This book is an exploration of the issues underlying the kinds of questions asked about gender and language. She dismissed the issue of sexist language as an important but somewhat separate gender and language issue. Aside from sexist language, the second problem that has historically preoccupied gender and language research is that of gender differences in language use.
The book concludes by examining what may follow the discursive turn in the field of gender and language.
SEXIST LANGUAGE
The 'difficulty' surrounding the use of Mrs, Miss or Ms can be understood as another demonstration of the links between language and the dominant moral order. One of the ways gender is marked in English is through the use of suffixes and affixes. Another grammatical technique in English that can indicate the gender of the person being referred to is the use of adjectives.
Of course, sexist language is not just a matter of the ways in which women are represented in language.
QUESTIONS OF DIFFERENCE
VERBAL ABILITY AND VOICE
These questions are just a sampling of the types of gender differences in language that have been investigated. For example, a Scienti®c American article cited Halpern in support of the well-established fact about gender differences in verbal ability. Hyde and Linn (1988) used a meta-analysis to re-evaluate the literature on gender differences in verbal ability.
Kimura's (1992) claim about sex differences in the functional organization of the brain has some support, but is by no means uncontroversial.
WOMEN'S LANGUAGE?
The following section briefly discusses some of the more explicit examples of gender differences in speech as deficits in women. Next, some research dealing with the debate on gender differences in speaking styles will be briefly reviewed. Regardless of the originality of Lakoff's thesis on gender and language, her work followed what was identified in the last chapter as an established pattern of research on gender differences.
Reviews of the literature in the field of gender and speech styles acknowledge the non-resolution of questions about gender and speech. An extremely comprehensive recent review of the empirical literature on gender differences in language and communication is Elizabeth Aries' (1996) Men and women in interaction. The importance placed on the design and careful execution of the study is clear from the description of the research.
How can the discrepancy in the results of the two studies just described be explained? Outside gender and language research, awareness of the interdependence of language and context has also increased (eg Giles and Coupland, 1991). The strength of this approach is that it avoids some of the pitfalls that have plagued many experimental studies of gender and speech styles.
The idea that gender and power are confused in some situations has been identified as one of the reasons why research on gender differences in speech styles has produced such conflicting results. The tendency for the dominance approach to construct women's speech as a subordinate style led to a reassessment of the literature on gender and language and the development of an alternative view.
THE DISCURSIVE TURN
The various uses of the term discourse include two meanings of gender as a social construction. Moreover, the studies had been largely laboratory-based, using experimental methods and "prepared" examples of language (eg the use of vignettes). Their study investigated how women and men were treated in public service meetings in the northeastern and southern United States.
A social constructivist sense of gender as discourse offers a radical critique not only of biological determinism but also of sex/gender distinction. Evidence of the view of one sex is the medical terms that were used for the sexual organs. The behavior of phone sex workers demonstrates the nonessential nature of gendered behavior.
Thus, the complete lack of consensus in the results of empirical studies of gender differences is not remarkable ± it is simply the consequence of the erroneous assumption that gender is located within the individual as a stable set of characteristics. The idea that gender differences in speech styles are a discourse rather than a 'true' representation of women's and. The sexual inequality that is evident in radio and television business can thus be seen as an effect of the discourses about the lack of female DJs.
However, recognizing that language about women and men and the way men and women speak are both aspects of the social construction of gender blurs the distinction between the two concerns. Gender is not a stable and permanent characteristic of an individual that would be reliably and transparently reflected in language use.
GENDER AND LANGUAGE IN ETHNOMETHODOLOGY AND
CONVERSATION ANALYSIS
Rather, gender would only be considered relevant for analysis if there was evidence that participants in the conversation used gender as a relevant feature of the interaction. Ethnomethodological influence on discursive psychology is particularly important for the field of gender and language because one of the earliest social constructionist approaches to gender was developed from an ethnomethodological perspective (Kessler and McKenna, 1978). 4 Anyone who clearly does not fall into one of the two gender categories is a joke or abnormal.
6 Everyone belongs to one of the two gender categories ± there is no such thing as someone without gender. A central aspect of gender is that it is part of the routine, ongoing work of everyday, mundane, social interaction. Toilet separation is generally understood as a natural consequence of the difference between women and men.
Rather, speakers' use of 'he' functioned as a pseudo-generic, biased only to the extent of assuming a male referent. So, even though the question may not be answered in the adjacent utterance, the sequence continues in the hope that the first part of the question will eventually receive its answer. An interesting social psychological aspect of the nonpreferred response structure is that it is essentially positive.
Stokoe welcomes the constructionist shift for the study of gender and language, but argues that some of the newer work confuses a constructionist position with gender essentialism. An issue that has been implicit in much of the work described so far in the book, and which cuts across the various theoretical approaches that have been discussed, is that of gender identity and language.
LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE AND GENDER IDENTITY
Speech cues, on the other hand, are supposed to trigger attributions about the speaker's gender identity (that is, how male or female they are). Further, what evidence is there that a person's "gender identity" explains differences in speech. According to the social identity approach, one of the fundamental processes of social identification is the categorization of people into different groups.
Therefore, an important part of research on social identity and language is that a person's speaking style can mark them as belonging to a particular social group (or groups). However, in the more formal styles, LMC speakers used more tokens of the prestigious (r) than UMC speakers. Sociolinguistic variables are seen as passive 'markers' of the speaker's place in the social grid (especially in the socio-economic hierarchy).
One consequence of the parallels between feminist identity theories and the CofP approach is that the CofP framework has had considerable influence on sociolinguists researching gender and language (see Holmes, 1999). Wetherell and Edley (1998) develop the notion of sexual practices to capture the concerns of different styles of discursive psychology. Instead, categories of girls' and women's social identity become attuned to local, rhetorically salient matters of current interaction.
The notion of practice has been a key concept of the CofP framework in sociolinguistic work on gender and language, where communities of practice have been understood as mediating the relationship between social identity and language variation. Billig et al. (1988)'s investigation into the dilemmatic aspects of gender categories was an earlier example of research into discourse practices relevant to the study of gender.
FOLLOWING THE DISCURSIVE TURN
The issue of gender differences in language and what these differences reveal about women and men has been the other major thread in the gender and language field. The constructionist drive in the discursive turn is a radical challenge to the question of whether women and men use language in different ways. Women's speech' and men's speech' is not an empirical reality of how women and men speak.
They also represent a cultural ideal – what it is that women and men should sound like. In a patriarchal social order, knowledge about the speech of women and men will support the status quo. Thus, the social categories of women and men can be understood as a product of conceptions of and ways of referring to gender.
Traditionally, in gender and language research, as elsewhere in the social sciences, language has been seen as a mirror; it reflected the shared essences of individual women and men. Language was also thought to reflect society's attitudes and values about women and men. Now language about women and men and the way men and women speak can be understood as part of the same discursive process, the social construction of gender.
Why sexist language affects persuasion: the role of homophily, target audience, and offensiveness. Women and language. Language for women and men: an example from popular culture. Journal of Language and Social Psychology.
