LANGUAGE, GENDER AND IDENTITY
A MONTENEGRIN
PERSPECTIVE SLAVICA PEROVIC
Abstract
In this paper we shall deal with the interdependence of gender and language on the one hand and gender and identity on the other. The relevant framework of analysis will encompass the theory of dominance, the theory of difference and performativeness theory. The current situation in Montenegro regarding the subject matter of our investigation somewhat reflects the chronology of the research in these categories and the historical order of their appearance. There is strong evidence to support the main postulates of the theory of dominance (Lakoff 1974) primarily expressed in terms of the markedness of the female member contrasted with the unmarkedness of the male. Also, the gender non-parallelism present in the public and private spheres finds fertile soil in the Montenegrin mentality, behaviour and overall cultural script of pronounced patriarchality. Perhaps the theory of difference would be nominally the best theory to describe the gender situation
in Montenegro in both its aspects: difference as unintentional dominance (Tannen 1990) and "different" in the meaning of "worse" when applied to women. At the same time, performativeness theory (Butler 1990, 1997), which takes the stand that gender means acting and doing, not just being, would be very suitable for grasping the various manifestations of gender identity. All the while, irrespective of these theories, the media exert their inexorable influence in maintaining the traditional role of the woman (and men), albeit with some new vocabulary.
Slavica Perovic is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Montenegro, Podgorica; e-mail: helenic@t-com.me.
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Language and Gender Time Machine
In this paper we will elaborate on the idea of how major theories and methods in the study of language and gender are reflected in Montenegro and how gendered identities are produced, reproduced and changed. We will try to relate culture, ideology, power and the role of the media in this process while the theoretical framework will be discourse analysis, cognitive science and linguistic anthropology, which is by definition the study of language and identity.
Chronology or a time-machine metaphor is a key word of the organisation of this paper because we can observe the phenomena in question along with the history of their study, which allows us both a static and dynamic approach. We can easily travel from one period of study to the other, switch from one theory to its competing counterpart and juxtapose the results of the research locally with the ones obtained globally. The Montenegrin state of affairs regarding these sociolinguistic and anthropologic phenomena can be assessed by the degree of accomplishment of women's emancipation on the one hand and the advancement in the change of awareness and attitude in the society on the other.
The relation between language and gender is direct and has largely been described, whereas the concept of identity has now taken a central position in linguistic anthropology
serving less as the background for other kinds of investigation and more as a topic meriting study in its own right.... Among the many symbolic resources available for the cultural production of identity, language is the most flexible and pervasive (Bucholtz and Hall 2007, 269).
The field is preoccupied with the linguistic production of culture which entails a concern with the variety of culturally specific subject positions that speakers enact through language. The classic anthropological studies deal with performance and ritual, socialisation and status, but with a somewhat different perspective: the focus is not merely on a kind of speech, but also a kind of speakers who produce y and reproduce particular identities through their use of language (Bucholtz and Hall 2007, 269). Linguistic input, especially that coming from discourse analysis, £ helped greatly in grasping the hidden meanings of interpersonal exchange in communication where interlocutors, their respective roles, and the hierarchy they are in, followed by their status, the position of power they hold etc., constitute powerful "ingredients" in the process of production, or change of identity in a given cultural script. The analyst only has to be aware of all of that and have instruments sensitive enough to detect it in its entirety. The description of identities thus defined also ^ differs with regard to theory. Research practice, which has gone all the way from radical feminism to the situation where performativeness is the state-of-the art theory, diametrically differs from the academic milieus which have not even begun any serious investigation along these lines. The major difference is in the degree of awareness regarding "the path of emancipation" to take (or not to take).
Theory of Dominance
The 60's and 70's of the previous century saw the advent of feminism and the study of language and gender. Lakoff's influential work Language and Woman's ^ Place (1975) argued that women have a different way of speaking from men - that
is, a way of speaking that both reflects and gives rise to a subordinate position in society. The main characteristic of such language is the absence of power springing CO from a negative attitude that women have about themselves. Speaking like a woman ^ meant cautious speech, a lot of hedging and avoiding assertiveness. Such language abounds in the devices used as mitigation (sort of, I think), inessential qualifiers (really happy, so beautiful) and it renders women's speech tentative, powerless, and trivial. As such it disqualifies them from positions of power and authority. That creates language which is itself a tool of oppression - it is learned as part of being a woman through societal norms and it keeps women in their place (Tannen 1990; Cameron 1992; Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003). Lakoff's basic claims that: (1) women and men talk differently and (2) those differences in men's and women's speech result from - and support - male dominance constitutes the theory of dominance. Basic tenets of the dominance theory are that the aim of gender discrimination is disempowerment of women whereas the lack of semantic parallelism in language simply emphasises the ideological task of "keeping women in their place."
