Gender

Question 1

The suffragettes - started in 1832

Answer 1

First wave feminists who fought for women’s rights, but only because black man had gained the right to vote.

2nd wavefeminists argued for women’s rights but not for disabled, religious, or women of other ethnicities.

Question 2

Lakoff 1970s- women’s speech styles

Answer 2

Believe the women and men use language differently.
Female language features: hedges or fillers, tag questions, empty adjectives, collaborative style, intensifiers, avoidance of taboo words, politeness.
Believed that women reinforced the subordinate status.
She then later went on to criticise herself and involved other genders, and did not use “real” data as she didn’t analyse real speech

Question 3

Labov - New York 1966

Answer 3

Analysis of the [r] variant - post vocalic.
[r] was seen as desirable and r-less varieties were widely perceived to be non-standard.
Distinctive link to social class - white female store clerks in the 3 department stores frequently used [r] more.
Hyper correction most common in MC women, overt prestige present.
Expected women to be more aware of their speech styles to fit in with the ‘culturally dominant group’

Question 4

Trudgill 1972 - Norwich

Answer 4

Analysis of the alveolar variant [in]
Overt prestige present
Women conformed to the standard more often.
Has been interpreted that women pay more attention to their speech and are aware they are not speaking the standard and perceive their own speech as ugly or incorrect.
Women are often evaluated on how they appear and men what they do.

Question 5

Milroy and Milroy 1987 - Belfast

Answer 5

Women’s speech was closer to prestige forms and closer to the standard.

BUT women began to speak with more linguistic features of males as they were going out to work, also implying they weren’t conforming to the standard

Question 6

Eckert - Detroit teenagers 2000

Answer 6

Northern cities shift of the central vowel /uh/ which resulted in ‘bus’ sounding more like ‘boss’.
More apparent in girls them boys - conflicts with other studies suggesting girls conformed to the standard.

Criticism: cannot be generalised to all to treat female teenagers as it was restricted to one group of high school teenagers called burnouts.

Question 7

Lambert

Answer 7

Always more intragroup variation than intergroup

Question 8

Cameron et al. 1988

Answer 8

States utterances are often multi-functional.
It is difficult to know the communicators full intentions unless stated so. There can be multiple meanings and outcomes behind utterances