GENDER NEUTRALITY IN SCIENTIFIC RUSSIAN DISCOURSE

Abstract

This article is supposed to prove an assumption that scientific and technical texts in academic discourse are void of gender specificities which get neutralized. The scientific novelty of the study is in survey and description of discursive gender means in scientific and technical articles, identification of gender-neutral language means equally used by both men and women in scientific texts. The proposed study reflects the linguistic features of achieving gender neutrality in scientific texts written by men or women. The study is aimed at more careful thought of gender neutrality and gender markedness of discourse. The data for study is the texts of articles presented in the journal of “ Current Issues of Oil and Gas”( The I.M. Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences) schedulized in the List of peer-reviewed scientific publications of the Higher Attestation Commission of Russia. The journals publish the scientific achievements in the oil and gas industry. The read out included texts from 2009 till 2022. In total, 60 texts of scientific and technical articles written both by men and women have been analyzed. A comparative method is used to draw an analogy between similar phenomena presented by authors of different genders; a componential analysis ; discourse-analytic approaches for pointing out sustained discursive formulae in scientific discourse. The article presents institutional features of the scientific discourse, articulates the concepts of gender markedness and gender neutrality. The characteristic linguistic properties of the gender neutrality in the scientific discourse are revealed. The discursive and lexico-grammatical analyses of the scientific and technical texts written both by men and women extracted a trend to neutralization of gender in scientific discourse. Gender markedness of the discourse is specified through either implicit or explicit linguistic gender properties. The gender neutrality of the scientific discourse is meant the usage of discursive formulas and lexical units which do not indicate the communicators’ gender parameters. The survey of scientific articles published in technical journals demonstrated zero gender differences in scientific discourse between male and female authors’ texts. Thus, according to research carried out Russian scientific discourse is specified by a consistent trend in gender neutralization which is proved by a lack of gender marked discursive and linguistic means pointing at gender properties of the authors. A scientific article as a genre of scientific discourse contains specific evaluative vocabulary used by both men and women. Although scientific functional style is void of expressive means the research points out a tendency to use colloquial expressions, idiomatic units and also descriptive-representational devices such as metaphors and adjectives in superlative degree. Directions for future research are seen in the development of a universal for different discourses gender model.