Some of the examples from this revolutionary work arranged around linguistic categories are a history of the social and language practice that revealed the dynamics in gender relations of that time. However, the influence of this theory gradually weakened because it had some theoretical imperfections. For example, Deborah Cameron remarks that feminists have not always subjected linguistic stereotypes to the scrutiny they require. Namely, sociolinguistics that deals with gender-related variation inherited a sexist tradition in the study which is usually called "folklinguistic" or "anecdotal." It represents the speech of subordinate groups both as different and deviant and Cameron notices that Language and Woman's Place is remarkable in creating a stereotype of its own (Cameron 1992, 4344). It was relatively easy for Cameron to observe the imperfections in the theory because the research had advanced, but at the time that Lakoff's essay appeared, the revolutionary impact it made hugely outweighed the theoretical shortcomings. Some of the examples still have the power to make us think about the linguistic and other reality around us.
Forty or fifty years ago in the USA, it was impossible to create lexical and semantic parallelism with a man's profession and say it without being insulting:
(1)	She is a professional.
Example (1) would have had only one interpretation, that of a prostitute. Today, the business environment in the USA absolutely accepts the lexeme professional as applied to a woman without it having a pejorative, i.e. ideological sound. Spinster and old maid as chauvinist names for single women parallel to bachelor are almost obsolete, not just politically incorrect in everyday speech. Bachelorette, as a newly coined word, is an acceptable result of the search for linguistic justice while dubbing life's reality. Ms. is a regular title for women, which is a linguistic invention that allowed women to withhold their marital status. Bella Abzug fought for it in the United States Congress and the rest is the history of women's emancipation and the desire not to be recognised through their men. Another example is pronominal neutralisation:
(2)	Everyone take his seat.
His in (2) was gradually resolved linguistically as his/her, his or her or their. The last word is the consensus of gendered linguistics, regardless of congruence. Example in (3) is the genesis of today's word chair for the presiding person. It all
started with chairman, but women rebelled and that resulted in chairwoman. That lexical alternation proved to be awkward in practice. The final outcome was chair which, in a given context in componential analysis, has elements [+ human] and [+ animate]. Chairperson was lexically neutral, therefore correct, yet semantically blunt. All this is the lexical and semantic shift created by a linguistic ambiance which was gender-sensitive and which cherished political correctness. This is the developmental series:
(3)	Chairman < chairwoman < chairperson < chair
In many ways the language used nowadays in Montenegro would reveal a gendered identity parallel to the one in the USA some forty years ago. Researchers and analysts associated with a dominance theory framework could generally find many instances to support their views. In essence, they argue that differences between women's and men's speech arise because of male dominance over women and that they persist in order to keep women subordinated to men (cf. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003). One would say that both the theory and practice are passé. But, they are not. Example (1) again:
(4)	She is a professional.
In Montenegro it is still likely to be understood in an insulting way, and it is advisable to avoid such formulations in order to avoid strange looks (Perovic 2009).
(5)	Miss or Mrs?
This is still a perfectly legitimate inquiry about the term of address that anyone can ask a woman and she will readily answer. Miss, she will say and probably blush with the coyness of her mid fifties. Spinsters, not bachelorettes are all around. They do not happily live in Singleton like Bridget Jones, they live in the macho culture of Montenegro where it is still normal to ask a woman: "Why are you not married?" And she will oblige with an answer.
As for pronominal neutralisation, it is not possible in Montenegrin. He still substitutes man and woman. Man is generically used as in (6), njegovo, and according to the current norm it cannot be changed or replaced by any of the linguistic y solutions from English.
(6)	Covjek ima pravo na rad. To je njegovo osnovno ljudsko pravo.
(A man has the right to work. It is his/her basic human right.)
Forty years ago woman was defined as "the other sex", the one against which she was seen is man, and her social status was defined through him: Mrs. John Smith. Linguistically, woman is described through the discourse concept of markedness, being marked, of course. Today, in Montenegro, gender identity for women in the public arena is still often supplied via men and masculine form of nouns. Not long ago, while participating in a TV talk, a professor strongly opposed being referred to as an antropoloskinja, which in translation is woman anthropologist - she insisted on the male grammatical form antropolog. The idea behind this is that a woman professionally sounds more convincing and her expertise is more powerful if she uses the masculine gender for the name of her profession. Montenegrin (and all languages belonging to the Serbo-Croatian corpus) is, besides, known as a language which has not fully developed terms and established practice for women's occupations yet. That is why it is possible to hear examples such as (7) on television:
(7)	Pacijent je trudan.
