On gender neutrality in Brazilian Portuguese and the limits of the linguistic system

• Autor(a) principal: Schwindt, Luiz Carlos
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista da ABRALIN (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revista.abralin.org/index.php/abralin/article/view/1709
• topic: Gênero neutro; Gênero gramatical; Mudança deliberada; Linguagem inclusiva; Neutral gender; Grammatical gender; Deliberate change; Inclusive language

In this paper, I propose an approach to gender neutrality in Brazilian Portuguese from the perspective of the linguistic system. For this, I start from considerations about the characteristics of deliberate changes and the patterns of markedness and productivity of the grammatical gender in the language. In this perspective, four types of current uses of inclusive gender are evaluated: marked feminine in case of two genders nouns (eg. a presidenta 'the president', feminine); contrastive and concurrent feminine and masculine forms, especially  in vocatives, instead of the generic use of masculine (eg alunas e alunos, 'students', feminine and masculine); special characters closing nouns and adjectives, such as x and @ (eg amigx, amig@, 'friend', neuter), or extension of the function of existing marks, such as -e (eg amigue 'friend', neuter); change in the base of pronouns and articles (eg ile '3rd sing neutral pronoun', le 'definite neutral article'). Among these forms, in addition to the marked feminine and the contrastive use of feminine and masculine forms, which already have significant use in the language, I propose that, in the domain of the word, -e finds less restricted conditions for expansion in the system considering the subset of nouns and adjectives denoting biological sex.