lgdrannotbib

Dominance & Difference in Research on Language & Gender:
An Annotated Bibliography

Bilous, Frances R. & Robert M. Krauss (1988). Dominance and Accommodation in the Conversational Behaviors of Same- and Mixed-Gender Dyads. Language and Communication 8(3/4): 183-195. Authors note that interruption need not be interpreted solely as dominance signals. These findings are significant given that they examined a range of variables noted by scholars to be ones on which males and female differ including: the total speech product (total words uttered), frequency of attempted interruptions, frequency of short and long pauses, frequency of back channel responses and frequency of laughter. Male dominance hypothesis fails to adequately account for behavior of males and females in MG (mixed gender) dyads: No m/f difference in interruption and speech production in MG dyads. In SG (same gender) dyads, female subjects utter more words and interrupt more often than do males. Therefore, any generalization about the ways men and women accommodate to each other when they interact must take into account the relevant properties of the situation in which the interaction takes place and the goals of participation in those situations.
Borker, Ruth and Daniel Maltz. 1989. "Anthropological Perspectives On Gender and Language" in Gender and Anthropology: Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching (AAA: Washington DC). This article challenges simplistic polemical paradigms of male dominance and power. Views anthropology as having developed more complex models for talking about hierarchy, pluralism, and hegemony. Authors also challenge the behaviorist paradigm for correlating personal attributes (i.e., gender) with specific forms of speech behavior. Research on language and gender in linguistics focuses on sentences or smaller units and is seldom embedded in larger social theory. As such; privilege the structure of language and produce a trivial picture of research differences among men and women. Gender must be understood as culturally constituted and context-dependent. Gender differences and their relation to speech: Gender as Identity, Role, and Experience. Speech difference and their relation to gender: Must consider conversational contexts, linguistic resources, topics and genres, speech as interaction, and rules for speaking that may differ in use among men and women.
Borker, Ruth. 1980. Anthropology: Social and Cultural Perspectives. In S. McConnell-Ginet, R. Borker and N. Furman, Eds. Women and Language in Literature and Society. NY: Praeger (pp. ). Borker notes that while linguistics focuses on rules which govern the internal structure of language, anthropological studies of language focus on the role of words in human social and cultural experience. Anthropologists looking and women and language ask: how a woman’s social position … affects her speech and how do the cultural ideas and models of language, gender, power and status give meaning to language use and shape linguistic behavior. Borker examines studies showing degrees to which women’s social position determines their language use; moves to see how women use language to cope with their social situation; and finally, how women do distinctive things with words as a result of their social experience. Attends to gossip in detail. Anthropological focus is significant since men and women in many societies focus upon different meanings of key cultural symbols and differently draw upon their cultural systems to understand their experience. Benefit of anthropological study of variation among men and women is its focus on this, as well as language as a resource for women. Here, function, not content, is significant.
Briggs, Charles L. 1992. "Since I Am A Woman, I Will Chastise My Relatives:" Gender, Reported Speech, and the (Re)Production of Social Relations in Warao Ritual Wailing. American Ethnologist 19:337-361. Briggs notes that ritual wailing by Warao women at funerals in eastern Venezuela serve to appropriate and rework words initially used in settings where only men are accorded a voice. Through ritual wailing, they question dominant means of social (re)production and in effect, act to constrain authority of male shamans and political leaders.
Brown, Penelope. (1990). Gender, Politeness, and Confrontation in Tenejapa. Discourse Processes 13(1): 123-141. Brown explores how relations of language and gender are context-dependent with respect to both the kinds of discussion - in this case cooperative vs. confrontational, and the speech event - and the particular norms governing talk within it. Gender is, in some senses, a “master status” transcending contexts in this society. Significantly, the interactional conduct of a Tzeltal court case is the inverse of interactional conduct in ordinary conversations in Tenejapan societies. Features used by women to convey positive affect, empathy, agreement, sympathetic understanding, are used to convey the opposite. Identifies current themes in language and gender research as: 1) Gender-based differences in language are fairly minimal in lang. structure, pervasive in lang. use, especially in clusters of ling. features that differentiate male and female communicative styles, 2) For most part, gender is not marked directly but gender indexing is indirect via other connections between gender and habitual uses of language, and 3) Gender indexing is context dependent.
Bucholtz, Mary. forthcoming. Geek the Girl: Language, Femininity and the Female Nerd. in J. Alhers, L. Bilmes, M. Chen, M. Oliver, N. Warner and S. Wetheim (Eds.) Gender & Belief Systems: Proceedings of the Fourth Berkeley Women & Language Conference. Berkeley: Berkeley Women & Language Group. Bucholtz notes that in popular imagination, nerd is overwhelmingly associated with males. Her ethnographic observations of discourse between self-identified nerds in a high school classroom highlights how nerds construct alternative and empowering identities through language. Girls, in particular, draw upon linguistic practices associated with nerdiness (e.g., sophisticated lexicon) to construct themselves as intelligent and academically successful.
Cameron, Deborah. 1992 Feminism and Linguistic Theory, 2nd Edition. New York: St. Martin's Press. This volume explores provides an expansive view of recent literature on language and gender, including a section on postmodernism. It charts the movement of feminist theory and scholarship during the 1980s and its impact on language and gender research. Lacanian thought are considered in depth in her discussion of language in theory and practice.
Cameron, Deborah. 1990. Why is Language a Feminist Issue? In D. Cameron (Ed.) The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader. New York: Routledge., 1-32. Cameron notes Lakoff also echoes Jesperen (1922) in 1) her claim that certain features are typical of women’s speech (e.g., overpoliteness, heavily qualified statements, `empty’ vocabulary, trivial subject matter) and 2) her reliance on her own intuition and casual observations. Yet, Lakoff wrote from a feminist perspective, explaining inadequacies of women’s talk in political and cultural terms rather than seeing them as natural sex differences. Must look at actual speech behavior that is situated in context. Both dominance and difference approaches are valuable in two ways: At a theoretical level, they allow us to perceive women as complex social beings who are more than just victims of our conditioning. At a political level, each approach underpins important demands. Feminist use one to develop more assertive styles and to better represent themselves and avoid interruptions. Both can go hand in hand.
