Abstract
In recent years, efforts for a more equal and inclusive society have led to reviewing sexist language in dictionaries (e.g., Oxford English Dictionary, Duden, Treccani). Definitions and examples are being cleaned of gender stereotypes. In grammatical gender languages (Stahlberg et al. 2007) like Italian and German, agentives, i.e., “linguistic forms that indicate an agent, as job titles, etc.” (Bengoechea 2017:200), are recorded both in their masculine and feminine form.
In terminology, the debate on which forms of agentives should be recorded is still open. Terminology puts a strong focus on concepts that are abstract units of knowledge (ISO 1087:2019, 3.2.7). Traditionally, terminology databases record the canonical form of designations that represent concepts; generally, the masculine form. Adding the feminine forms is possible, but sparks an essential question: is gender the mere “feature of an object”, i.e., a property (ISO 1087:2019, 3.1.3) or a characteristic of a concept, i.e., an “abstraction of a property” (ISO 1087:2019, 3.2.1) (Winter 2021:29). In the first case, the masculine and feminine form of an agentive designate the same concept and should be described in the same concept entry. In the second case, they designate two different concepts and should be described in different concept entries.
Public and private organizations are expressing an increasing need for feminine agentives in their terminology databases to be able to use them correctly and consistently in their texts (e.g., job advertisements, business cards, organizational charts, e-mail signatures) (Evers 2022:13) and, in general, in authoring and proofreading tools, ontologies, CAT tools and machine translation engines. The latter are known for their male bias (Savoldi et al. 2021).
This affects also definitions in terminology databases. In terminology, concepts are preferably defined according to their intension. Intensional definitions follow the model definiendum = genus proximum + differentiae specificae (Arntz et al. 2021:67). Concepts are described starting with the (closest) generic concept and by specifying the delimiting characteristics (cf. ISO 1087:2019, ISO 704:2020).
Against this background, we explore to what extent terminological definitions can be drafted in a gender-sensitive language following terminological principles. As a case study, we use 640 definitions in Italian from a multilingual database containing legal terminology and
* identify which definitions are (not) gender-neutral and why
* classify strategies to write gender-neutral definitions in Italian (e.g. using gender-neutral terms or phrases)
* draft guidelines for gender-neutral definitions in Italian
The study shows three main challenges:
* Agentives in the legal domain are often abstract. They do not focus on a person, who can be male, female or non-binary, but rather on a function or role (Ralli & Evers 2023, Chiocchetti & Ralli 2022). Following this abstraction process, agentives are usually recorded in their masculine form (Ralli & Evers 2023).
* Defining hyponyms requires mentioning the hypernym. This implies semantic (not conceptual!) cross-references between concepts to achieve gender-neutral definitions.
* Many feminine agentives in Italian are rarely used and cannot be described by contexts from real texts.
Considering the aforementioned issues, we will illustrate our analysis while contributing to the debate on gender equality in terminological definitions.