender in linguistics, modern science is in "need of methodological development of the problem of gender from the point of view of understanding its biological and social aspects" [3, P. 18]. This is due to the following reasons: first, it is still widely believed that biological differences between men and women are correlated with their social behavior, which indicates a commitment to the concept of biological determinism in this matter; secondly, as multimedia capabilities increase, the social environment is much more subject to changes than the biological characteristics of the individual. In such a case, the socialization of both men and women has a steady tendency to transform into the realization of their interests and abilities, conditioned by social needs. In this regard, it can be argued that the content of specific messages from a gender perspective contains the entire totality of a certain fragment of social content. It can be both real and abstract, existing only in the imagination of the individual.
The semantic variability of the text in its perception is a manifestation of the mechanisms of semantic formation conditioned by the gender expectations of the recipients, which is realized, as in other types of texts' perception [7, P. 163], in the form of individual reactions of the recipients. Thus, "gender" is actually a subjective sense when perceived. In fact, the perceiving person "ascribes" gender characteristics to the author of the text, but this fact does not at all indicate their presence — the recipient "ascribes" gender, projecting the features of his consciousness onto the external and internal form of the text.
As a result of the psycholinguistic experiment, we obtained a set of parameters according to which the subjects characterized the scientific text as "masculine" and "feminine", confidently attributing them to the corresponding sex. At the same time, it is obvious that often "masculinity" and "femininity" is associated with the factor of ease/difficulty of understanding the text. This fact gives grounds for including a gender component in modern models of understanding information in text form. At the same time, it is associated with meaning and relates to the semantic mechanisms of understanding, but not to the meaningful ones.
In the process of identifying the biological sex of the authors of scientific texts, it was established that the written speech of the authors does not always correspond to the generally accepted gender stereotypes of "male" and "female" text. This confirms our assumption that the features of male and female written speech can only be defined as tendencies of use and are consistent with the belief of a number of researchers who believe that gender-marked differences inherent in the speech behavior of men and women manifest themselves inconsistently (hence the characterization of gender as a "floating" marker)
and are not absolute, but relative. In the traditional sense, scientific texts are not gender-oriented, and therefore it is often difficult to determine the gender of the author of a scientific text.
Conclusion
Thus, the text itself, representing a certain type, gender-labeled or gender-neutral, plays an active role in the communication process. The degree of gender marking of scientific texts is often so insignificant that the identification of the author's gender is often realized based solely on extralinguistic / background data (subject of content, intuition) rather than by analyzing the linguistic aspects of the text (structural and verbal-semantic analysis of the text). In the absence of gender markers in the scientific text that are directly related to the linguistic aspects of the text, the thematic focus of the scientific text becomes a defining parameter of the gender of the text, conditioned by stereotypical ideas about the spheres traditionally assigned by society to men (politics, economics, science, business, hunting, fishing, sports) and women (children, fashion, health, education, social protection, culture). In accordance with the stereotypical notions that science belongs to the sphere of interests of men, the scientific text itself acts as an indicator of gender marking.
Конфликт интересов Conflict of Interest
Не указан. None declared.
Список литературы / References
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