Cameron, Deborah, F. McAlinden and K. O'Leary. (1988). Lakoff in Context: the Social and Linguistic Function of Tag Questions. In J. Coates and D. Cameron Ed., Women in their Speech Communities: New Perspectives On Language and Sex. New York: Longman, 74-93. Authors conduct two case studies of the tag-question form showing, 1) the relation between linguistic form and communicative function is not a simple thing, and we cannot state a priori what tag questions do. Critique of Lakoff’s argument that if women use form x more than men we should seek and explanation of this in terms of the invariant communicative function of x. 2) findings also suggest that the patterning of particular linguistic forms may be illuminated by a consideration of a number of variables, not just gender. these include the role taken by participants in interaction, the objectives of interaction, participants’ relative status on a number of dimensions, and so on. Gender is cross0cut with other social divisions and the relative importance is affected by the specifics of the situation. 3) A question which the studies have not resolved, but which they certainly pose, is whether the role of conversational facilitator, which appears to favor the use of some types of tag in both casual conversation and unequal encounters, is a subcultural norm of all female groups, a burden shouldered by subordinate speakers, or a strategy used to control ongoing talk - or of course, whether it is all of these things at different items as different settings. The possibility that women’s more frequent use of facilitative tags could be a marker of control over conversation rather than one of responsibility for “interactional shitwork” may appear to go against the grain of feminist studies. But, this is something that merits a reassessment.
Cameron, Deborah & Jennifer Coates. 1989. Some Problems in the Sociolinguistic Explanation of Sex Differences. In Coates, Jennifer & Deborah Cameron (Eds.), Women in their Speech Communities. New York: Longman. 13-26. The authors note that the problems related to sex difference findings are of two kinds: First, the sociological component of sociolinguistic methodology is critiqued; sociolinguists have often been insufficiently aware of the specific conditions of women’s lives. To little attention has been paid to the place of women in economic and social organization; too little is known about the nature and values of women’s subcultures, and this has led to an assumption that “vernacular culture” is uniform and exclusively masculine phenomenon. Also, traditional model of social class membership has had an unsatisfactory treatment of women. Secondly, the three explanations commonly put forth to account for sex-differences findings are inadequate , as well as being implicitly sexist (for instance, in their tendency to attribute particular psychological dispositions, like conservatism, to women as a group). The inadequacies the authors discuss have serious implications for theoretical concepts such as “vernacular” (how far can we maintain a notion of the vernacular as a relatively homogeneous class/regional variety?) and “speech community” (given differing vernacular norms for the two sexes, what happens to the definition of the speech community as a group with shared linguistic norms?) Need more empirical research within a framework which assumes that male behavior and male norms are prototypical. Explaining sex differences does not just mean explaining the usage of women, after all. It means devising methods applicable to informants, so we can gauge the importance of sex in the complex system of intersecting social relations that supports linguistic variation.
Coates, Jennifer. 1996. Women Talk: Conversation Between Women Friends. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Coates look at women’s gossip and argues that such talk is not trivial. Gossip involves stories about absent others which can provide a focus for discussing and re-evaluating social norms and for the construction and maintenance of our personal identities, our selves. We need to challenge the negative social values placed on women’s talk and to assert that such talk is as culturally significant and as deserving of attention as any other talk.
Coates, Jennifer. 1988. Gossip Revisited: Language in All-Female Groups. in J. Coates and D. Cameron Eds., Women in their Speech Communities: New Perspectives On Lan-guage and Sex. New York: Longman, 94-122. Coates emphasizes gossip as women’s speech which should not be trivialized, but rather is an integral part of women’s construction of their ‘selves.’
Coates, Jennifer. 1986. Women, Men, and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Sex. New York: Longman. Coates discusses way men and women are socialized into different gender roles and shows how linguistic usage of women and men reflects these differences. She attempts to lay bare myths about linguistic sex differences current in our culture (folklinguistics), noting that is more pertinent to talk about “women’s style” and “men’s style” vs. “Women’s speech.” This is true only if her conceptualization of women’s speech is prepared to take into account the diversity of styles existing between different groups of women. Coates’ book explores sociolinguistic research as evidence of the differences in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary in the speech of men and women.
Coates, Jennifer and D. Cameron (Eds.). 1988. Women in their Speech Communities: New Perspectives On Language and Sex. New York: Longman. Monumental collection. Authors note that feminism has foregrounded issues of gender difference and male domination in society. Assert that dominance invariantly been justified by difference. A feminist critique of sociolinguistic research on lang. and gender is that women in quantitative socioling have been measured using instruments designed for men. Such studies produce invisible, peripheral and deviant women. Authors further reflect critically on earlier work on “women’s language” and the “female register,” noting that such studies tended to be based more on casual observation and introspection rather than on empirical research. Moreover, the writers’ perceptions of the topic were influenced by the preconceptions about male and female roles. Remains two conflicting views to explain differences between men and women: dominance; interpret lang. differences in women and men’s communicative competence as a reflection of men’s dominance and women’s subordination and difference; emphasizes idea that men and women belong to different subcultures, differences are interpreted as reflecting these different subcultures. Problem with Dominance position is that it equates a simplistic relation between form and function such that tag questions equal weakness. This framework takes one particular communicative function for granted and further does injustice to the complexity of female genders’ position in society.
Cooke, B.G. (1980). Nonverbal Communication Among Afro-Americans: An initial Clarification. in R.L. Jones, Ed., Black Psychology (2nd Ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harper & Row. Cooke describes the non-verbal communication strategies of African American women as including the use of their eyes to reprimand and a particular style of walking and standing with hands on hips to connote certain (perhaps) oppositional stances.
Crawford, Mary. 1995. Talking Difference: On Gender and Language. London: Sage. Relying on a “social constructionist perspective” which views gender as a system of social relations operating at individual, social structural and interactional levels, - Crawford critically examines research on the question of whether men and women speak differently. Crawford argues that such research has mostly failed to develop a social critique that would serve feminist ends of understanding and ending sexism given the ways the questions have been framed. Instead of delineating real or essential sex differences in speech style, Crawford shows why that question is the wrong one to ask. Instead, she asks “how are gender relations enacted and maintained in talk? How is the enactment connected to power and status? How is it intertwined with enactment of racism, heterosexism, etc.? and How have feminists appropriated talk for political change. Points to difference as itself as fluctuating and variable.
De Klerk, Vivian. 1992. How Taboo Are Taboo Words for Girls? Language in Society 21(2):277-290. DeKlerk’s analysis of data on African American adolescents reveals that females do use derogatory language and appear to be doing so in increasing numbers. Her research is closely related to other discussions of lexical bias across sex, particular the notion that men and boys are more likely to use derogatory words and expressions. Her methodology includes the use of a questionnaire on slange, 160 English-speaking informants, anonymous reportings.
