Gender

• Female equivalent of 'master'


  • 'Mistress'
• Names used for women


  • From the semantic fields of food and animals
• Germaine Greer has tried to linguistically reclaim the term 'cunt' in an attempt to remove any negative connotations attached to female genitals
• Example of semantic derogation


  • 'Mistress' connotations of prostitution
• Semantic derogation


  Words have gained negative connotations as time has progressed
• Dale Spender believes there's a culture of male as norm
• Dominance theory


  Examines language in respect to men being more dominant
• Janet Holmes looked at the way women are referred to in affectionate nominatives
• Otto Jesperson's research is often dismissed as folk linguistics
• Robin Lakoff's research is based purely on her own observations and not any linguistically rigorous testing
• Otto Jesperson finds that women speak without thinking and so they use non-fluency features
• Non-fluency features

  Fillers and pauses
• Investigated non-fluency features like fillers and pauses

  Otto Jeperson 1922
• Otto Jesperson's research relies on evidence from literature and travellers
• Spoken language features that make women's language weak

  • Hypercorrect grammar
  • Over-apologising
  • Less swearing
  • Employ adjectives
  • Tag questions
  • Lack of humour
  • Intensitters
  • Lexicon
• Findings of O'Barr and Atkins


  Suggests it's to do with power, not gender, known as powerless language
• Found spoken language features that made women's language weak

  Robin Lakoff 1975
• Deficit Theory


  Theory that women's language is deficient compared to men's language
• While the use of language to represent women is a serious issue for the individual in society, men can also be represented in ways that cause problems for themselves and for other people
• Language can be used to represent events, places and issues in ways that influence our feelings and attitudes towards them
• Socialisation is the process by which we acquire the social knowledge about gender and make it part of the way we think
• Socialisation starts from birth and lasts our whole lifetime, which is one of the reasons we can change our views, and why both individuals and language change
• From birth onwards we are given certain types of toys, dressed in certain types of clothes, talked about and to in a certain way, and told what behaviours are acceptable or not
• As children we are bombarded with images which portray expectations about our future roles and preferences, with the sexes represented in very different ways
• Linguists of Difference Approach

  • Key: Deborah Tannen
  • Linked: Deborah Jones
• Deborah Tannen

  Believes men and women belong to different subcultures and therefore speak differently
• 6 differences between male and female speech, proposed by Tannen

  1. Status vs Support
  2. Independence vs Intimacy
  3. Advice vs Understanding
  4. Information vs Feelings
  5. Orders vs Proposals
  6. Conflict vs Compromise
• Status vs Support

  Men use language to show power and dominance; women use language to connect with others
• Independence vs Intimacy

  Men use language to show that they need not rely on others; women use language to connect and maintain closeness with others
• Advice vs Understanding

  Men use language to offer solutions to problems; women use language to show empathy and understanding when presented with problems
• Information vs Feeling

  Men use factual language; women use less factual language which stems from a more emotional viewpoint
• Orders vs Proposals


  Men use language to command others (such as through using imperatives); women avoid commanding and instead use language to suggest what others should do
• Conflict vs Compromise

  Men use language to argue a point; women use language to avoid conflict
• Features of women’s speech, suggested by Deborah Jones

  • House Talk (exchange of information and resources connected to the role of a housewife as an occupation)
  • Scandal (judging the behaviour of others, particularly women)
  • Bitching (expressing of anger at the restricted role and inferior status of women, expressed only in private and only to other women)
  • Chatting (most intimate form of gossip consisting of mutual self-disclosure)
• Dominance approach


  The belief that the language difference between men and women can be explained by the hierarchical dominance of men in society
• Don Zimmerman and Candace West


  • In 1975, they did an investigation on a college campus and found that men were responsible for 96% of the interruptions in conversations between men and women, showing male domination in conversations
• Zimmerman and West (1987)


  • They spoke about the idea of "doing gender", defining it as involving the everyday performance of interactional activities that label particular activities as expressions of masculine and feminine 'natures'
• Conversational Shitwork


  Pamela Fishman (1963) found that women were four times more likely to use tag questions than men. She said that they do this to start and maintain conversations with men as men don’t always give responses to declarative statements
• Geoffrey Beattie


  • Similarly to Zimmerman and West, he looked at the difference in interruptions between men and women, but found there was very little difference, with men interrupting 2% more
• Dale Spender


  Proposed that the English Language was man-made/dominated by men, and that language determines the limits of the world as well as constructs reality