Page 458 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
course, the mere substitution of a combined pronoun such as he/she for the supposedly 'generic' he (under- stood as the assertion of '[traditional grammars ... that the word manfunctions ... to encompass human beings of both sexes'; Frank and Treichler 1989:3) does not, in and by itself, change anything in the conditions of society that underprivilege its female members. But if it is true, as McConnell-Ginet says (1989), that 'earlier feminist research has established that he, no matter what its user intends, is not unprob- lematically interpreted as generic, and the consequent shift in the community's beliefs about how he is inter- preted has influenced what one can intend the pro- noun to convey,' then it is also permissible to use this example as one of the areas in which emancipatory linguistics has actually been successful, albeit to a modest degree, that is, by establishing a whole new code for the use of pronouns in English—pronouns that reflect the growing consciousness of women's presence in society, but that at the same time, and with apparent success, change the ways in which society's members (both female and male) speak, write, and think about women, treat women, and interact with
women. As examples, compare the growingnumber of journals that subscribe to guidelines for 'nonsexist' use of language promulgated and adopted by various scientific societies and journals (such as the American Psychological Association, the Modern Language Association of America, the Linguistic Society of America, and their respective journals, the Journal of Pragmatics, and so on).
Language, in McConnell-Ginet's words, 'matters so much precisely because so little matter is attached to it; meanings are not given but must be produced and reproduced, negotiated in situated contexts of communication (1989:49),' that is, between the users of language themselves in their social and com- municative relations, in people's pragmatic interaction in and through linguistic structures.
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