^^	(The [male] patient is pregnant).
The patriarchal system in Montenegro is still strong, the gender hierarchy is deeply rooted, male heirs are almost the norm and heiress is a deviation from it LO and the sister expects protection from the brother - in a word, male dominance is ^ understood as natural and normal. Yet, women are present in positions of power, Parliament included, but they are not as visible as they should be. They speak, but they are not assertive enough; they are assertive, but they do not interrupt, and when they do, they do it for purposes of intimacy, not to take the floor, and so on. When women are assigned departments and projects they tend to be of less prominence, not to say of marginal importance compared to those of men. So, women have positions in establishments and they hold positions of power. However, positions of power do not grant power; they have to be executed in a powerful way. Gendered identity is performed differently each time and there is not a one-to-one relationship of gender to power, or to authority or to ideology. Research on this has yet to be undertaken, though a little has been already done (Perovic 2006, 2008, 2009). In a way, the 70's of the USA are present in today's Montenegro both in terms of the fight for women's rights and of the (modest) results of that fight.
Men Are Dominant - Unintentionally
Language as a symbolic resource for cultural production of identity, i.e. gendered identity, is above all diagnostic. As the study of language and gender progressed it became evident that women and men spoke differently because of fundamental differences in their relationship to their language. One of the likely reasons was different socialisation and experiences in early childhood. Tannen, who was the creator of the difference theory, argued that girls and boys live in different subcultures analog to the distinct subcultures associated with those from different class or ethnic backgrounds. The hypothesis of Tannen's influential book You Just Don't Understand (1990) is that men are indeed dominant, but that is not their intention, only the communicative goals and their realisations are different: men seek status, women seek rapport and relationships. That perceptiveness in observing the phenomena created a solid basis for Tannen's conclusion that genderlects as the language of sexes exist and that conversation between men and women constitutes cross-cultural communication.
Language and its use are inseparable because language is created in practice. As the linguistic theory advanced Tannen was able to provide an answer, with a high degree of certainty, to Lakoff's question: "Who decides who is responsible for things? Who gets the power to determine whose meaning" (Lakoff 2004, 22). Tannen, using a number of examples, linguistically approaches the conversation, the actants, and the felicity conditions under which a certain speech act is performed and she concludes that the understanding of culture and of upbringing, of different backgrounds, different ways of thinking and different verbal practices are to be understood as an answer to the question of gender non-parallelism. Barrie Thorne, Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley (1983) also felt the need to counteract the trend of the fixedness of roles in the introduction to their second anthology of articles on language and gender. They argued that researchers need to take into consideration the contexts in which the differences emerged - who was talking to whom, for what purposes, and in what setting. Furthermore, there are differences within each group, and the need to detect the moment when the differences within
each gender group outweigh any differences between the groups (cf. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003). All this channelled the research of language and gender in the USA towards a less radical stand and a more sophisticated theory which relied on richer input coming from the neighbouring disciplines of discourse analysis, conversational analysis and pragmatics, as well as the theory of cultural scripts.
Although in the Anglo world the difference theory chronologically followed the dominance theory, the order of theory and practice in Montenegro was inverted. To our knowledge, in the scarce sociological research, there has always been an insistence on the difference between the genders being due to biological, cultural and social factors, rarely dominance. Dominance was not a term widely used. It was presupposed as such because the mentality affirmed it as normal and legitimate behaviour, so complaints about asymmetries between genders were usually rejected with: "Ma pusti muskarce, znas kakvi su" (Oh, forget men, you know how they are). Women's lib never reached Montenegro in its original force, the dominance theory weakened along the way, only the difference theory had some chance. And here the time machine bleeps.
In 1999 Tannen's bestseller book You Just Don't Understand appeared in Montenegro in our translation, under the title of Ti jednostavno ne razumijes. The reception was excellent, it was recognised as something new, useful and fresh and it was sold out within a few months. But, as the play of signs is more important than the play of meanings, so it sent at the same time a metamessage about its real effect. The front cover depicted a man being blown amongst cigarette smoke from the mouth of a woman. Obviously, equal was unequal enough for men.