Eckert, Penelope. 1989. “The Whole Woman: Sex and Gender Differences in Variation" Language Variation and Change 1:254-267. Eckert notes the sociolinguistics generally treats sex in terms of oppositional categories (male/female) and the effects of sex variation are generally sought in ling. differences between male and speakers. However, because gender differences involve difference sin orientation to other social categories, effects of gender on ling. behavior should show up in different within sexual groupings. Data on sound change in progress among Detroit area adolescents show gender has variety of effects on variables and that effects of gender in variation cannot be reduced to notions of male/female speech as “more or less conservative.” Gender does not have uniform effect on ling. behavior for community as a whole, across variables, or any individual. Categories are much more complex.
Eisikovitz, Edina. 1987. Sex Differences in the Inter-Group and Intra-Group interaction Among Adolescents. in Women and Language in Australian and New Zealand Society, Ed. Anne Pauwels, Pp 45-58. Eisikovitz notes that is important to look at the interlocutor in the study of language and gender. Female informants in her study show greater identity with female interviewer than males. Females’ speech has a confessional nature during interviews while males are detached.
Fisher, S. and Kathy Davis. 1993. Negotiating at the Margins: the Gendered Discourses of Power and Resistance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. This more recent book invokes postmodern theories to understand how women negotiate their identities through spoken discourse, as well as oppositional discourses of the body, etc.
Fishman, Pamela. 1983. Interaction: the Work Women Do. in Thorne, Barrie, Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley (Eds.) Language, Gender, and Society. Newbury House, Rowley, MA, 89-102. Fishman notes that the failure of women’s attempt to talk is not due to anything inherent in their talk, but to the failure of men to respond; to do interactional work.
Fishman, Pamela. 1990. Conversational Insecurity. In D. Cameron (Ed.) The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 234-250. Fishman explores behavior that is situated in interaction. She asserts that researchers must attend to the situational context, not merely prior socialization, in order to understand issues of conversational insecurity that may be occurring in men and women’s speech. She questions Lakoff’s theoretical framework using empirical data. Where Lakoff notes that asking questions are one of the prime examples of women’s insecurity and hesitancy in communication, Fishman looks at questions as an interactional attribute: Women ask questions because of the conversational power of questions, not because of personality weaknesses. Questions are used to solve the conversational problem of gaining a response to their utterances. Similarly, hedges, also thought to key women’s conversational insecurity, do work by trying to get a response. Women’s conversational troubles reflect their inferior social position, not inferior social training.
Foster, Michèle. 1995. Are You With Me?: Power and Solidarity in the Discourse of African American Women. in K. Hall and M. Bucholtz (Eds.) Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self. London: Routledge. 329-350. Foster notes that even in relatively formal contexts of interviews and classroom discourse, African American middle class women do codeswitch into black vernacular forms. Their codeswitching behavior is an expression of solidarity and shared identity through which they express their power and challenge the hegemony of political discourse.
Gal, Susan. 1995. Language, Gender and Power: An Anthropological Review. in K. Hall and M. Bucholtz (Eds.) Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self. London: Routledge. 169-182. Gal notes that the study of language and gender is significantly enhanced by attention to everyday practices on the one hand, and the ideological understandings about women, men and language that frame these practices and render them interpretable in particular social contexts, historical periods and social institutions. Must move beyond notions of “women and men’s speech” or “difference vs. dominance” controversy to analyze hegemonic power of linguistic ideologies and the ways in which speakers attempt to parody, subvert, resist, contest, or in some way accommodate these positioned and powerful ideological framings.
Gal, Susan. 1991. Between Speech and Silence: the Problematics of Research On Language and Gender. in Gender at the Crossroad of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Micaela Di Leonardo, Ed. Pp. 175-203. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gal’s insightful piece highlights the fact that silence, while generally deplored by feminists who view it as the result and a symbol of passivity and powerlessness, can ALSO be a strategic defense against the powerful. Looks at sociolinguistic studies of everyday talk to show that it is in part through verbal practices that relations of gender and dominance are perpetuated and sometimes subverted. Verbal interaction is also site of struggle about gender definitions and power. Word become synecdoche for consciousness. Gossip evidences the fact that their is power in everyday talk; in it women construct themselves through language. Must understand the conditions under which informants can talk and seek and understand the genres and discourses women produce. Attn. to ling. detail, context of performance, and nature of dominant forms is important..
Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gilligan’s piece discusses women’s speech differences from a difference perspective. Her psychological background reflects the broad and interdisciplinary scope that characterizes research on language and gender.
Goodwin, Marjorie. 1990. He-Said-She-Said: Talk As Social Organization in A Black Peer Group. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. In relationship to research on dominance and difference in research on language and gender, Goodwin offers evidence that young black girls are fully competent in direct “aggravated commands” usually associated with young boys during play.
Goodwin, Marjorie. 1988. Cooperation and Competition Across Girls' and Boys' Task Activities. in A. Dundes Todd & S. Fisher, Eds., Gender and Discourse: the Power of Talk. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 55-94. Goodwin’s detailed ethnographic study of girls in play situations presents a different view of girls’ activities are conducted with what appears to be minimal disagreement/competition, others provide for extensive negotiation. Compared how boys condition themselves in a specific task activity; making sling shots and how girls make rings from the caps of glass bottles. In contrast to boys, girls select a more egalitarian form of social structure, avoiding creation of distinctions between participants. And when the full repertoire of female interaction patterns is investigated it can be seen that girls exhibit ways of formulating and sequencing their talk with display both cooperative and competitive forms.
Goodwin, Marjorie. 1980. "Directive-Response Speech Sequences in Girls' and Boys' Task Activities" in Sally Mcconnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker and Nelly Furman, Eds. Women and Language in Literature and Society (NY: Praeger), Pp. 157-173. Goodwin notes that while young black girls and boys used different types of commands, with girls using more mitigated commands and boys using mostly aggravated commands, - girls are nevertheless fully competent in aggravated directives and used them in appropriate circumstances, including mixed-sex situations.
Graddol, David & Joan Swann. 1989. Gender Voices. New York: Basil Blackwell. Like Mills (1995), Graddol and Swann discuss the importance of defining the term language in both personal and social terms, recalling Saussure’s description of language as an abstract system and that of the social contract. With respect to defining gender, the authors differentiate their use of it from the technical linguistic term relating to grammatical categories of words in certain languages or the lay use of it to make a social distinction between masculine and feminine. It also differs from “sex” which relates to the biological and by and large binary distinction between male and female. Authors note that views that ling. behavior merely reflects social processes is far from being a straightforward one (as suggested by Coates 1986; vi), yet there is some truth there. There is also an interplay between language and social structure.
