Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Language & Gender
- 3 Key Theories
- Difference Theory
- Deborah Tannen
- Begins at childhood when
parents use more verbs with
boys and more emotive
language with girls
- 'Cross-cultural communication'
- DIFFERENCES
- Advice vs Understanding
- Status vs Support
- Independence vs Intimacy
- Information
vs Feeling
- Orders vs
Proposals
- Conflict vs
Compromise
- MEN & WOMEN CONVERSE DIFFERENTLY
- Dominance Theory
- WOMEN'S LANGUAGE IS THE
RESULT OF SUBORDINATION
- Robin Lakoff
- Combined elements of
dominance and deficit
- Claims women...
- hedge more
- use super polite forms
- complying to
grammatical rules
- use more prosodic features
- use more empty adjectives
- use more modal verbs
- overuse qualifiers
(I think that...)
- use more minimal
responses
- avoid expletives
- Believed women used these
features because they were
uncertain, non-committal and
didn't want to impose their views
- Women's language features
show their inferior social status
- Comes from living in a patriarchal society
- Weak compared to men's so
stops them being taken seriously
- Zimmerman
& West
- 96% of interruptions
are by men
- Deficit Theory
- WOMEN'S LANGUAGE IS
ASSUMED TO BE WEAK
- O'Barr & Atkins
- Found witnesses of both genders
had the same language features
when in court
- More to do with feeling
powerless than gender
- Sexism
- Julia Stanley
- 220 derogatory terms for women & only 20 for men
- Society has become ANDROCENTRIC
- Built-in bias towards
men due to a
patriarchal society
- Some argue sexism is just a reflection of how society is
- Some people have sexist attitudes therefore
there is sexist language
- Others argue the existence of sexist
language helps create sexist attitudes
- Reducing the use of sexist
language will improve the
perception of women in society
- Lexical Asymmetry
- Male & female equivalents of words
are often unequal in their connotations
- Marked/Unmarked
Terms
- Added suffix of '-ess' or '-ette'
to the male term
- Now less common -
sign of change in
attitudes
- Suggests male position is
higher or more important
as it is unchanged
- e.g. 'spinster' and 'bachelor'
- SAME DENOTATION, DIFFERENT CONNOTATIONS
- Patronising Terms
- Several compare women to food
- e.g. 'tart', 'sweetie', 'honey'
- Suggests that a
woman is there to be
desired and consumed
by men
- Female Inanimate
- Referring to objects as 'she/her'
- Can be
affectionate
- Can imply male
ownership
- Man & Mankind
- Man sometimes refers
specifically to males
- And can be used generically to
reference the whole human race
- Mankind is always generic
- Criticised as they imply men are
the most important
- 'Humankind' is becoming
more common
- Prestige
- Overt
- Greater use of SE or RP
to appear respectable
- Sought by
women
- Perhaps to combat their
inferior position or to meet
behavioural standards
- Covert
- Use of more non-SE
to seem rebellious
- Sought by men
- Already have a higher
status or to seem down
to earth/traditionally
masculine
- SEE LANGUAGE & POWER
FOR EXAM TECHNIQUE
- Some changes to context in the intro but otherwise identical