The routine achievement of gender in Greek interaction

This paper examines the obligatory use of grammatical gender in the composition of turns in Greek conversation and its implications for the routine achievement of sociocultural gender as part of the taken-for-granted world. By drawing on sociolinguistics, I study the role of grammatical gender in ascribing sex to referents and constructing gender identities. Moreover, I argue that this social dimension of grammatical gender is related to covert assumptions shared by participants about referents as women or men. I explore empirically the relation between grammatical gender and culture by employing conversation analysis, in addition to the notion of the gender membership category