Language and gender

Question 1

Sex

Answer 1

the biological differences between males and females.

Question 2

Gender

Answer 2

behavioural characteristics that are a result of social and cultural influences. In other words MASCULINE and FEMININE behaviour are not necessarily a result of a person’s sex but part of a socialisation process that begins when we are children.

Question 3

Socialisation

Answer 3

This is a process by which individuals’ behaviours are conditioned and shaped.

Question 4

Gender as a social construct

Answer 4

This means that we are not born thinking that men and women should act differently.
Instead, it is society which teaches us that we should act differently and most people confirm to this idea.
From the day we are born we are condition to think that the different sexes should behave differently.

Question 5

Heteronormativity.

Answer 5

Gender is closely linked with sexuality-for example, ideas about gender differences are often projected onto same-sex couples.

Question 6

Morgan (1986)

Answer 6

notes a number of qualities which are typically associated with males and females in western society.
Males are seen as logical, rational, aggressive, exploitative, strategic, independent and competitive.

Females are thought to intuitive, emotional, submissive, empathetic, spontaneous, nurturing and co-operative.

Question 7

Semantic derogation

Answer 7

The sense of negative meaning or connotation that lexical items have attached to them.

Question 8

Semantic deterioration

Answer 8

The process by which negative connotations become attached to lexical items-E.g. lady

Question 9

Marking

Answer 9

Marking in linguistics means that a language item stands out or is unusual in some way.

Marking often creates additional or contrastive meaning, which tells you something about the original meaning of the term

Question 10

Janet Holmes(1992)

Answer 10

suggests that metaphors are used to describe women in a negative way.

This implies that the language people use to describe women in normally negative while people use more positive language to describe men.

Question 11

Deficit

Answer 11

female talk is deficient / has less authority than the established male norm.

Question 12

Dominance

Answer 12

men control and dominate / take charge of mixed conversation

Question 13

Difference

Answer 13

men and women are from different sub-cultures and so their language is simply different as a result of different pressures / preferences.

Question 14

Cameron (2008)
tw:myth

Answer 14

Cameron has crticised the idea that there are innate differences in male and female speech.

Cameron ‘The very idea that men and women…use language in very different ways and for very different reasons is one of the great myths of our time.’

Cameron states that these myths have evolved around ideas such as women pay more attention to being good communicators compared to men; that men have a natural desire to be competitive that results in an aggressive speech style and that women talk about people and feelings.

Cameron challenges Lakoff, Fishman and Tannen.

Question 15

Hyde (2005)

Answer 15

‘Gender Similarities Hypothesis’
There are substantially more similarities than there are differences between male and female language.
Differences could be due to social variation such as: age, social status, ethnicities, sexuality, occupation, politics and the contexts of language use: what is talk for, where does it happen, what is it part of?

But gender does need to be considered as it forms our sociolect.

Question 16

Butler (1990)

Answer 16

Gender Performativity Theory
She argues that it is a mistake to reinforce a binary view of gender and assert that ‘women’ are a group with common characteristics.
She states that gender is performative ‘we perform’
‘We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.’
Thus, we are not biologically constructed but conform to social norms

Question 17

Diversity

Answer 17

Differences in speech are caused by many different factors, including age, power and gender.

Question 18

Jespersen (1922)

Answer 18

• Women talk a lot
• women use half-finished sentences because they speak before they have thought about what they will say
• women link sentences with ‘and’ because they are emotional rather than ‘grammatical’
• women use adjectives such as ‘pretty’ and ‘nice’ too much. They are also fond of saying ‘so pretty’ and ‘so nice’
• women use adverbs too much and tend towards hyperbole
• women have a smaller vocabulary than men – the words they use are the ‘indispensable small change of a language’
• women know their smaller vocabulary so well that they are more fluent in speaking and less hesitant than men, who are searching for the precise word in their large vocabularies
• novels written by ladies are much easier to read and use fewer difficult words
• women often gain spoken mastery of foreign languages more easily than men, but when put to the test in translating a difficult text, men prove superior
• women, by virtue of their sex, “shrank from coarse and gross expressions”
• women had a “preference for veiled and indirect expressions“, which preclude them from being as effective as men.
• women had a debilitating effect upon the language and it was reasonable for men “certainly with great justice [to] object that there is a danger of the language becoming languid and insipid if we are to content ourselves with women’s expressions.”
• men are responsible for introducing new words into the language

Question 19

Lakoff (1975)

Answer 19

Robin Lakoff in 1975, published an influential account of women’s language. This was the book Language and Woman’s Place. In a related article, Woman’s language, she published a set of basic assumptions about what marks out the language of women. Among these are claims that women:
• Hedge: using phrases like “sort of”, “kind of”, “it seems like”, and so on.
• Use (super)polite forms: “Would you mind…”,“I’d appreciate it if…”, “…if you don’t mind”.
• Use tag questions: “You’re going to dinner, aren’t you?”
• Use empty adjectives: divine, lovely, adorable, and so on
• Use direct quotation: men paraphrase more often.
• Have a special lexicon: women use more words for things like colours, men for sports.
• Use question intonation in declarative statements: women make declarative statements into questions by raising the pitch of their voice at the end of a statement, expressing uncertainty. For example, “What school do you attend? Eton College?”
• Speak less frequently
• Overuse qualifiers: (for example, “I Think that…”)
• Apologise more: (for instance, “I’m sorry, but I think that…”)
• Avoid coarse language or expletives
• Use indirect commands and requests: (for example, “My, isn’t it cold in here?” - really a request to turn the heat on or close a window)
• Use more intensifiers: especially so and very (for instance, “I am so glad you came!”)
• Lack a sense of humour: women do not tell jokes well and often don’t understand the punch line of jokes.

