Language & Gender

Question 1

Trudgill (1983)

Answer 1

Studied men and women’s social class accents. He found that women’s pronunciation was closer to RP, the accent that’s usually seen as the most prestigious

Question 2

Cheshire (1982)

Answer 2

Studied the speech of adolescent girls and boys, and found that boys tended to use more non-standard grammatical forms - e,g, ‘ain’t’ - than girls.

Question 3

Robin Lakoff (1975)

Answer 3

Identified features that she felt were characteristic of women’s language. Hedges & fillers, apologetic requests, tag questions, indirect requests

Question 4

Why do women use more prestigious forms than men?

Answer 4

1. Women might be less secure in terms of social status
2. Society generally expects higher standards of behaviour from women
3. Men already have a higher social status therefore they don’t need to use prestigious forms to improve it
4. Non-standard language is traditionally associated with working-class men, so men might use it to show that they share traditional masculine qualities like being ‘tough’ and ‘down-to-earth’

Question 5

O’Barr and Atkins (1980)

Answer 5

Analysed transcripts of American courtroom trials. They found that men and women witnesses who were of low social status and/or inexperienced with the courtroom practices both showed many linguistic features that Lakoff labeled female

Question 6

Zimmerman and West (1975)

Answer 6

Recorded interruptions in conversations between men and women. They found that 96% of the interruptions were by men. This suggests that men are dominant in male-female conversations. They argued that this reflects male dominance in society

Question 7

What are marked terms?

Answer 7

These are words that reveal a person’s gender, e.g. ‘policeman’, ‘wife’
Some words are marked by a feminising suffix, e.g. actress, usherette, comedienne

Question 8

What is lexical asymmetry?

Answer 8

Refers to words that appear to have similar meaning, but aren’t equally balanced, e.g. ‘bachelor’ (positive) and ‘spinster’ (negative)

Question 9

How can grammar be sexist?

Answer 9

Pronouns - the third person masculine ‘he’ or ‘his’ can be used to refer to both genders
Syntax - When one gender specific word is used before the other, e.g. ‘Mr and Mrs’, ‘Men and women’, ‘Sir or Madam’

Question 10

What is over-representation?

Answer 10

There are more insulting terms for women than there are for men. E.g. many insult have an animal theme ‘cow’, ‘bitch’