Problema genului în mentalul românesc

The fact that the Romanian society values more the features associated with masculinity, manifesting attitudes strongly flanked by stereotypes and prejudices regarding gender, beliefs related to gender differences, can easily be justified by linguistic stereotypes – expressions belonging to the repeated discourse – proverbs, sayings, phraseological expressions etc. We started from the liminal idea that language is not only an instrument, but also a deposit and form of thought, and proverbs, beyond the fact that they are universal and are transmitted over time from one nation to another, yet they reflect the local, historical, and linguistic specificity. In order to put ourselves in line with the mutations of the extralinguistic context on which it is projected, in our research we have resorted to the correlation of the cognitive and cultural dimensions, with the purpose of highlighting the peculiarities of linguistic coding of the concepts related to gender, which provides access to cognitive structures and schemes involved in the conceptualization of the woman. For this purpose, we have used the data of the Associative Dictionary of the Romanian Language.