Figure 1: The Montenegrin Edition of Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand
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Ti jednostavno ne razumijes

They needed more, they needed dominance. Difference was the most to which they could consent. Our translation of the book in a way pacified the situation between the genders in Montenegro, which had not yet been radicalised. No serious linguistic and anthropological research on the issue existed, gendered identities were fixed, though practice in all aspects of life was casting a shadow over that fixedness. However, the last two decades have seen an acceleration in the research in linguistics and sociology, establishing gender studies in universities, activism in the NGO sector regarding constitutional change, but also the appearance of practical issues related to women and gender. Yet the core parameters of identity and gender reflected in language remain unquestioned and unquestionable. They are largely conditioned by the history, tradition, and the overall way of living which has cherished some features of interpersonal communication over all others. Values established far back in history still prevail and in broad characterisation they can be identified as principles of conduct anthropologically classified as high context society (cf. Hall 1976), which is in cognitive linguistics categorised as "cultural scripts" (Wierzbicka 1999, 1991/2003). In that characterisation, the Montenegrin cultural script is more "compelling" than "non-compelling." The theory of cultural script made it evident that such a society cultivates collective values of pride and non-humiliation, hierarchical male-female organisation and a rather rigid division into private and public spheres of life, the former assigned to women, the latter to men (Perovic 2011). Montenegrin society is still quite patriarchal, hierarchically organised and with considerable respect for the leader. In such social organisation power and high status are highly appreciated, so anything that can undermine such rank or question personal dignity is not welcome, constituting a possible threat of face loss (Goffman 1967; Brown and Levinson 1987). In the compelling cultural script, to lose face is the greatest humiliation that someone can experience, to lose it at the hands of a woman instantly becomes anecdotal.
Emancipation from Folklinguistics
Discourse Turn and Performance Turn
There was a shift in the feminist theory with the rise of discourse on the language side. Gender was more and more conceptualised as something that people do, rather than have. It was no longer seen as the way people speak about women and women speak of themselves, as something that just exists, it was a view where gender is
continually produced, reproduced and indeed changed through people's performance of gendered acts as they project their own claimed gendered identities, ratify or challenge others' identities and in various ways support or challenge systems of gender relations and privilege (Eckert and McCon-nell-Ginet 2003, 4).
The centrality of gender performance was becoming apparent, especially with Judith Butler's influential philosophical work, Gender Trouble (1990). Later on, this work was further complemented by her elaboration of Austin's concept of perfor-mativeness in Excitable Speech (1997), a title which Butler additionally explained as "a politics of the performative" giving it initially a somewhat ideological flavour. There were also precursors in the different traditions of sociology and anthropol-
ogy (cf. Kessler and McKenna 1978) that drew attention to the centrality of gender performance. For many language and gender schools the performance turn meant questioning the familiar categories of woman and man and exploration of the variety of ways in which linguistic performance relate to constructing conversational gendered identities as well as identities that challenge conventional gender norms. The discourse turn has paved the way for the performance turn. The former created tools and insights, the latter meant a change in the perception of the problem. As Eckert and McConnell-Ginet say:
Both language and gender are fundamentally embedded in social practice, deriving their meaning from the human activities in which they figure. Social practice involves not just individuals making choices and acting for reasons: it also involves the constraints, institutional and ideological, that frame (but do not completely determine) those individual actions (2003, 5).
Performance in theory always presupposed everyday social contacts in face-to-face interactions, for example, communities of practice, or groups that come together around some mutual interest or concern: families, workplace groups, sports teams, musical groups, classrooms, playground groups, and so on. According to such an understanding of gender, language is never all that matters socially, because there are always other meaningful aspects of interaction: non-verbal and kinetic signs, facial expressions, semiotic signals of various kinds, dress, location, etc. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet express it in a series of questions:
Once we take practice as basic to both language and gender, the kinds of question we ask change. Rather than 'how do women speak'? we ask what kinds of linguistic resources can and do people deploy to present themselves as certain kinds of women or men. How do new ways of speaking and otherwise acting as women or men (or 'just people' or members of some alternative category) emerge? Rather than 'how are women spoken of?' we ask what kinds of linguistic practices support particular gender ideologies gj	and norms. How do new ideas about gender gain currency? How and why
do people change linguistic and gender practices? The shift from focusing on differences between male and female allows us to ask what kinds of personae can males and females present (2003, 5).
