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News with an Attitude: Ideological perspectives in the historical press
Edited by Claudia Claridge
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 105] 2025
► pp. 201–225

Chapter 10
Feminatives in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodicals in partitioned Poland

| Adam Mickiewicz University
According to Woolard, language ideology studies have focused on: (1) linguistic and social differentiation; (2) linguistic authority, including also “linguistic construction of political and social authority” (2021: 12). Whereas gender differentiation may be studied on the basis of linguistic manifestations (feminatives), authority and its construction are best viewed in an emic perspective, which calls for support from the relevant metadiscourse. This paper focuses on occupational and agentive terms for women in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodicals in partitioned Poland. The analyses recover potential authorial attitudes based on typographic marking and characterise feminine referential terms with respect to the scores of synthetic vs. analytic and generic vs. gender-specific forms.
Keywords: feminatives, women’s magazines, partitioned Poland, nineteenth-century, gender-specification, Magazyn Mód i Powieści
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Ideologies of woman’s place in society in Central and Eastern Europe
    • 2.1Gender-specification and its perceptions in Polish
  • 3.Ladies’ press
    • 3.1What constitutes the women’s press in partitioned Poland?
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Data sources
    • 4.2Historical news discourse as a source of social commentary
      • 4.2.1Visual marking analysis
    • 4.3Morphosyntactic options for referring to women
      • 4.3.1Feminatives in Tygodnik Mód i Powieści [Weekly magazine for fashions and novels]
      • 4.3.2Morphosyntactic types: Summary and limitations
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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