Gender key terms Flashcards
Empty adjectives
Do not have much meaning to them. E.g. ‘lovely’
Tag questions
A small question that is attached , or “tagged”, to the end of a sentence.
Commands
A demand to do something.
Lexical Asymmetry
It occurs when words used to refer to men and women literally have the same meaning, but have diverting connotations, for example “master/mistress”.
Hedges
Unsure language, e.g. ‘probably’ ‘possibly’
Super politeness
Super polite forms – ‘If you don’t mine please may you..’
Expletives
An expletive is a word or phrase that is used to fill a syntactic slot without adding any extra meaning to the sentence.
E.g. ‘like’
Hyper-correct grammar
- A pronunciation, word form or grammatical construction produced by mistaken analogy with standard usage in a desire to be correct.
- Women use a more hypercorrect language than men do.
Topic control
Whoever manages the conversation, the topic manager tends to be a man.
Back channel behaviour
- Feedback given while someone else is talking, to show interest, attention and/or a willingness to keep listening.
- Links to Fishman’s ‘conversational shitwork’.
Conversational shitwork
- Fishman came up with this concept.
- Women have to do most or all of the work when interacting with men.
Vocal fry
- The lowest vocal register.
- Used more frequently by female speakers
Uptalk
- A rising intonation pattern.
- It has been a linguistic feature associated with women because of its perception of demonstrating or feigning uncertainty and its association with powerlessness.
Use of ‘like’
- Used as a filler word.
- More commonly used by women.
Diminutive suffixes
- Suffixes added to the end of a word.
- -ie is by far the most common suffix used.
- E.g. ‘birdie’.
- Used more commonly by women.