Hall, Kira and Mary Bucholtz. 1995. Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self. London: Routledge.. Revisits Lakoff’s study and highlight how her methods are wholly consistent with her disciplinary community at the time; introspection and native speaker intuition were the central methodology of linguistic investigation, empiricism. Identify three general analytical stances in new feminist scholarship on language: the investigation of how cultural paradigms of gender relations are perpetuated through language; study of women’s innovative use of language to subvert the dominant belief system; examination of how women construct social identity and community that are not determined in advance by gender ideologies.
Henley, Nancy. 1995. Ethnicity and Gender Issues in Language. in H. Landrine (Ed.) Bringing Cultural Diversity To Feminist Psychology: theory, Research, and Practice, 1st Ed. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Henley notes that work by people of color has exposed the fact that research on language and gender has been based on white women and that research on ethnic variation has not only equated class with ethnicity/race but mainly based on male culture. Specifies the two main concerns of language and gender as including sex bias (e.g., address terms) and sex difference (e.g., color terms, intonational patterns).
Holmes, Janet. 1995. Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman. Holmes notes, mostly using data on middle-class New Zealand men and women, that on the whole, while women tend to be more polite than men, politeness is always context-dependent, varies from one culture to another.
Holmes, Janet. 1986. Functions of 'You Know' in Women's and Men's Speech. Language in Society 15(1):1-22. Here, Holmes examines the various functions of “you know” in women and men’s speech and discusses the implications of this work in problematizing earlier associations of back channeling cues with hesitancy in women’s speech.
Holmes, Janet. 1990. Hedges and Boosters in Women's and Men's Speech. Language & Communication 10(3):185-206. Holmes identifies some of the major weaknesses in much of research that have attempted to investigate Lakoff’s claims as involving: The identification of relevant forms; Simply counting linguistic forms without taking into account of their function and context, and Methodological weaknesses with respect to selecting an appropriate universe of discourse for analysis and ensuring that the language samples from each sex are carefully matched. If we wish to be able to distinguish the influence of certain ling. factors from gender perse, must account for such problems as well as issues of relative power, status, role, context and type of activity.
Irvine, Judith. 1989. When Talk Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Economy. American Ethnologist 16:248-267. Irvine notes that linguistic forms are part of a world of objects, economic transactions and political interest. Verbal sign relates a political economy in many ways: by indexing parts of it; by depicting it (Peircian terms; iconic function); and lastly, by taking part in it as an object of exchange (recalling Bourdieu’s “linguistic marketplace”). Therefore, Saussure’s segregation of sign-value from world of material values in linked to his view that languages function solely as vehicles for referential communication.
Jacobs-Huey, Lanita. Forthcoming. Negotiating Social Identity in An African American Beauty Salon Paper Presented at the Berkeley Women in Language Conference, (April) Berkeley, California. in Press. This paper describes how African American women negotiate their identities as hair experts and/or contest their identity as hair novices within their own highly intimate speech community; the beauty salon.
Jacobs-Huey, Lanita. Forthcoming. BTW, How Do YOU Wear Your Hair: Establishing Racial Identity, Consciousness and Community On An African American Listserv Group. forthcoming Manuscript in S. Herring (Ed.) Computer-Mediated Conversation. This paper describes several discussions about hair that took place on a listserv discussion group dedicated to African American research (AF-AM.L @ Missou1). A discourse analysis of these dialogues illuminate the range of discursive strategies employed by African American women to establish cultural authority in the forum. For example, participants employ a range of African American discourse styles, including indirectness, signification (cf., Morgan 1995), and a lexicon of African American hair terms (cf., Smitherman 1994) to position themselves within a distinctly African American and female community. Such discourse styles enable forum participants to transcend the physical constraints of the electronic medium by allowing them to construct their racial identities for unseen audiences. However, participants also acknowledge the physical constraints of computer-mediated discourse through indirect questions like, “And how do You wear your hair?!” Because African American hairstyles symbolize women’s gendered and racial identities in African American culture (Mercer 1994), this question is a camouflaged interrogation of the addressee’s racial authenticity.
Jacobs-Huey, Lanita. 1996a. Negotiating Price in An African American Beauty Salon. Issues in Applied Linguistics, (June) Vol. 7, No. 1: 45-59. This study attends to the ways black women negotiate their authority over negotiations about the price of hair care. Through an analysis of the client’s use of paralinguistic, prosodic, and indirect discourse styles (i.e., hedges, questions, and humor), I argue that the client attempts to negotiate the price of her visit. This view is later corroborated by the hair stylist in an ethnographic inteview afterwards; she too felt that the client was trying to attempt to assess the cost of the visit.
James, Deborah and S. Clarke. 1993. Women, Men and Interruptions; A Critical Review. in D. Tannen Ed., Gender and Conversational interaction (pp. 231-280). Oxford: Oxford University Press. The authors review students appearing between 1965-91 and dealing with gender differences in use of interruption by men and women. Study’s findings does not support the conclusion that men interrupt women more than women interrupt men. Rather, most research has found no significant differences between the genders in a number of the interruptions initiated, in either cross-sex or same-sex interactions. Yet this result in unsurprising given the multi-functional nature of simultaneous talk. This review article also highlights the importance of defining term, interruption, as well as the multiple functions of interruptions: they can as supportive and cooperative speech acts (e.g., back channel utterance) and they don’t always violate the speaking rights of others. Hence, a more adequate analysis of what an interruption may have been attempting to do must take into account: not simply the content of an interruption, but also the larger context in which interruption is used; the semantic content of the interruption; the general trend and content of the conversation up to that point; relationships between the participants; conversational style employed by interrupter, given that individual’s cultural background. There are also methodological considerations: Existing research provides virtually no information abut the possible effects of the subjects’ SES, cultural/ethnic group, amount of education; studies differ in the way interruptions are counted (inconsistencies in rate vs. raw numbers); some studies exclude back channel utterances and overlap while others have not; and few consider “silent” interruptions as candidates for study.
Jesperen, Otto. (1990). The Woman. In D. Cameron (Ed.) The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 201-220. This hallmark piece, first published in 1922, asserts that there are differences between men and women’s speech. This is supposedly in the fact that the greatest orators and literary artists were men and the fact that the “highest linguistic genius and lowest degree of linguistic imbecility are rarely found among women.” This admittedly controversial and non-empirical piece is one of the first articles addressing issues of difference among men and women. Where Jesperen ignores issues of dominance in society that would position men as great orators and literary artists, Lakoff highlights, indeed in some cases, reifies issues of dominance to explain women’s so-called marginal position as speakers in relation to men.
