[Plagiarism] : [Assignments] : [Week 3 Summarizing] : Original Text
Original Text for Summaries
Source:
Salzmann, Z. (1998). Language, culture, and society: An introduction to linguistic
anthropology. Boulder, Col: Westview Press, 1998.
Language and Gender
The term gender refers in linguistics to which certain word classes (parts of speech) are formally classified. In Latin, for example, the gender of nouns is for the most part grammatical, that is, it has nothing to do with distinguishing between male and female: The gender of pes 'foot' is masculine, of manus 'hand' feminine, and of caput 'head' neuter. By contrast, gender in English is on the whole natural: A male is referred to by the pronoun he, a female by she, and almost everything else by it. Exceptions are very few: Some people use the feminine pronoun to refer to ships and cars, and the neuter pronoun it to refer to an animal of either sex. In some languages, nouns are classified according to gender as either animate (possessing life) or inanimate (not endowed with life). Such a distinction is not as obvious as one might suppose. In Arapaho, hinen 'man,' hisei 'woman,' wox 'bear,' and heeni? 'ant' are of animate gender as one would expect, but so are hokoox 'tepee pole,' hiii 'snow,' hotii 'wheel,' and others. Animate nouns in Arapaho and other Algonquian languages are subject to different grammatical rules than inanimate nouns (Salzmann 1983). The purpose of this section, however, is not to discuss gender as a grammatical term but to survey briefly the relationship between language on the one hand and gender in the sense of male/female distinction on the other. To put it differently, how is the natural division between females and males reflected in language and speech? The most obvious are the physical differences in voice quality that become pronounced during puberty. As a result of the greater lengthening of the vocal cords in boys, the range of the male voice broadens and lowers by about an octave, whereas the female voice becomes louder and changes its timbre, that is, "color" (quality) because of overtones.
Apart from timbre and relative pitch, does women's speech differ from men's? In essence, of course, it does not, because regardless of the differences that may exist between the position of males and females in any particular society, men and women must be able to communicate efficiently. But minor differences between women's and men's speech do exist in most if not all languages. Among the languages in which certain morphemes have a different phonemic shape depending on whether women or men are speaking is Koasati, a Muskogean language spoken in southwestern Louisiana. According to Haas (1994), the speech of middle-aged and older Koasati women in the late 1930s differed from that of men in certain indicative and imperative verb forms. Because in a few instances the speech of women appeared to be older and more basic, Haas described the men's forms as derived from the women's forms. For example, verb forms-ending-in-a nasalized vowel, such as a' in lakawwa' 'he will lift it [woman speaking],' add an s after the corresponding oral vowel, yielding lakawwa's 'he will lift it [man speaking].' Similarly, the women's word lakawhol 'lift it! [addressed to second-person plural]' yields the men's form lakawhos. In other instances, a vowel is lengthened and the final n becomes an s, and in still others the men's form simply adds an s to the form occurring in women's speech. One may summarize the changes at the end of certain Koasati verb forms as follows (W = women's form, M = men's form, V = any vowel, y = nasalized vowel, C = any consonant, and (.) = short or long). Haas further reported that in telling traditional narratives, Koasati women used men's forms when quoting male characters, and conversely.
In North Africa, Arabs who speak French as a second language articulate the French (r) according to the speaker's gender: In men's speech it is an apical consonant (produced with the tip of the tongue serving as the active articulator); in women's speech it is a uvular consonant (made by the back of the tongue with the aid of the uvula). Because both of the (r)s occur and are phonemically distinct in the Arabic dialects native to these people, the two variants are easily pronounceable by both men and women. According to a recent survey of French dialects by Henriette Walter (1988), North African men would now prefer to approach the contemporary French norm, which happens to be the uvular r, [R]. What prevents them from doing so is a fairly rigid convention, according to which the uvular articulation of r in North African French is a social characteristic of women.
