La consapevolezza delle scrittrici riguardo all'esistenza della "lingua delle donne": un'analisi in prospettiva linguistica

The aim of this paper is to analyse the correlation between women writers and language, as social construct strongly correlated to diastratic and diaphasic factors. This study will examine Matilde Serao’s awareness about the existence of a “women’s language” in their novels. The research starts from sociolinguistic surveys, which have revealed the existence of a set of expectations held by a community of speakers regarding the linguistic behaviours attributed to gender. The analysis applies to the novel a set of prototypical features of “women’s language”, according to speakers’ expectation, and some linguistic phenomena (divided on the bases of different linguistic levels, like morpho-phonological, syntactic, and pragmatic-textual) for each one of these traits. The linguistic examination has been performed with GATE, an open-source software used for the development of Information Extraction system. Thanks to the data obtained it is possible to compare the occurrences of each prototypical feature with all the others linguistic possibilities available to express the same concept. The relative frequency of the linguistic phenomena demonstrates that they depend on an intersection of variables like gender, diastratic and diaphasic factors. It is very important to focus on the difference between sex and gender. As a matter of fact, existing literature on the subject has proven there are no differences in masculine and feminine language dependent on sex, being a biological factor. Instead, there can be differences depending on gender, in the sense of a factor built on social and historical phenomena.