Jones, Deborah. 1990. Gossip: Notes on Women’s Oral Culture. In D. Cameron (Ed.) The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 242-250. Gossip should not be interpreted as trivial women’s language. Rather, it is the staple of women’s lives; key to female subculture. This was an important notation in the context of Jones’ writing. It occurred in a time when researchers were beginning to turn their critical gaze towards the form and function of women’s everyday talk within their own speech communities.
Kaplan, Cora. 1990. Language & Gender. In D. Cameron (Ed). The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader. New York: Routledge., 57-69. Kaplan, working within the dominance approach, notes that there are two distinct stages at which women’s apparently weaker position in language is set: Oedipal stage in which child is constructed as a speaking subject; young girls must then acknowledge social sex differences and align herself with women and restricted speech. The second stage is puberty which further distinguishes girls from boys by appearance of adult sex differences and access to public discourse for men. The “taboo” of speaking like men is evident in apologies, fear or self-consciousness expressed by female poets, in particular, using the “high language” of poetry.
Kipers, Pamela S. 1987. Gender and Topic. Language in Society. 16(4), December. Kipers notes that folk wisdom has long advanced the idea that women talk more about trivial topics than men do. Some linguists, namely Jespersen (1922) and Lakoff (1975) have also embraced this idea. Kipers asks, “What do all female, all male and mixed gender groups really talk about. Her results do not show support for the believe of women’s talk as trivial.
Kramarae, Cheris. 1980. Proprietors of Language. In S. Mcconnell-Ginet, R. Border, & N. Furman, Eds., Women and Language in Literature and Society. New York: Praeger, 58-68. Kramarae notes that by and large, men have controlled norms of language use by creating words, etc. This poses a challenge to women to define her feelings in a language chiefly made by men to express theirs. Yet, women have played a role in the development of language systems. Women are sometimes at the vanguard of linguistic change. As major sources of adult linguistic influences on young kids, women help chart the course of many developments in language.
Kramarae, Cheris. 1989. Feminist Theories of Communication. in E. Barnouw (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Communications. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 157-160. Kramarae traces the varied influences of feminist theory on the study of communication. She discusses these influences under the sub-headings of the “Silencing of women,” “Violence” incurred by women from that silencing, “Heteropatriachial semantics” of talk, and the resistance that women authors have enacted by “Writing the body.” She also discusses “technologies,” or the media and its dominance by men and the presence of the public and private division throughout mainstream communication theorizing.
Kramarae, Cheris and Marsha Houston. 1991. Speak from Silence: Methods of Silencing and Resisting. Discourse and Society 2: 387-399. Authors note that women experience tragic and destructive forms of silencing that is apparent no only in the absence of their voices, but also in the form, focus and content of their speech and writing. Women can be silenced via ridicule, enforcement of family hierarchies, male-controlled media, racism. Feminist researchers help break silences through analysis of silencing techniques, re-evaluation of trivial discourse, creative code-switching, linguistic creativity, and the organization of women’s presses. Also women struggle to tell stories, critique literacy programs, record our herstories, publish our truths, create networks, revise our languages. There are also positive silences, healthy, happy, humorous powerful silences. Women silence other women. Black women are silenced by white women who see them as confrontational.
Kramarae, Cheris & Mercilee M. Jenkins. 1987. Women Take Back the Talk. in J. Penfield, Ed., Woman and Language in Transition. Albany: State University of New York Press, 137-156. Authors document strategies women are using to take back some of the control of talk; ways women can be have been ‘voleuses de langue’ thieves of language. Look at women’s talk at a six day feminist scholarship conference. Women are changing the categories (e.g., taking new names, making reversals by calling oneself “hag”, naming new expressions “sexism”); writing the body; reclaiming nonstandard languages, using humor as resistance, talking about damage, and preventing “unnatural silences.” Authors point to Elgin’s Native Tongue and A Feminist Dictionary as recent evidence.
Lakoff, Robin. 1990. Talking Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff’s more recent piece describes language as politics on the premise that politics assigns power and power governs how people talk and how they are understood.
Lakoff, Robin. 1975. Language and Woman's Place. NY: Harper. One of the significant points Lakoff makes here is that it is too simplistic to say that boys and girls from the start learn two different ways of speaking. Rather, she asserts that little girls are taught or socialized to speak like “little ladies.” Thus, girls speech tends to be more polite than boys or men. Women are taught to be polite in order to present expression of strong statements, thus reaffirming their linguistic inferiority in relation to men. While Lakoff’s position was correct in highlighting how societal factors impact the differences between men and women, she has since been criticized for failing to consider how politeness can be used strategically by women to navigate power relations to the benefit of the speaker. This oversight by Lakoff is not surprising given that native speaker intuition were some of the major forms of methodology used during her era.
McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 1990. Gender, Politeness and Confrontation in Tenejapa. Discourse Processes 13(1): 123-141. McConnell-Ginet explores women’s use of conventialized polite speech in the context of the courtroom. Interestingly, women use polite speech styles sarcastically, for the purposes of being impolite.
McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 1988. Language and Gender. In F. J. Newmeyer Ed., Linguistics: the Cambridge Survey 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 75-99. McConnell-Ginet notes that language use involves the production by linguistic agents (speakers/writers) of linguistic forms; in using these forms, agents are meaning to express content and to present themselves as social beings and actors in the world. She then explores production and meaning in greater detail. She asks, “How does gender interact with patterns of linguistic expressions produced?” and then posits two reasons why we might tend to view the study of linguistic production as the study of the speaker (versus of also the audience, context, etc.) One reason is a general psychological phenomena observed in our strongly individualistic culture. While language production is a form of behavior, a major error is to associate a person’s behavior as due to intrinsic properties of the person (her grammatical knowledge or her intellectual capabilities) without reference to contextual factors. A second reason is that linguists have primarily studied grammars as systems instantiated in minds of the linguistic agents. Linguistic production is prima facie evidence only for the grammar(s) in the mind of the agent is responsible for the production. Thus, there is the little reason to look beyond speaker to her audience or situation. BUT to look at language in interaction with gender, it is not enough to observe how features of linguistic production connect the characteristics of the producers. The study of how gender affects linguistic production is not exhausted by the study of how the gender characteristics of speakers affect their speech. Yet this is all that prevalent sex-difference approach considers.
She then makes three concluding remarks: 1) Gender is not simple a matter of individual characteristics (e.g. sex) but also involves actions and social relations, ideology, and politics. 2) Patterns of language production depends on more than just the agents’ intrinsic characteristics, her sociolinguistic identity: they also reflect her assessment of social situations and her choice of strategies for the linguistic construction of her social relations. 3) Meaning interacts with gender because it links the social psychological phenomena of language with the abstract formal notion of a language, an interpreted linguistic system. The individual (what she means, her means, her intentions) are also here inextricably enmeshed in the social. IN SUM, a theory that accommodates the dual psychological and social nature of language and its relation to language can help further understanding of language and gender.
