Gender Markers in the English Picture of the World

Abstract

Gender is determined as an ideological frame that assembles the idea of what it means to be a man or a woman in a certain culture, a non-linguistic category with linguistic ways of actualization. The article substantiates the key theoretical problems concerning gender-marking based on English phraseology and their influence on the formation of the gender picture of the world. The objective of the current paper is to analyze gender-marked phraseological units of the English language, which are the basic matrices of the phraseological picture of the world of a given cultural community, and to identify the frequency and impact of gender stereotypes on the development of the national picture of the English-speaking community, such as word, phraseology, paremia, text, which contain background knowledge and ways to reflect these meanings in the national picture of the world. The paper’s main conclusion is that the semantic basis of gender markers on the material of English phraseological units predominantly consists of stereotypical-associative units, which are perceived as social activity and characteristics of the images of both sexes with certain asymmetry for male denotata. The connotations of words can illustrate this inequality and the double standards between men and women.