Language, gender and discourse identity
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This document discusses research on language, gender, and discourse identity. It summarizes key findings from several studies. Kramer found that men's speech was seen as logical and concise while women's was seen as emotional and wordy. Cutler and Scott found that in dialogues between men and women, the woman was judged to talk more. However, when members of the same gender had a dialogue, each was judged to contribute equally. The document also discusses social identity theory and how gender identities are constructed through communities of practice rather than fixed speech communities.
Language, gender and discourse identity
- 1. LANGUAGE, GENDER AND DISCOURSE IDENTITY Second Group Semester 7 Class A
- 2. IDENTITIES IN SPEECH • People will have attitudes towards women’s and men’s speech that are consequential for evaluation of speakers, on the other hand, speech cues are thought to trigger attributions about the gender identity of the speaker (that is, how masculine or feminine they are). (Weatherall-2002) • In general, men’s speech was seen as logical, concise and dealing with important topics, whereas women’s speech was rated as emotional, flowery, confused and wordy. (Kramer-1978) • Cutler and Scott (1990) researched that the dialogue between man and woman, the woman was judged to be talking more than man. When the members of the same gender performed the dialogue, then each speaker was judged as contributing to the conversation equally. • Lawrence et al. (1990) concluded that impact of gender difference in speech styles and gender stereotypes may be fluctuating and transitory in nature.
- 3. SOCIAL IDENTITY THEORY • According to social identity theory, a person’s sense of who the are is comprised of aspect of the self deriving from themselves as an individual and those that arise out of their membership of the social group. (Weatherall-2002) • Williams and Giles (1978) suggested that prior to the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s to 70s, women had largely accepted their secondary status in society. • According to Williams and Giles (1978), another strategy that members of low-status group might use to improve their social identity was to create new dimensions for comparison with other group.
- 4. SOCIAL IDENTITY THEORY • Coates (1986) suggested that, in term of gender and language, an assimilation strategy was a widespread identity maintenance tactic being used by women to enhance their social identity. • The heterogeneous nature of what it means to be a woman or to be a man is also problem for research based on essentialist and realist assumption about gender identity and its relationship to language. Despite the considerable problems with social identity theory for understanding women’s identities, it continues to be used, particularly in sociolinguistics, as a frame-work for understanding the relationship between identity and language. (Weatheall-2002)
- 5. IDENTITY AND LINGUISTIC VARIATION • In a study of dialect variation in Norwich, people who were categorized as middle middle class (MMC) used more tokens of the “-ing” variant the lower middle class (LMC), who used more than the upper working class (UWC), who used more that the middle working class (MWC). The lower working class (LWC) used the “ing” variant least frequently. (Trudgill1972) • One explanation for women’s more standard speech was similar to that given for the stratification of phonological variables by social class. It was suggested that women are mire status-conscious than men because their social status is more precarious then men’s.
- 6. SPEECH COMMUNITIES • Social network relatively ‘open’ or ‘closed’ . In closed social network, people all know each other, whereas in a more open network an individual’s personal contacts tend not to know each other. • The social network or speech community explanation does not rely on stereotyped ideas about what role women play in society. • The speech community explanation of gender differences in phonological variation was a development because it considered the influence of social contact on speech, but it too has been the subject of feminist critique. (Bucholtz et al-1999). • One problem with speech community explanatory framework is that gender identity is effectively reduced to a position within a social structure. Being a ‘woman’ or being a ‘man’ is treated as social address. (Weatherall-2002)
- 7. COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE (COFP) • Eckert and McConnell-Ginert (1992) suggested that the notion of communities of practice (CofP) be used instead of speech communities in order to avoid treating social identity as fixed and gender as a homogenous identity category. • For them, a Cofp framework is a constructionist approach to the relationship between language and identity. They describe gendered practices as constructing members of a community ‘as’ women or ‘as’ men, and argue that this construction also involves constructing relations between and within each sex.