USJ Language and Linguistics Seminar | Cycle of Conferences on Language and Identity: ‘Grammar, Gender, and Sex: an unruly threesome.’
USJ Language and Linguistics Seminar | Cycle of Conferences on Language and Identity: ‘Grammar, Gender, and Sex: an unruly threesome.’
23
Feb
The Faculty of Arts and Humanities is hosting the USJ Language and Linguistics Seminar “Grammar, Gender, and Sex: an unruly threesome” from the Cycle of Conferences on Language and Identity, on February 23.
ABOUT SEMINAR:
Language maketh man! The language we speak or even the way we speak it tells the world who and what we are. From the ancient days, when the Greeks used to call barbarians those who did not speak Greek to more recent times when territory claims are made on the basis that the majority of the people there speak Russian and not Ukrainian, language has served to identify individuals as members of a group. Indeed, what we speak can tell where we are from, what we do, our sex and age, or even which part of town we live in.
Language as a major factor in our personal and collective identity shapes to a great extent our linguistic interactions and things such as nationality or sex, social background, or religion affect many of our language use choices.
Problems such as the use of which pronoun or why to adjust our speech will be some of the topics in this cycle of four conferences which will look at how what we speak determines what we are and vice-versa.
ABOUT THE CONFERENCE:
‘Grammar, Gender, and Sex: an unruly threesome.’
Traditional concepts of sex and gender and the relation between the two have come under revision of late as gender identity becomes increasingly more dependent on individual choice than on nature. This situation has even led to changes in the policy of sex recognition in many countries.
What about language? Can it too be changed like the law? Can we change language to accommodate new non-consensual forms of seeing the world? Can we change the grammar of our languages to reflect new concepts of sex and gender? This talk will reflect on the challenges that these changes in individual identification bring to language and how grammatical categories may be able or not to reflect new demands from a society in constant change.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Roberto Ceolin, MA (Conim.), MPhil, DPhil (Oxon.) was educated in Coimbra, Salamanca, Salzburg and Oxford. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the Greek verb. He has taught Latin and Greek, as well as courses on historical and synchronic linguistics, in Salamanca, Salzburg and Oxford. At present he teaches ancient languages at the Faculty of Christian Studies and Philosophy-USJ, Macau.
Details:
Date: Thursday, 23 February 2023
Time: 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m (Macau)
Location: Speakers Hall, Nape Campus
Organised by: Faculty of Arts and Humanities (FAH/USJ)
Moderated by: Prof. Roberto Ceolin
*Free event, open to the general public
*Sessions will be conducted in English