These and other questions, and answers to them gradually modified the dominance theory and upgraded the difference theory. The dichotomy of men vs. women in the former theory or status vs. rapport in the latter one gradually gave way to a multifaceted manifestation of gender. Thus "being different" which in effect meant "worse" was avoided in the plurality of the never-ending performance of gender, both of men and women.
Exempli Gratia
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Mary Bucholtz (1999) examined one such community of practice, that being the community of the "nerd girl," and how they expressed their nerdiness in fighting to demonstrate expertise and knowledge and how they played games to gain
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power and position within their community where nerdiness was an especially valuable resource for girls in the gendered world of the US school. Very interesting ^ is a work by Deborah Cameron (2011), in which she examined the performance of
gender identity in young men's talk and how they constructed their heterosexual identity. In performing this they displayed phases of cooperation, competition, C^ of deconstructing opposition, etc. Gender is a relational term, these men had to ^ fulfil the minimum requirement for being a man, which is not being a woman, and they were under pressure to constitute themselves as masculine linguistically. The traditional sociolinguistic stand was that people talk the way they do because of who they are, whereas the postmodernist approach suggests that people are who they are because of the way they talk (inter alia) (Cameron 2011, 251-252). To illustrate identity as an emerging product rather than the pre-existing source of linguistic and other semiotic practices, and therefore as fundamentally a social and cultural phenomenon, Bucholtz and Hall (2005, 588-589) took the examples of Hijras, a transgender category in India whose members, though predominantly born male, identify themselves as neither men nor women. They typically dress and speak like women, but sometimes violate gender norms through the use of obscenity, sending mixed messages (Hall 1997). Another good example is Korean Americans that emblematically imitate American Vernacular English to express the stand against racial ideologies that privilege whiteness (Bucholtz and Hall 2005, 588-589). A process of identity construction takes place every time a speaker assigns social gender to another human being.
Recent feminist theory emphasizes, by contrast, that one is never finished becoming a woman, or a man. Each individual subject must constantly negotiate the norms, behaviors, discourses, that define masculinity and femininity for a particular community at a particular point in history. From this point of view, it would be desirable to formulate notions such as 'women's language' or 'men's style'. Instead of saying simply that these styles are produced by women and men as markers of their gender affiliation, we could say that the styles themselves are produced as masculine and feminine, and that individuals make varying accommodations to those styles in the process of producing themselves as gendered subjects. In other words, if I talk like a woman this is not just the inevitable outcome of the fact that I am a woman; it is one way I have of becoming a woman, producing myself as one. There is no such a thing as 'being a woman' outside the various practices that define womanhood for my culture - practices ranging from the sort of work I do to my sexual preferences, to the clothes I wear, to the way I interact verbally (Cameron 1996, 43).
As Bergvall (1999, 282) emphasises, the approach called "community of practice" has a focus on different aspects of gender: "what is inborn, what is achieved and what is thrust upon us." In the light of this paper we are interested in the second "what." The theory of performativeness did not fully explain the inequality (dominance) between men and women, nor did it quite clarify the non-parallelism in their relationship (difference), it only sharpened the view that such categories as "men," "women," "identity," even "gender" are not something carved in stone and given and defined once for all. Taken theory-wise, it only means that a serious researcher in Montenegro can encounter instances of tolerant and caring male behaviour in a thoroughly androcentric culture or harshness and resoluteness in women in the public arena as normal manifestations of gender being "performed." But social, pragmatic, and contextual parameters in interpersonal communication
would probably play a decisive role in labelling such manifestations as not typical or simply possible performances of gender. Tradition, mentality, and patriarchal cultural scripts institutionalised and definitely legitimised male discourse dominance and through it opened the gate to every other dominance.
Corpus Delicti
Butler's ideas on the performance of gender open up a possibility to begin research on gender in Montenegro from a slightly different perspective than that of dominance or difference theory. The new approach (and the results thereof) would provide, for example, an insight into the nuanced manifestation of maleness within the sexist, androcentric culture of Montenegro and women's rising assertiveness respectively. But no such research exists. In the meantime, the media, legislation, and various regulations insist upon reinforcing the old-fashioned patterns between genders, somewhat oblivious to the progress in society and the new dynamic forces that are either already in existence or are in the making. Actually, reproduction of old gendered identity is constantly in action. In the process of standardisation, of Serbian, for example, the ideology of male dominance was taken as the norm. This ideology supports the view that language structure and language economy are the only relevant criteria for word formation and enrichment of the Serbian terminology for professional names and titles, and that male morphological forms actually are simply gender natural containers of specific semantic information (Filipovic 2011, 122).
