ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates English from the perspective of gender, and focuses on lexis and grammar. One of the most important things a name does, then, is to mark gender. One baby-naming book specifically recommends parents to choose a name that identifies the child’s sex. The feminist insight which caused the word gender to be used alongside sex has been undermined by its overuse as a replacement for the word sex. It is a commonplace of relativist thinking in linguistics to draw attention to kinship terms in different cultures to show how languages differ in how they ‘divide up’ or categorize reality. Romantic or sexual scenes in books are a very useful source to analyse how language, in particular the collocation of female and male subjects with passive or active verbs, with relational or transitive verbs, reflects a social or ideological norm for female and male behaviour.
