Language and Gender

Language and Gender

1. Deborah Tannen

   • believes the difference starts in childhood, where parents use more words about feelings to girls and use more verbs to boys. Males and females belong to difference sub-cultures and therefore speak differently.
   • Status vs. support
     • Men see language as a means of asserting dominance; women see it as a way of confirming/supporting ideas.
   • Independence vs. intimacy
     • Men "go it alone"; women seek support.
   • Advice vs. understanding
     • Men see language as problem solving; women see it as a means of empathy.
   • Information vs. feelings
     • Males are concerned with the facts; women with emotions.
   • Orders vs. proposals
     • Men use imperatives; females use hidden directives.
   • Conflict vs. compromise
     • Men will argue; women will try to find a middle ground.

2. Folklinguistics

   • Attitudes and assumptions about language that have no real evidence to support them.

3. Trudgill

   • How male and female speakers pronounce the suffix "ing" like 'walking' and 'laughing'
   • Discovered that across social classes, men tended to use a more non-standard pronunciation
   • Men marked themselves as using non-standard forms even when they did not, they under-reported
     • Women did the opposite and over-reported
   • Concluded that male speakers attached a covert prestige to non-standard forms
     • Covert prestige: a form of high status given to non-standard forms

4. Robin Lakoff (1975)

   • Features that characterised women's language as deficient when compared to men's
     • Use specialised vocab centered around domestic chores
     • Precise colour terms e.g. mauve, magenta
     • Weak expletive terms e.g. oh dear
     • Empty' adjectives e.g. charming, sweet
     • Tag questions to show uncertainty e.g. isn't it?
     • More polite forms than men use e.g. euphemisms
     • The use of hedges e.g. sort of, you know
     • intensifiers e.g. so
   • Suggested that socialisation played an important role
     • Ensured that female language remained less assertive and more insecure when compared to that of men
       • The differences were more socially constructed than biologically based
   • Janet Holmes (1992)
     • Suggests that tag questions are not always a sign of uncertainty
       • May also function as a device to help maintain discussion or to be polite
       • Tag question: group of words that turn a declarative into an interrogative
     • Suggests that other features of 'women's language' like hedges/fillers have a variety of functions
   • O'Barr + Atkins (1980)
     • From their research into language of the courtroom, discovered that many of Lakoff's features did occur
       • Men from lower-class backgrounds used similar features
         • Leading O'Barr + Atkins to believe that features of uncertain speech were more dependent on power relations rather than gender
           • Suggested the term 'powerless language' rather than 'women's language'
   • The deficit approach

5. Zimmerman and West (1975)

   • Found in their small data that 96% of all interruptions in mixed-sex conversations were made by men
     • Women had restricted linguistic freedom and men sought to impose their dominant status through implying explicit constraints in conversational practice
     • Women and men do not have equal conversational rights
   • The dominance approach

6. Jennifer Coates (1989)

   • Suggested that all-female talk is cooperative in the way that speakers help to negotiate discussions and support eachother's rights as speakers
   • Argues that these patterns are evidence of differing socio-cultural expectations and differences in sub-cultures
   • The difference approach

7. Sterotypes

   • Women are: weak, pretty, intuitive, emotional, domestic, social
   • Men are: strong, decisive, practical. rational, public, commanding

8. Derogatives

   • Female: bitch, cunt, slag tart, whore, slut, slapper, dog, cow
   • Male: bastard, wanker, dickhead, prick, gay puff, wimp

9. Semantic derogation

   • Unmarked term: the normal/neutral form of a word. Most unmarked terms are considered male e.g. lion
     • Covert marking: marking that is understood, eg antonyms young and old
       • Overt marking: marking that takes place through affixation or modification
   • Marked term: the form of a word that stands out from the norm e.g. lioness
     • Adding a diminutive suffix
   • The sense of negative meaning or connotation that some lexical items have attached to them
     • Where the female term in a male/female pair will acquire negative connotations over time.
       • E.g. "bachelor" and "spinster" have the same denotation, but different connotations
   • Semantic deterioration: the process by which negative connotations become attached to lexical items

10. Political Correctness

    • To find the gender pairs and replace them with more gender-neutral terms: e.g. police officer, fire fighter

11. Generic Terms

    • A term that generalises the population rather than individually naming it e.g mankind

12. Default Assumptions

    • Our language makes assumptions of what is 'usual' and what is 'normal e.g. surgeon being a man