Pei-Ci Li
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Sociolinguist, her research interest focuses on language and gender, including sex, gender, and sexuality metaphors and gender stereotypes represented in media and textbooks. She is particularly interested in how different nouns denoting animate or inanimate references (humans, animals, objects, food, etc.), are associated with feminine or masculine quality in languages with or without grammatical gender. She will contribute to the gender studies and sociolinguistics of this CAT research project.
Research Interests
French-Mandarin comparative studies, language and gender in Mandarin, Metaphors.
Unraveling the interactions between culture and language:
Does grammatical gender foster gender inequality and vice versa?
(Collaborative project, awarded a NetIAS Constructive Advanced Thinking grant, 2021-2024)
The human cognitive system interacts with the cultural environment. Within this interaction, the interplay between grammatical gender and sociocultural gender represents a societal challenge. The presence of grammatical gender (such as masculine and feminine) in language has an effect on how men and women are perceived by humans. Most studies compared languages with sex-based gender (such as masculine/feminine in Spanish) with languages that do not have a grammatical gender system (e.g., in English and Mandarin). However, other nominal classification systems such as noun classes (e.g., in Swahili) or classifiers (e.g., in Japanese) also categorize nouns of the lexicon into categories based on features such as animacy or shape. Furthermore, most languages considered in existing studies are Indo-European. Nevertheless, sex-based grammatical gender system are not restricted to this language family. For example, grammatical gender systems are also found in languages such as Mian (Ok family, Papua-New-Guinea).
We expand the data pool for testing the effect of nominal classification systems on gender parity. Information on grammatical gender and sociocultural gender is extracted from the data already gathered during the respective research of the project members. We then use quantitative methods to capture the multilevel interaction between the linguistic and the sociocultural variables.
Key Publications
Li, Pei-Ci. 2022. A Comparative Study of Gender Metaphors in French and Mandarin. GLAD! Revue sur le langage, le genre, les sexualités, 13: 1-7. https://doi.org/10.4000/glad.5650
Li, Pei-ci., & Wang, Sheng-Fu. 2022. FEMALE teachers get pregnant and MALE teachers commit sexual harassment? Implications of overt gender markings of Chinese profession nouns. Paper presented at the 55th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. University of Bucharest, August 24-27.
Li, Pei-Ci. 2020. Une étude comparative des métaphores de genre en français et en mandarin. PhD dissertation: Université Paris Cité, Paris.
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