Gender

• Androcentric

  Focused on men e.g. mankind, human
• Use of patronyms


  • Names reflect male line of inheritance
• Julia Stanley


  • 220 insults for promiscuous women vs 20 insults for promiscuous men
• Tyger Drew-Honey


  • Women described as 'slag' 'slut', Men described as 'lad'
• Pejoration/amelioration


  Terms for women undergo pejoration (gain negative connotations), terms for men undergo amelioration (gain respect) e.g. bachelor/spinster
• Gender marking


  • Reflects a mindset, certain roles assigned to particular gender e.g. family man, working mother
• Diminutive suffix


  Makes the word smaller/less significant e.g. waitress
• Sex Discrimination Act 1975: illegal to write job advert that implies people of only one sex could apply
• Semantic derogation


  Words gaining negative connotations overtime e.g. master vs mistress (connotation of prostitution)
• Approach of equality


  • Men and women are inherently different, neither superior
• Male and female individual lifestyles

  • Presented as different, different in their modes of communication, use language for different outcomes
• Deborah Tannen


  Compares gender differences to cultural differences
• Socialisation


  • Children learn behaviours/attitudes/routines that are considered normal in society, leads to men/women learning different ways to communicate
• Six contrasts of male/female language

  • Status vs Support
  • Independence vs Intimacy
  • Advice vs Understanding
  • Information vs Feelings
  • Orders vs Proposals
  • Conflict vs Compromise
• Cooperative overlap


  • Supportive/affirming
• Competitive overlap


  • Attempt to control conversation
• High involvement speakers (MEN)


  • Active role in conversation with backchanneling
• High considerateness speakers (WOMEN)


  • Speak slower and avoid talking at the same time as others
• Rapport talk (women)


  • Establish connections/promote sameness, talk too much, build relations, overlap, speak symmetrically
• Report talk (men)


  • Preserve independence/exhibit knowledge, speak one at a time, negotiate status, speak asymmetrically
• Goodwin's research shows girls habitually doing things Tannen stated they wouldn't e.g. direct orders, boasting about skills, bullying others
• Jennifer Coates


  Children belong to same-sex friendship groups, develop different styles of speaking
• Techniques used by women

  Not signs of inferiority but signs of intelligence, tag questions/modality help make women's talk supportive/cooperative
• Deborah Jones


  Research on gossip amongst women - called house talk, scandal, bitching, chatting
• Deborah Cameron says girls bitch covertly, dominant behaviour is acceptable for women
• All male groups


  • Use 'locker room banter', insults created bonds
• Men use more insults/expletives
• Peter Trudgill


  Pronunciation of words 'walking' and 'talking' with the g-drop, men more likely to use non-standard forms to appear tough/down to earth, women use hypercorrectness/prestige pronunciation, social class is more important to women, women over-report use of standard forms, men under-report use of standard forms
• Milroy's research in Cloncard found young women (the key earners) in areas of high male unemployment used more non-standard forms
• Variation reinforces existing power structures


  • Cause of historically patriarchal structure of society, women are in a position of social weakness/have less power, they acquiesce to dominance
• Dale Spender


  Culture of 'male as the norm' due to patriarchal order, women are add-ons, difficult to challenge this system, reinforces male power
• Androcentric language


  • Made patriarchal to ensure continued dominance, men introduced first e.g. Mr and Mrs, 'mankind' 'Human' 'History', men have permanent surnames - patronyms
• Gender neutral terms e.g. Headmaster/mistress Headteacher
• Pamela Fishman


  Mixed sex conversations fail due to male responses, women do the interactional shitwork/work harder to keep conversation going, men don't do 'shitwork' due to dominance, reinforces men's power, women ask more tag questions - not a sign of uncertainty
• Zimmerman and West


  • Study of 31 conversations between men and women, men used minimal responses and violated rules of turn taking, women conformed to rules of turn taking, mixed sex interactions contained more overlaps, men interrupted 46 times, women interrupted 2 times, men overlapped 9 times, women overlapped 0 times, same sex conversations contained 29 violations of turn taking
• Beattie: equal number of interruptions by men and women, larger and more representative corpus (10x the number)
• Otto Jespersen


  Investigates non-fluency features like fillers/pauses, women talk more than men, women speak without thinking so use more non-fluency features, research relies on evidence from literature/travellers - speculative, dismissed as folk linguistics, use 'and' to link sentences (emotional, not grammatical), adverbs ('so pretty'), hyperbole, smaller vocab
• Onnela found with masters students, there was a similar MLU (mean length of utterance) - use of non-fluency features are the same in men/women
• Robin Lakoff


  Women's language expresses uncertainty, hedges, polite forms, tag questions, speaking in italics, empty adjectives, question intonation in declaratives, avoid expletives, lack a sense of humour, hypercorrect grammar, women must modify their language use to meet expectation of male-structured language
• Kira Hall found phone sex workers use Lakoff's features to appear more feminine