Date: Wednesday 26 March 2025
Time: 17.00 to 19.00
Location: Uí Chadhain theatre, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin.
Registration to this free event is required. Please click here to register on the Eventbrite page or click on the image below.
Professor Giuliana Giusti (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) will give this public lecture, which is organised by Dr Valentina Colasanti, School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences, TCD.
Professor Giuliana Giusti says “Language is the most important means of human communication. Languages are likewise the most important means to transmit cultural concepts and create social groups (family, friends, local communities, national identities, professional circles, political discourses, etc.). Undoubtedly, our manner of speaking, comprising our native or non-native competence, regional accent, age slang, formal and informal codes, positions us in society. Likewise, we recognize our interlocutors as being inside or outside of our “social group” from the way they speak. This is all due to the double biological and socio-cultural nature of language.
Gender is a cultural label grounded on the persuasion that biological sexes are two and that they determine most of our behaviours. Human beings have been traditionally labelled as either male or female from birth. This labelling brings with it a cluster of expectations on the behaviour of the newborn, who will receive continuous inputs in social interactions to comply with societal expectations. In the last two centuries, feminists have struggled to dispute the “naturalness” of gender biases. More recently, the binary conception of gender has been questioned. Languages include gender in their forms and functions. In this talk I present the interpretation of neutralized gender forms in Italian, a language that has gender specification not only on pronouns (like English) but also in most nouns (even inanimate ones) and concord for gender on determiners, adjectives and even verbs. I will present how Italian can be challenging but also resourceful to deliver inclusive content communication.”
Giuliana Giusti is a professor of Linguistics at the University of Ca’ Foscari of Venice, where she also serves as a member of the Equal Opportunity Committee. Her research primarily focuses on formal comparative linguistics, particularly within Germanic, Romance, and Balkan languages. She specialises in the syntax of nominal expressions, exploring aspects such as language attrition, first and second language acquisition, language change, and dialectal variation. She has contributed to reference grammars of Italian, Old Italian, English, and German, aiming to enhance linguistic awareness and support language learning through innovative approaches. Additionally, she actively advocates for the use of gender-inclusive Italian in media and institutions and is currently engaged in studying endangered Balkan varieties in the Adriatic region.
For further information please email Dr Valentina Colasanti at <valentina.colasanti@tcd.ie>