Dan Zeman

Accounts of gender terms have been pursued within what is known as ameliorative frameworks (e.g., Haslanger (2000)), where the aim is to provide meanings of the target expressions that service political, emancipatory goals. In this paper, we propose one such account, starting from what we take to be a suitable descriptive account of terms such as “woman”, “man”, etc. The main claim we make is that a polysemy approach is suitable for both a descriptive and an ameliorative project; and although polysemy views have been proposed in the literature (e.g., Bettcher (2009), Laskowski (2020)), we offer a substantive implementation of the claim that gender terms are polysemous by appealing to theories from the field of lexical semantics. 

Thus, we start by paying close attention to the various uses a term like “woman” has: it can be uses in a biologicalsense, in a social role sense, in a self-identificatory sense and (we submit) in an evaluative sense. While this list is not exhaustive, we claim that a suitable model for this variety of uses is what is known as “rich-lexicon theories” (e.g., Jackendoff (1990), Pustejovsky (1995), del Pinal (2018), Zeman (2022)); according to such theories, the lexical entry of a word is comprised of various interrelated meaning dimensions from which one or several are selected as the term’s sensein a certain context. We provide a tentative lexical entry for “woman” and show how the various uses mentioned above can be accounted for by the mechanisms of foregrounding and backgrounding of one or more meaning dimensions.

We then show that an ameliorative proposal can be forged based on and starting from the concept just sketched. We first note, following Jenkins (2016), that amelioration need not come down to upholding a unique goal but can instead be multifaceted. The polysemy idea sits well with this plurality of purposes: if, for example, in a certain context the woman-as-class concept is the one needed for emancipatory purposes, then it is the social role dimension (perhaps suitably modified) that is foregrounded; if in a different context the woman-as-identity concept is the relevant one, then it is the self-identificatory dimension that is foregrounded; and so on. Ultimately, the aim of the various ameliorative projects pursued is to arrive at a lexical entry with less dimensions – precisely those consistent with the emancipatory goals (contextually) pursued. Lastly, we show that our approach manages to fend off some of the recent criticisms of Haslanger’s ameliorative project and its replacement with a linguistic innovation strategy proposed by Simion and Kelp (2023).