McConnell-Ginet, Sally. "Feminism in Linguistics." In P. Treichler, C. Kramarae, and B. Stafford (Eds.) For Alma Mater: Theory and Practice in Feminist Scholarship. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 159-176. Author notes that the rigor in linguistics has been achieved at the price of rigor mortis; formal rules and representations provide no insight into language as human activity. Asks, what tools can linguistics offer feminist scholars for the study of language?: Precise formal characterizations of expressions speakers and writers use and Methods and procedures for the collection and analysis of language users. How one speaks, given options in particular community’s linguistic repertoire, can indicate: access (how do folks you speak with most often talk?), social bonds (how do your friends talk?), social identity and status, utility. Language choices reflect speakers on social analysis and thus provide one way to get at women’s own perspectives on their lives. Must look at discourse situated in interaction.
McConnell-Ginet, Sally and R. Borker and N. Furman, (Eds.). 1980. Women and Language in Literature and Society. New York: Praeger. McConnell-Ginet, in Chapter 1 (Linguistics and the Feminist Challenge), notes that the focus in linguistics on formal rules does not shed significant light on interaction of gender. However, linguistics does direct attention to the possible parameters of variety among language systems to the kinds of features that might distinguish the language of women and men in diverse situations. She identifies two major questions which have dominated research on language and the sexes: how are women spoken of and to? And how do women (and men) speak? Research addressing these questions have focused on the question of sexist language, particularly evident in vocabulary. She notes that although the particular linguistic forms and structures are not sexist in and of themselves, the range of linguistic choices readily available in a community both reflects and contributes to the maintenance of traditional views of the sexes. Secondly, the concept “Genderlect” that has been offered to describe “women’s speech’ does not explain how language functions in the lives of women and men and why the sexist systems show the features they do. Studying language use is an important way to gain insight into the semantic structure of language styles and strategies; to see language at work. Linguistic codes change through men and women’s strategic use of them. Indeterminacy and multiple meanings are important features of linguistic systems. Once simple labeling view is seen as inadequate, it is possible to see why and to begin to investigate how language is important in women’s lives.
Miller, Casey and Kate Swift. 1977. Words and Women: New Language in New Times. New York: Anchor Books. Authors, also journalists, note that sexist language is not always conscious and can be lazy. Eradicating it need not result in graceless language. Emphasizes the broad scope of writers on sex and language.
Mills, Sara. 1995. Language and Gender: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Longmann Press. Like other authors, Mills discusses the problem of defining relevant terms, including language and gender. She summarizes how language is defined differently by the contributors and how gender has moved beyond a technical linguistic term to describe how sex is encoded in grammar, but rather as a highly politicized term.
Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia. 1972. “Signifying, Loud Talking & Marking” in Rappin and Stylin Out: Communication in Black America. Urbana, Univ. Ill. Press. Pp. 315-35. Mitchell-Kernan foundational article delineates some of the verbal arts used by both African American women. Her work serves to challenge Labov’s claim that black males are the best exemplars of vernacular culture and is also in conversation with Stanback’s claim that middle-class black women evidence control over a variety of discourse styles characteristic of the linguistic repertoire in African American speech communities.
Mitchell-Kernan, Claudiea. 1973 “Signifying” in Mother Wit From the Laughing Barrel, Ed. A. Dundes, Pp. 310-28. New York: Garland. See above.
Morgan, Marcyliena. Forthcoming. No Woman No Cry: The Linguistic Representation of African American Women. In K. Hall, M. Bucholtz, and B. Moonwoman (Eds.) Proceedings of the Berkeley Women & Language Group Conference. Berkeley: University of California Press. Early literature on ethnic variation in language use was largely based on young urban black males and thus described the vernacular as male and poor. Research on language and gender studied black women in relationship to men. Yet black women should be understood in their own right. Discusses the importance of social face for both black men and women and highlights women’s discourse styles that are designed to construct and maintain a cool social face. Asserts that African American girls, young women, adults grow and function as core social actors in their communities. They are a part vs. on the periphery of vernacular culture.
Morgan, Marcyliena. 1996a. Conversational Signifying: Grammar and Indirectness Among African American Women. in E. Ochs, E. Schegloff and S. Thompson (Eds.) Grammar and interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Here, Morgan examines conversational signifying, a practice fundamental to the construction of identity in African American speech communities. In particular, she describes how the system of conversational signifying is cued through a variety of grammatical, prosodic and syntactic features in conversation. Significantly, she explores data involving African American women, who are the connoisseurs of this African American verbal style.
Morgan, Marcyliena. 1996b. More Than A Mood Or An attitude: Discourse & Verbal Genres in African American Culture. To Appear in S. Mufwene, J. Rickford G. Bailey and J. Baugh (Eds.) The Structure of African American English. London: Routledge. This article describes several African American indirect and direct discourse styles, including reading and reading dialect, baited and pointed indirectness, signification. Morgan discusses how these discourse styles are cued prosodically and grammatically by African American speakers, as well as how the use of these discourse styles co-constructs a speakers’ communicative stances. She also describes several African American women’s speech styles, in particular.
Morgan, Marcyliena. 1991. Indirectness and Interpretation in African American Women’s Discourse. Pragmatics, Vol. 1, No. 4: 421-51.
Morgan, Marcyliena. 1989. “From Down South To Up South: the Language Behavior of Three Generations of Black Omen Residing in Chicago.” Dissertation. University of Pennsylvania.
Nichols, Patricia. 1983. Linguistic Options and Choices for Black Women in the Rural South, in Language, Gender, and Society, Ed. B. Thorne, C. Kramerae, and N. Henley, Pp 54-68. Nichols asserts that “women’s language” is as much as myth as “private language.” In examining the speech of women in an all black speech community in coastal South Carolina, she found that women use language in ways that reflect options available to them in their particular speech communities. Some exhibit linguistically innovative behavior; others more conservative. Women make language use choices in contexts of particular social networks rather than as some generalized response to universal conditions of women.