The women interviewed in Filipovic's research were not strongly opposed because a direct relationship exists between the unmarkedness of male grammatical forms and the metaphorical association with social power and the status of men within the given society (Filipovic 2011, 114). It turned out that everyone (men and women) wants to be observed as powerful and ideologically belonging to the mainstream. Markedness implies being stigmatised in a way - one is marked if he/she is ill, for example. Healthy is neutral and unmarked. It turns out that women y as the marked member in the dichotomy have a malady of some kind which makes Q them inadequate.
£	The same ideology of power contained in the male morphological form from
the illustration above is hidden in the choice of lexicon in our corpus. However, the example of the standardisation of Serbian proved to deal with overtly present morphological forms of genders where discrimination was legalised in the top-down procedure of language policy and planning, whereas in our corpus ideology was covertly present, male and female forms had seemingly the same status, and the ^ whole corpus of lexemes was at first sight devoid of sexism. The reason is the large number of metaphors where the source domain becomes somehow outweighed by the target domain, acquiring prominence which constitutes a semantic and cognitive trap.
If, as Robin Lakoff (2004) says, language is a means of diagnosis, then the conceptual metaphor is the scanner of language. We can see this in a somewhat illustrative example from the lexical domain of women's magazines. Those are the
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type of publication with shiny covers - known as glossy magazines - with a high quality of colour and printed on expensive paper. They write material for women, the way women expect it of them, or the way they expect women to shape them-
selves. These magazines write about the lives of famous men and women, about the relationships they are in, or have exited from, about the marriages they are in, or which have run aground, about their families, their children, and their hobbies - in other words they write about what those people believe in.
Princes and Princesses
We will focus on one lexical shift from the discourse of these magazines in relation to some ten years ago. Semantic analysis reveals that a lexical shift has happened, or perhaps it is better to say there has been a shift in the conceptualisation of certain gender sub-categories. A mother-to-be expects a mezimica (little pet/favourite [daughter]), mum and dad a Ijepotica (beauty) and a princeza (princess). A child is kruna braka (the crown of marriage). If there is a son in the family he is usually the nasljednik (heir). Not a princ (prince), but rather the muski potomak (male offspring) and heir. The fashion icon or folk-pop star from such a magazine refers to her man as her jaca polovina (stronger half), while it goes without saying that she is the ljepsa polovina (fairer half). From just this handful of examples - and we have a great many in our corpus - we can see a lexical change that brings with it a new view of people, society and relationships. Until not long ago, a newborn child would have been beba (baby), djecak (boy) or djevojcica ([little] girl), that is to say, in componential semantic analysis, an infant human being of male or female gender. No social or class component was read into this. In the current terminology of women's magazines, mezimica (little pet/favourite [daughter]) is not just a little girl, it is a little creature with a privileged position in the family, carrying this connotation for whoever's job it is to spoil her, mollycoddle her and tie a ribbon in her hair. The semantics are primarily those of a (static) recipient. As previously mentioned, we also encounter princeza (princess) in this context. This lexeme completes the cognitive and conceptual framework: the newborn little girl is conceptualised in fairytale terms - attention is lavished on her, but at the same time she is objectivised and passive. On the other hand her birth has placed her in a glorious position as a member of the upper classes - princesses are the daughters of kings. All in all, the stereotypes these magazines insist on significantly invalidate efforts towards female emancipation. If women have made any progress then, if guided by the writing of these magazines, they have not got far. Anyway, it is not easy in high heels.
The new conceptualisation of the boy as heir is perhaps even more dangerous. They too are represented as recipients - heirs of a mighty name, inheriting great wealth. Whatever it is, it is not something to be achieved, it is his by birth. The essence of this new vocabulary is revealed when one applies one of the possible linguistic interpretations, that being the conceptual metaphor. In the process of understanding a metaphor, we transfer the structure from the original domain which derives from experience and direct perception, to the more abstract target domain - and all this happens in a systematic and consistent way. Most striking are those metaphors which have been unconsciously assimilated into language via established conventions and which serve as a means of illustration and of focusing attention. An example of such a conceptual metaphor is LIFE IS A JOURNEY, which can be illustrated in an example sentence: "His life's journey was full of ups and downs." When these magazines present sons from issue to issue as the heirs of their
wealthy fathers, an image is conjured up of happy little beings who have already arrived somewhere in life, without even having travelled. They have property to their name, without ever having needed to break a sweat. They inherit from the family and, most commonly, from the father, name and status and the profits from his labours and endeavours. The success of the father can be understood as that of the son too - it is all his. The universal conceptual metaphor, LIFE IS A JOURNEY for the most part does not apply to them.
