Linguistic means of constituting an egalitarian gender worldview in contemporary German-language literature for children and adolescents

The authors of the article aim to identify the verbal tools used to construct a contemporary egalitarian gender worldview in German-language literary works for children and adolescents published in the last decade. This worldview is formed in literary texts from fragments where stereotypical masculine qualities and roles are attributed to female characters, and stereotypical feminine qualities and roles – to male characters. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that, for the first time, the linguistic means used to reflect gender stereotypes and their violations in German-language literature for children and adolescents have been described and systematized. The research revealed that verbal means of creating gender non-stereotypical artistic images appear both in the narrator’s speech and in the characters’ speech. The former include units from the lexical-thematic fields “emotions and feelings”, “appearance”, which are actualized in the narrator’s descriptions of the characters’ inner world and behavior. The latter involve lexical-syntactic and pragmatic features of the characters’ speech (diminutives, invectives, and other emotionally charged vocabulary, tag questions, and interruptions) that contradict typical notions of masculine and feminine speech styles. In rare cases, the violation of gender stereotypes is additionally visualized through the cover and illustrations. The study concludes that German-language literary works contribute to shaping an egalitarian gender worldview among children and adolescents.