Language and Gender by Penelope Eckert & Sally McConnell-Ginet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, xii+366 pp (original) (raw)
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Speaking up: understanding language and gender
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development
Allyson Jule's overview of language and gender research introduces readers to a range of valuable material using accessible prose and an engaging tone. As a 'beginner's guide' to the ways in which we are 'rehearsed into genderedness' (3-4), a useful concept, it covers the 21-42. Oxford: Blackwell.
The handbook of language and gender
Language in Society, 2005
There has been a great deal of research on language and gender and there are many books which have the title Language and Gender. Despite this proliferation of resources, I have always had difficulty recommending a textbook to students of language and gender, because many of the overview texts seem to belong to a particular research paradigm which assumes firstly, that gender/sex is a stable categorization which has a consistent influence on language production and, secondly, that the speech of men and women differs in ways that are consistent and predictable. Holmes and Meyerhoff's Handbook of Language and Gender is therefore an unusual and challenging collection of essays. It is unusual in that all of the essays have been newly commissioned (unlike some other collections of essays on this subject which reprint 'classicessays'); all of them are written by acknowledged experts in the field and constitute surveys of the most recent research (unlike other language and gender research surveys which sum up past trends in the research); and all of them challenge conventional academic and popular views of the relation between language and gender. 1 The primary importance of this book lies perhaps in this last aspect, for these essays all move language and gender research away from a concern with documenting the differences between so-called 'male' and 'female' language. Instead, they all take as their starting point an anti-essentialist view of gender, one which assumes that gender is something which individuals perform or which they orient to within interaction. But significantly, all of the essays, instead of assuming as some have, that gender therefore is now irrelevant, demonstrate that gender does make a difference, but not in the same way in every interaction, and perhaps not always in ways which we would expect. Furthermore, rather than simply dismissing research which aims to prove that women and men speak differently, many of these essays focus on why it is that the notion of sex difference is so important within our culture.
Are men really more casual and women more sophisticated while speaking? Despite both genders being part of the same human species, they do have a salient difference in the manner they interact, speak, react and even the topics they choose to talk about. While men are more at ease in their social contexts, women appear to be conscious about their status and thus tend to use higher standard language in terms of talking. In addition, both men and women have different purposes when talking: for men it has more to do about imparting information and demonstrating expertise compared to women who aim to maintain and develop relationships. However, like in a lot of other things, exceptions are a part of this issue too; some men are just ‗too feminine' and some women are just ‗too boyish'.
Term Paper Introduction to Gender and Discourse
This paper focuses on the literature that has contributed to the understanding of the major research questions underlying two major strands, language and gender, concentrating on the development of the literature from the deficit and dominance models to the social constructivist era of post-modernism in order to provide a context for recent developments in language and gender theories. The study of language and gender has increasingly become the study of discourse and gender. While phonological, lexical, and other kinds of linguistic analysis continue to be influential, the interdisciplinary investigation of discourse-level phenomena, always a robust area of language and gender scholarship, has become the central approach of the field.