Heirs are an example of an implied conceptual metaphor which negates itself. Heirs have arrived without having travelled. What do we do with those children born as babies, whose inheritance is life's journey and the task of making as much sense as possible of that journey? Do we thus, as per Kovecses (2010), gain new metaphors of the heir and the traveller in the linking of the target and source domains? These other numerous travellers, of whom the aforementioned magazines do not write so very often, live the tried and tested conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A STRUGGLE. A struggle has victors, and so victors and heirs are now prototypical members, not just the metaphorisation of the idea of the new age.
Let us take another primary metaphor, A CHILD IS THE CROWN MARRIAGE. The metaphor is positive, children are desirable little creatures, crown as an item of royal insignia bears a strong connotative potential, it puts the child in the imperial context and upon a pedestal immediately upon birth. Regal, royal, imperial, majestic, throne, etc. are lexemes not only of fairy tales but also of a certain privileged strata of society. Not every child in the glossy magazines is proclaimed to be the crown of marriage. Their parents are already established as celebrities, so the silver spoon is only the natural outcome when their image is considered. Thus, the media implicitly builds a chasm of class discrepancy on top of that of gender inequality. They would have to be feeling extremely benevolent to put a ban on such subtle and nuanced innuendos of discrimination via metaphors, hypocoristic words or flattery in the mentioned contexts. Sooner will Biblical language be changed into a politically correct discourse than such language of the media deemed negative. y Yet, regulations regarding the media tend to prevent such occurrences. "Special software is devised for a search for a gender-specific vocabulary and promoting gender expertise of the language of state documents" (Tolstokorova 2006, 108). But, how can they detect a metaphor? Or metonymy?
"Marija Will Present an Heir to Her Emotional Partner"
Probably most confusing, even destructive in the media are mixed messages such as in the following example of a headline from one such wonderful magazine: Marija ce podariti nasljednika svom emotivnom partneru (Marija will present an heir to her emotional partner). This can be divided into two parts according to the stereotypes and sexual identities it reinforces. The first part of the phrase podariti nasljednika (present an heir) does not so much conceptualise parenthood as it does the man and the woman in a construct of marriage in which the woman has the role of a giver, and the man the role of receiver. The woman presents and in doing so pleases the man expecting this gift and hopes that this will make him happy.
...,.___________________.....„......„_________r________________________ ________......
As a consequence, his happiness will be her happiness. The implied meaning is in the relationship between gift giver and gift recipient, which is often hierarchical as the woman strives to meet the expectations of her man (this hierarchy can be
reversed, too). This affirms her in the role of a creature whose primary role is that of biological reproduction, and she does not keep the fruit of her womb for herself, fO but rather metaphorically gives it. The associative meaning of the phrase podariti ^ nasljednika (present an heir) is in analogy with the royal court: kings are presented with an heir so that their line will not be extinguished and the throne will not be disputed. Here the reproductive role of the queen and her identity as biological provider are especially emphasised.
Emotivni partner (emotional partner) sends the opposite message. This noun phrase conceptualised the woman as equal if active, which is not the canonic representation of women in media. Partnership demonstrates respect, acceptance, and above all symmetry and a lack of domination. Part of the semantic surroundings also comes from the emotional component. Emotivni partner (emotional partner) reinforces everything that the first part of the phrase invalidates: equality, symmetry, lack of domination and hierarchy. In the first part of the phrase, the woman is conceptualised as giver and pleaser, in the second as equal and committed to a reciprocal emotion. This is also a metaphor for the woman's gender identity in the printed media in the second decade of the 21st century.
All this is hot-and-cold, with a little emancipation, a little control of that emancipation, and superimposed models of the conceptualisation of genders and their identities through the media. Those expecting to give birth to princesses and heirs are usually married. Marriage itself is a desirable category but love is often considered apart from it. Just in one magazine we find in two places the collocation apsolutna ljubav (absolute love), and a few pages later potpuna sreca (total happiness). Another indispensible companion is totalna romantika (totally romantic). Together with this romance goes totalna (ljubavna) posvecenost (total commitment [in love]). How to achieve that absolute, completeness, totality - the maximum that is held up as the standard. Who would go through the hassle of love for any less? When love becomes absolute it is usually unattainable. If it is not attainable then it is sending a message that it does not exist. In these texts, deliberately or not, the emotional bar is raised higher and higher. Not only is Prevert neglected, who said "Il n'y a pas ddamour heureux" (there is no happy love) - at least that meant that love existed - but love is called into question altogether.
