Chap7

• Many terms of the language that are supposed to be gender-neutral are not
• The pronoun "he" is used both when we know the person is male and when we do not know the gender of the individual
• This use of "he" as a gender-neutral pronoun is not logical
• Feminist theorists argue that using words like "man" and "he" for both genders ignores or marginalizes women, reinforcing the idea that men are the default
• Language is a tool for social interaction and it can be affected by different social contexts
• True. There should be three pronouns: male, female and as-yet-undetermined
• True. In most studies, women use fewer non-standard language forms compared to men in similar social situations
• Gender differences in language use

  • Physical orientation: Men avoid eye contact, women use eye contact
  • Status and connection: Men talk for status, women talk for solidarity
  • Directness and indirectness: Men from decision to discussion, women from discussion to decision
  • Public and private talk: Men talkative in public, quiet in private, women quiet in public, talkative in private
  • Ritual opposition: Men fight for fun, women may fight but not for fun
  • Conversation style: Men avoid "trouble talk" as it puts status at risk, women use "trouble talk" to create rapport
• Females show greater sensitivity to socially evaluative linguistic features than males
• In careful speech, women use fewer stigmatized forms than men and are more sensitive to the prestige pattern
• Females show more awareness of prestige norms in both their actual speech and their attitudes towards speech
• Females, allowing for other variables, produce an average linguistic form which more closely approaches the standard language or has higher prestige than those produced by men
• In stable sociolinguistic stratification, men use higher frequency of non-standard forms than women
• The view that "male" is the norm and "female" is the deviation
• Casey Miller and Kate Swift are pioneers in the movement to get rid of the language of sexist prejudice
• Spiro T. Agnew argues that degenderized English is both foolish and awkward, and that feminist's accomplish is a setback in fluency
• Gender


  The social roles and behavior of individuals arising from their classification as biologically male or female
• Two key approaches within the field of language and gender studies

  • The Difference Approach: Asserts that male and female language differs without attributing it to social relationships
  • The Dominance Approach: Sees language use as reflecting male control over females
• Language has contributed to women`s lower status in quite varied ways.
• Gender Originally a grammatical term, has come to refer to the social roles and behavior of individuals arising from their classification as biologically male or female.
• Genderization is the first act of giving names
• Gender roles are perceptually merged with biological sex and unless one step think about the matter this seems to be perfectly natural.
• The standard of any langauge is the one with greatest prestige.
• She demonstrated the gender differences in language use. Deborah Tannen
• Diminutive Formation ___are commonly used for girls, which stresses their lacks of power and conversely needed for protection.
• De-sexification of language__ that is to remove inherently sexist structure