Nichols, Patricia. 1980. Women in Their Speech Communities. In McConnell-Ginet, Sally and R. Borker and N. Furman, (Eds.). Women and Language in Literature and Society. New York: Praeger, 140-149. Nichols notes that while there is much talk about “women’s speech,” women are members first and foremost of their own small speech communities. Researchers must therefore examine women’s speech in these contexts. Sociological respect for and interaction in variation in linguistic structures used by diverse groups must be combined with an ethnographic concern with language as it is used in special contexts within speech communities. Points to three studies of women in their communities, including Elinor Keenan’s study of men and women’s speech in small village in Madagascar, Susan Gal’s work in a community in Austria, and her own work in a small speech community in rural South Carolina. In Madagascar, women exhibit conservative behavior (though not be Western standards) and in Austria, women exhibit innovative linguistic behavior. Must understand variation in terms of the norms of women’ speech communities.
O'Barr, William & Bowman K. Atkins (1980). "Women's Language" Or "Powerless Language"? in S. McConnell-Ginet, R. Borker & N. Furman, Eds., Women and Language in Literature and Society. New York: Praeger, 93-110. Authors examine phenomena of “women’s language” in institutional context of a court of law. Shows that the features of “women’s language” are not restricted to women and therefore suggests renaming the concept “powerless language” due to close association with persons having low social power. While this article rightly suggests that Lakoff’s term “women’s language” be reconsidered, it doesn’t explore how some of the features stereotypically associated with women’s speech can be used by women across contexts as empowerment or resistance strategies.
Ochs, Elinor. 1992. "Indexing Gender" in C. Goodwin and A. Duranti (Eds.), Rethinking Context: Language As An interactive Phenomenon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Ochs notes that the relationship between language and gender is not a simple straight forward mapping of linguistic form to social meaning of gender. rather, the relation of language to gender is constituted and mediated by the relation of language to stances, social acts, social activities, and other social constructs. With respect to gender hierarchy, Ochs argues that images of women are linked to images of mothering and that such images are socialized through communicative practices associated with caregiving. Explores this phenomena among white middle class women and Samoan mothers.
Penelope, Julia. 1990. Speaking Freely. Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers' Tongues. New York: Pergamon Press. Penelope asserts that women must understand how structure of English language controls the way we think. English proscribes boundaries of lives women might imagine and will themselves to live. “Glamour of grammar” - rules of patriarchal English are glamours; made up rules said to describe the language that are in fact illusions conjured up by men’s ideas on how language ought to be. English promotes and maintains women-hating in the U.S. “Standard English” is founded in elitism and androcentricism as well.
Philips, Susan U., Steele, Susan & Christine Tanz, Eds. 1987. Language, Gender, and Sex in Comparative Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press. Authors discuss women’s speech through a consideration of society and biology. Explore gender, language and cognitive processes; sex hormones on the brain are seen as having direct effect on sex differences in language-related cognition. Also discuss language, gender and physical and emotional processes; to explore some of the more socializing, culturally constructed aspect of gender and language
Poynton, Cate. 1989. Language and Gender: Making the Difference. Oxford University Press. Notes that much of the discussion of language in relation to sexism focus on lexes (e.g., chairman vs. chairperson). Poynton argues that we must begin to explore other linguistic units and levels, all of which collaboratively construct meaning. Further, we can no longer afford to assume that language is outside the individual self and culture since neither would exist without language. Some of the linguistic structures we need attend to include discourse (e.g., dealing with the construction of texts); lexico-grammar (e.g., construction of clauses); and phonology (e.g., dealing with getting it all on the airwaves). To fully describe texts, must understand these features and the choices that speakers make in language use. Researchers’ must also attend to higher level semiotics, such as register (e.g., contexts in which thing are said - field, tenor and mode), genre (e.g., goal/purpose of talk), ideology (e.g., values and meanings implicated in language use). Language is important in social construction of reality, naming is significant in everyday conversation as are ways of speaking (language as social process). Language structure predisposes a certain ways of seeing and acting in the world. Covert grammatical categories (“crototypes” Whorf) contributes to one’s world view: pronoun choice, adjective choice, personal names. Similarly, we need a “grammar of context” which sees the grammatical options open to speakers and the choices they make. Further, we need to challenge the ideology of gender more so than objecting a few sexist words and actions.
Smith, Janet. 1992. Women in Charge: Politeness and Directives in the Speech of Japanese Women. Language in Society 21(1):59-82. The “powerlessness/low status’ and “femininity” factors that underly relatively frequent use of politeness forms in Japanese create a dilemma for Japanese women in nontraditional occupations and for those who hold gender atypical occupational statuses in modern society. Findings show that there is empirical support based on observational data drawn from various sources for the claim that women are more polite than men. This appears to be true both when women occupy roles that are traditionally female or those that are nontraditional. A unified set of linguistic behaviors directives - does relate to underlying cultural notions of power and powerlessness in a principled way in Japanese case and these behaviors interact with gender in complex ways. Japanese women who acquire positions of authority do appear to experience linguistic conflict. Attempt to resolve it by defeminizing their speech within limits (Reynolds 1990). YET This study suggest that women may rather attempt to resolve the conflict by empowering their own speech (by adopting the Motherese Strategy as a public-domain power strategy) and that they are creating new and powerful strategies (Passive Power Strategy) on a female power continuum that is distinct from the male power continuum.
Smith-Hefner, Nancy. 1988. Women and Politeness: the Javanese Example. Language in Society 17(4):535-554. Smther-Hefner notes that while it seems that women are required to be more polite than men, Javanese men more commonly cultivate politeness and formality as a means of expressing superior status and authority. Cultivated use of the Javanese speech levels by Javanese men shares certain features in common with Keenan’s Malagasy example and reveals just what are the particular social conditions which support and encourage cultivation of polite forms by men. Ethnographic observations avoid characterizing speech interactions in terms of a single status differential and highlight the importance of considering men and women’s roles in relation to their use of language across a wide variety of contexts. Social evaluation of these roles and questions of culturally appropriate behavior must also be considered - information which may be different to ascertain using traditional sociolinguistic methods alone. Ambiguity in the social message of polite speech allows it to serve both as an index of politeness and a mechanism of potentially political, and the public, political sphere is primarily defined as a male domain, we should not be surprised to find that men are publicly more polite, while women, their political subordinates, speak less politely and with less power.
Spender, Dale. 1980. Constructing Women's Silence, Man Made Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Spender’s book constitutes a monumental piece in the discussion over language and gender, particularly supports the dominance perspective, or proponent of the view that men are originators of language because men have wielded the power.
Stanback, Marsha Houston. 1985. Language and Black Woman's Place: Evidence From the Black Middle Class. In Treichler, Paula A., Cheris Kramarae, and Beth Stafford, Eds., for Alma Mater: theory and Practice in Feminist Scholarship (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press), 177-93. Notes that, in contrast to Labov’s claim that black males are the best exemplars of vernacular culture, middle-class black females in conversational groups are proficient in a full range of BEV forms, including signifying, indirectness, etc. Middle class black women are bi-dialectal.
