New Deixis? New Anaphora? New Semantics: Language Game and the Obviousness of Sex Marking

Arkadiusz Jabłoński's 2021 paper in Homo Ludens examines whether new Polish practices of marking sex in language, including feminatives, gendered deixis, and anaphora, actually solve genuine communicative problems. Rather than issuing a normative verdict for or against these practices, the author frames them as a "language game" and asks whether they serve the communicative functions their proponents claim. The central thesis is that gender marking in Polish is only loosely tied to biological sex, and that the rigid, binary marking of sex in contexts where it was previously unmarked is often redundant and may function in a manipulative manner.

The argument draws on Berne's transactional model of communication, which sorts exchanges into expert (adult), non-expert (child), and careless (parent) relations. The author applies this lens to what is characterized as a "parent" stance that imposes gender as a primary parameter in language and public discourse. Corpus examples from Polish media, covering rectors, job titles, hyperonymization, and claims about women's superiority, are used to show that such usage can distort facts and rest on unverified a priori assumptions. The author contends that neutral-gender forms already secure linguistic equality and that the case for binary marking lacks clear empirical evidence of solving real problems.

The paper's evidentiary base is largely illustrative, relying on selected media examples and dictionary definitions rather than systematic quantitative data. Its scope is confined to contemporary Polish communication, with references spanning Polish, English, and Japanese-related linguistic sources. The paper's main methodological conclusion is that gender marking should be analyzed as a potentially non-straightforward reflection of referents' actual properties, and that its benefits should be weighed empirically against its costs before such practices are accepted as necessary.