In cognitive theory love also can be analysed via the conceptual metaphor, LOVE IS A JOURNEY, nicely illustrated by the sentence "Their love's road was paved with faithfulness." But our corpus offers instances of love which is so demanding in its totality, absoluteness and completeness that it discourages the lover to even set forth on the journey. If that first journey from the metaphor about life means that it is over before it has even begun, then the journey from this second one will never even begin. Thus the existing knowledge that there is no happy love is gradually being reconceptualised and now reads - there is no love. It simply does not exist in that absolute form. Until then, some lower level of emotional engagement will suffice. That understatement is already producing effects on language, gender and identity perceivable with the naked eye and is in accordance with the overall tone and ideology of the media discourse despite the following:
Anti-sexist language campaigns are implemented primarily in countries which are most advanced in terms of gender justice, and the best they have achieved are guidelines or recommendations for non-sexist language use
which are voluntary in nature since their non-adherence does not result in actual penalties. Besides, even in those countries which may boast success in gender linguistic reformation, a real problem is that up till now there are no universal, legally protected regulations which could guarantee the mandatory use of gender-correct language. ... it will probably take another generation for the changes to be fully incorporated into the different languages (Tolstokorova 2006, 120).
Conclusion
Our topic on language, gender and identity from the Montenegrin perspective can be summed up as follows: the theory heralds (new) practice, practice creates new (old) theory. With a delay of some forty years in the study of language and gender, research into that field in Montenegro resembles a visit to terra incognita. Many know where it is but only the bravest dare to set foot on it. The rest do not see the point. The theory might be known to a greater or lesser extent, but a lot of courage and awareness is needed to change the practice. As the paper has shown, some research on language and gender has been done, but much more is needed. First, it should be done in academia, with an interdisciplinary approach that will depict the overall situation regarding the subject matter, then in legislation, though existing laws are better than actual practice, and lastly in the media. The linguistic analysis of the corpus has shown that the ideology behind the new media discourse is the retraditionalisation that happened in the period of transition, the insistence upon women's passivity and the return to values whereby women are even more marked members of society. The insistence upon a fairy tale lexicon, plot and values, and, above all, metaphors, creates a conceptual frame which supports the ideology of disempowering of women, instead of the opposite.
Our time machine has been very busy going back and forth through the history of the study of language, gender and identity and between the Anglo study of these phenomena and the corresponding research in Montenegro. Dominance theory y focused upon the strong polarity of genders, difference theory tried to bridge the ^ gap between the parties in opposition, while modern theories insist on the non-£ fixedness of the category of gender. These theories, each within its own scope, have established the categories, assessed the situation in the society and diagnosed the "malady" between the genders, redefining the concept of gendered identity along the way. While the theory of difference stands in opposition to the theory of dominance, one being the successor of the other, the theory of performativeness improves on both, while not annihilating their basic postulates. In essence, this means that ^ a society can be as patriarchal or as egalitarian as it is, individuals having defined identities, but the performativeness theory will shed light upon those phenomena which other theories are not able or not willing to fully explain. Though it may appear confusing, the findings of the theory of performativeness — that one is never finished becoming a woman, or a man — is in essence encouraging. Each individual subject constantly negotiates the norms, behaviours and discourses that additionally define masculinity and femininity for a particular community at a particular point in history. That constant negotiation is a chance for change in language, gender and, consequently, identity if the change is needed.
The analysis of the examples from our corpus has proven that the categories of
c >
language and gender, and consequently, identity, undergo influence coming primarily from the domain of ideology. Just superficially touching on the new lexical LO groups from our corpus of women's magazines we form a picture in the metames- ^ sage that is often quite opposite to the society's proclaimed values. The media, as shown, do their subversive work serving an ideology which will not disenthrone man (the purposeful metaphor of royalty). Female children, despite all efforts towards emancipation, in the cognitive/conceptual framework are still depicted as passive and seeking a protector. All she has to do is be beautiful. Women's emancipation can be seemingly attempted through a lot of nudity that superficially signals liberation, but the goal is an ancient and well-known one: turn a woman into an object and leave her with the conviction that she is a subject. This serves an equally old purpose: to keep women in their place. The tendency is towards the fixedness of the old/new gender stereotypes, possibly with the aim of establishing and stabilising the new economic order, which sheds a completely new light upon our research and represents a new avenue for its development.
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