Differences of this kind between the speech of men and women are not at all rare. They have been documented for languages of North and South America as well as Asia and are also found on other continents. In some instances they may not even be noticed by linguistically untrained listeners. For example, in a small sample of children in a semirural New England village studied by John L. Fischer (1958), the girls were more likely to pronounce the present-participle suffix as -ing [in]] rather than -in' [In], a form used more frequently among the boys. The choice between -ing and -in' appeared to be related not only to gender but also to the personality (aggressive vs. cooperative) and mood (tense vs. relaxed) of the speaker, the nature of the conversation (formal vs. informal), the socio-economic circumstances of the family (above vs. below median), and the verb used (for example, correcting vs. chewin').
Douglas Taylor (1951) reports on a more complex situation in Central American Carib, a modem dialect of Island Carib. Two genders, masculine and feminine, are distinguished in this dialect. Gender is in part natural (assigned as a rule in accordance with the sex of a living thing), in part grammatical (for example, the words for sun, milk, river, and maize are masculine, whereas those for star, liver, knife, and snake are feminine). However, words denoting qualities, states, actions, and the equivalent of the pronoun it in such English sentences as it is raining tend to be assigned to the feminine gender by men but to masculine by women. The equivalent of "the other day," for example, is ligira buga when said by women but tugura buga when said by men (buga is a past-tense particle).
The choice of words used by men and women varies according to the occasion, the type of audience present, and various other circumstances. Profane or coarse speech is less likely to be heard when children or people held in respect are within earshot, and a job interview calls for a more considered vocabulary than a casual conversation between two close friends. Nevertheless, some lexical differences between the speech of men and women are fairly common and can be illustrated from American English. Certain words are used by women much more frequently than by men. Among such words are expressive adjectives that convey approval or admiration-for example, adorable, charming, cute, divine, lovely, and sweet-and fashionable color names-for example, beige, chartreuse, ecru, fuchsia, magenta, and mauve. Men are much more likely to phrase their approval or liking for something by using a neutral adjective, such as fine, good, or great, and reinforcing it, if necessary, with such an adverb as damn, as in "That was a damn good show." Men's color vocabulary as a rule is much less discriminating, and hence poorer, than women's. There is no doubt, however, that in the United States and many other countries the differences between men's and women's word choices are steadily growing smaller. Profanities are now casually used by many young women whose mothers and grandmothers not only would never have uttered them but would probably have been embarrassed even to hear them. On the whole, however, as several authors have noted, in careful speech women are likely to use fewer stigmatized words than are men.
On the sentence level, the trait most frequently cited as characteristic of women's speech is the use of the tag question in certain contexts. The term refers to a question attached to an utterance to obtain the assent of the addressee, as in "That was a stupid thing for them to do, wasn't it?" Seeking confirmation or validation of a statement may indicate the speaker's desire to avoid assertiveness. Another purpose of the tag question is to include the person spoken to in friendly conversation by offering the opportunity to respond, as in "It's a nice day today, isn't it?" Again, younger women appear to use tag questions much less frequently than do older women. On the subject of tag questions, however, some scholars have argued that "a more sophisticated view of the complexity of both linguistic and social behaviour" is needed (Cameron, McAlinden, and O'Leary 1988:92).
Last, some differences in intonational patterns between male and female speakers have also been noted. If one analyzes intonational contours of American English in terms of four relative pitch levels, then men tend to use only three of them, hardly ever reaching the highest one. Women's range frequently includes all four. Among the contours very rarely heard from men is the full downglide from the highest to the lowest pitch level, as in Oh, that's terrible! to express surprise, excitement, and the like. In general, women's speech appears to be more dynamic, making greater use of paralinguistic features and extending over a broader pitch range.
To sum up, in American English there are no pronunciations, grammatical forms, words, or sentence constructions that are employed exclusively by men or by women. Rather, what differences there are between male and female speech have to do with the frequency with which some usages are employed by one sex or the other. That these differences are decreasing rather than maintaining themselves or growing is an indication that long-standing social differences between women and men are breaking down.
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