Tannen, Deborah, (Ed.). 1993. Gender and Conversational Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tannen notes that language and gender must be explored through the study of discourse in interaction. Critiques the tendency of researchers to bifurcate the gender and linguistic field into two camps, dominance and cultural. Those who take the cultural approach (Maltz and Borker 1982) see males and females as belonging to two different cultural groups since they tend to be socialized in primarily sex-separate peer interaction during childhood; these scholars also recognize gender is only one of many cultural influences affecting ling. behavior. Yet, these scholars do not deny the existence of dominant relations in general or the domination of women by men. Such bifurcation (between the two approaches) is likewise unfortunate since it belies the complexity of the issues and the subtlety of the scholars’ research. This volume highlights the strength of interactional sociolinguistics or ethnographically oriented discourse analytic approaches. Contributors likewise focus on discourse in interaction, attention to context, gender and language in interactional and diverse contexts, and language explored holistically rather than as a bundle of isolated variables.)
Tannen, Deborah. 1990. You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: William Morrow. This book, geared for public-audiences, has raised a number of questions regarding writing for academic and lay audiences. Particularly, because Tannen has been accused of “selling out” to feminist linguistic goals and reifying the differences between men and women without accounting for how social factors such as male dominance, sexism, racism factor into women’s speech, - researchers of language and gender have had to grapple with the complexities of representation and accountability to multiple audiences (see also Cameron 1995).
Thorne, Barrie and Nancy Henley (Eds.) 1975. Language and Sex: Difference & Dominance. Newbury House, Rowley, MA. In this foundational piece which was published along with two other monumental studies of sex and gender, authors note that language helps enact and transmit every type of inequality, including that between the sexes. Male dominance is strikingly apparent in content of words; male is associated with the universal. Everyday uses of talk and nonverbal gestures also evidence sexism (e.g., touching, smiling, eye contact, interruption, intonation) - all of these help establish, express and maintain power relationships. Book highlights the significance of social context.
Thorne, Barrie, Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley (Eds.). 1983. Language, Gender, and Society. New York: Newbury House Publishers. Authors trace changes in conceptualizations of the relationship between language and gender, including 1) a deepened understanding of social organization of gender, and 2) shift from the earlier emphasis on mixed-sex talk to closer attention to women’s speech with one another. Language and Sexes research began in the early 70s. Drew on earlier reports of travelers and missionaries by describing men and women’s languages in societies removed from Western culture. Jesperen (1922) reviews cross-cultural reports and adds series of speculations about Western women’s supposed preference for refined euphemistic hyperbolic expression and men’s alleged use of slang and innovation. Given that language structure was and continues to be distinguished from language use in certain fields (langue et parole - Saussure), researchers of language and gender initially separate research on sexism in language from inquiry into ways women and men use the code. In research that emerged in the U.S. by poets and radical feminists argued that language is deeply patriarchal and that women need to reword traditional forms in order to create women-centered language and meaning. This approach connects language structure, use and experience. Now, the study of isolated variables (adverbs, tags, etc.) almost invariably leads to further questions about the effects of setting, topic, roles and other social factors that may interact with gender. It also raises questions about language function and use. Recognizing findings of sex-differences to be over-reported, researchers are increasingly using the phrase, “sex similarities and differences.” Trends summarized: critiques of units of language study are too abstracted from context; Genderlect concept is too abstracted from context; most fruitful research on gender and speech conceptualized language within contexts of actual use; gender and sex have been deepened - gender is not merely an individual attribute, essence or “role” but instead takes shape in concrete historically changing social relationships; gender, like language, has been returned to its social contexts - moving beyond a first, perhaps necessary stage of work where we sought correlations between frequency of a linguistic feature and the speaker or spoken to; silence, it has been asserted, should not merely be confused with absence in that women can use silence as a subversive strategy; increased focus on women with women talk. In these and other ways, research on language and gender has been and continues to be profoundly political, as is all research.
Trudgill, Peter. 1975. Sex, Covert Prestige, and Linguistic Change in the Urban English of Norwich. in B. Thorne & N. Henley, Eds., Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House, 88-103. Morgan, M. 1989. “From Down South To Up South: the Language Behavior of Three Generations of Black Omen Residing in Chicago.” Dissertation. University of Pennsylvania. Trudgill notes that “covert prestige” can be associated with certain linguistic forms. Reflects value system of our society and of different sub-cultures within this society. For male speakers and females under 30, nonstandard speech forms are highly valued, although the values are not explicitly expressed.
Uchida, Aki. 1992. When 'Difference' Is 'Dominance': A Critique of the 'Anti-Power-Based' Cultural Approach To Sex Differences." Language in Society 21(4):547-568. Uchida offers several critiques of difference approach, including: 1) notion of men and women as belonging to different “cultures” is too simplistic to account for everything that occurs in mixed-sex conversation, 2) Dichotomization of “power” and “culture” as two separate, independent concepts is inappropriate because social interaction always occurs in the context of a patriarchal society. Relationship between gender and language should be approached from viewpoint that we are doing gender in interaction. Must come up with a framework that allows us to see gender as a holistic and dynamic concept regarding language use, a framework that allows us to see how we, in a social context, are doing gender through the use of language.
Visweswaren, Kamala. 1994. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. London: Univer-sity of Minnesota Press. Visweswaren’s ethnographic accounts show how silence is used by her participants to resist being “subjected” to inquiry.
Yankah, Kwesi. 1995. Speaking for the Chief : Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory. Bloomington : Indiana University Press. Yankah notes that silence is itself an effective mode of rhetoric, as is indirectness.
Zentella, Ana Celia. 1987. Language and Female Identity in the Puerto Rican Community. in J. Penfield Ed., Women and Language in Transition. Albany: SUNY Press, 167-179. [25] Notes that language is closely tied to social dimensions of Puerto Rican identity. Puerto Rican females are on the cutting edge of language change.
Zimmerman, D. and West, C. 1975. Sex Roles, Interruptions and Silences in Conversation. in B. Thorne & N. Henley Eds., Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House. Using data of informal chit chat collected in coffee shops, drug stores, and other public places in a university community, Zimmerman and West found that males assert an asymmetrical right to control topics and do so without evident repercussions. Men deny equal status to women as conversational partners with respect to their rights to the full utilization of their turns and support for the development of topics. Thus, authors speculate that just as male domination is exhibited through male control of macro-institutions in society, it is also exhibited through control of at least a part of one micro-institution; conversation.