Question 20

Holmes (1992)
-tw tag questions

Answer 20

Wanted to explore Lakoff’s ideas about tag questions…
Referential tag questions – signal factual uncertainty – we turn here, don’t we?
Affective (facilitative) tag questions – express solidarity or intimacy – we love that show, don’t we?
Affective (softening) tag questions – weakening a command or criticism – Take out the rubbish, won’t you?
 Referential: Women 35% (18) Men 61% (24)
 Facilitative: Women 59% (30) Men 25% (10)
 Softening: Women 6% (3) Men 13% (5)
Women – 51, Men 39
Holmes also researched ideas about politeness-Her data from TV talk shows indicate that women give 70% of compliments and receive 75% of them. Men give other men compliments 10% of the time. Are compliments patronising – do they perpetuate stereotypes?
Also, women are more apt to be complimented on their appearance – men on their abilities and possessions.

Question 21

Spender (1980)

Answer 21

Idea is that men dominate women in language, reflecting a patriarchal society.

Question 22

Zimmerman and West (1975)

Answer 22

This is the theory that in mixed-sex conversations men are more likely to interrupt than women. It uses a fairly old study of a small sample of conversations, recorded by Don Zimmerman and Candace West at the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California in 1975. They report that in 11 conversations between men and women, men used 46 interruptions, but women only two.
Z and W are criticised as they only used a small data set and they did not count the number of interruptions within same sex conversations. The data was only gathered from white middle class, which means there is little variety in their research.

Question 23

Beattie (1982)

Answer 23

Geoffrey Beattie, of Sheffield University, points out (writing in New Scientist magazine in 1982): “The problem with this is that you might simply have one very chatty man in the study which has a disproportionate effect on the total.” Beattie goes on to show: “Why do interruptions necessarily reflect dominance? Can interruptions not arise from other sources? Do some interruptions not reflect interest and involvement?”

Beattie found that women and men interrupted with more or less equal frequency (men 34.1, women 33.8) - so men did interrupt more, but by a margin so slight as not to be statistically significant.
Yet Beattie’s findings are not quoted so often as those of Zimmerman and West. Why is this? Because they do not fit what someone wanted to show? Or because Beattie’s work is in some other way less valuable?

Question 24

Fishman (1983)

Answer 24

Pamela Fishman argues in Interaction: the Work Women Do (1983) that conversation between the sexes sometimes fails, not because of anything inherent in the way women talk, but because of how men respond, or don’t respond. Women ask questions to try to get a response from men, not because of their personality weaknesses.

Question 25

Tannen (1990)

Answer 25

Deborah Tannen has summarized her book You Just Don't Understand in an article in which she represents male and female language use in a series of six contrasts. These are: 
•	Status vs. support
•	Independence vs. intimacy
•	Advice vs. understanding
•	Information vs. feelings
•	Orders vs. proposals
•	Conflict vs. compromise
In each case, the male characteristic (that is, the one that is judged to be more typically male) comes first, this links very closely to socialisation.

Question 26

Trudgill (1970)

Answer 26

Peter Trudgill made a detailed study in which subjects were grouped by social class and sex. He invited them to speak in a variety of situations, before asking them to read a passage that contained words where the speaker might use one or other of two speech sounds. An example would be verbs ending in -ing, where Trudgill wanted to see whether the speaker dropped the final g and pronounced this as -in'. 
Trudgill found that men were less likely and women more likely to use the prestige pronunciation of certain speech sounds. In aiming for higher prestige (above that of their observed social class) the women tended towards hypercorrectness. The men would often use a low prestige pronunciation - thereby seeking covert (hidden) prestige by appearing “tough” or “down to earth”.

Question 27

Jennifer Coates and Deborah Jones

Answer 27

Jennifer Coates looks at all-female conversation and builds on Deborah Tannen’s ideas. She returns to tag questions - to which Robin Lakoff drew attention in 1975. Her work looks in detail at some of the ideas that Lakoff originated and Tannen carried further. She gives useful comment on Deborah Jones’ 1990 study of women’s oral culture, which she (Jones) calls Gossip and categorizes in terms of House Talk, Scandal, Bitching and Chatting.
• House Talk - its distinguishing function is the exchange of information and resources connected with the female role as an occupation.
• Scandal - a considered judging of the behaviour of others, and women in particular. It is usually made in terms of the domestic morality, of which women have been appointed guardians.
• Bitching - this is the overt expression of women’s anger at their restricted role and inferior status. They express this in private and to other women only. The women who bitch are not expecting change; they want only to make their complaints in an environment where their anger will be understood and expected.
• Chatting - this is the most intimate form of gossip, a mutual self-disclosure, a transaction where women use to their own advantage the skills they have learned as part of their job of nurturing others.