Gender Flashcards
What is a community of practice?
A smaller social unit than a social network. Co-membership is defined on three criteria: mutual engagement, a jointly negotiated enterprise, and a shared repertoire. It is associated with analyses of variation that emphasise speaker’s agency.
What is a constitutive group relation?
The view that a correlation between linguistic behaviour and a non-linguistic factor actually helps to bring about and define the meaning of a social category; often contrasted with an interpretation of variation as reflecting a social category
What is conventional implicature?
An inference that arises from the meaning (or semantics) of a word or phrase
What is conversational implicature?
An inference that arises from interlocutors’ shared understanding of the norms of conversation, not from the semantics or inherent meaning of a word or phrase
What is direct indexing?
A relationship of identification when a linguistic feature indexes something with social meaning if the social information is a conventional implicature, e.g. speaker sex is indexed by some forms of some adjectives in French, je suis content (male speaker); je suis contente (female speaker)
What are exclusive gender differences?
A feature that is associated solely with a particular user or group of users or solely in a particular context. It contrasts with the preferential use of certain features.
What is gender?
A term used increasingly in sociolinguistics to indicate a social identity in relation to masculinity, femininity, etc. that emerges or is constructed through social actions
What is grammatical gender?
Different classes of nouns that may be called masculine or feminine, etc.
What is Illocutionary force?
The speaker’s intention in producing a speech act. Saying ‘I promise’ has the _________ of promising if the speaker is genuinely committed to what they utter.
What is indirect indexing?
A relationship of identification when a linguistic feature does not index a social category directly. It may be associated with several other social meanings, e.g., casualness and vernacularity, and ultimately these may connect it to, for example, masculinity (a concept that has a link to a social category). Because these other factors help to constitute what it means to be ‘male’ the index between vernacular variants and male speakers/masculinity is not direct.
Who is Lesley Milroy?
A British linguist known for her work on social network theory and her pioneering study of Belfast English
Who is Penelope Eckert?
An American linguist who, together with Sally McConnell-Ginet, introduced the community of practice as a unit of analysis to sociolinguistic research
What is performativity?
A situation in which the iteration of actions and ways of talking in a social context acquires constitutive force within a community. For example gender can be constituted in this way. It can be done through _________ .
What are preferential differences?
A situation in which a feature or variant is found more or less frequently in the speech of any member of the community, but occurs more often in the speech of some group of speakers
What is reflexive group relation?
The view that a correlation between linguistic behaviour and a non-linguistic factor is due to the fact that language reflects identification with a social category or a personal stance; often contrasted with the constitutive interpretation of variation
