LANGUAGE AND GENDER

TOPIC: ORGANIZING TALKS

Instructor: Dr Fatima Baig

Group No : 03
Group Members
Sadaf Rasheed 73,
Urwa Kanwal 19,
Aliza Mehfooz 97,
Ashva lodhi 59,
Aqsa Irfan 21,
Asma Aslam 61,
Sawera asghar 85 ,
 Rubina shabir 67
Organizing Talk
Human discourse is a continual effort to create meaning, and an individual’s, a
group’s, or a category of individuals’ ability to genuinely contribute to meaning
depends on their contributions accepted and handled. Even before a speaker speaks,
the outcome of their contribution is already in doubt because one must be in the right
situation and have the right discourse before they can contribute their views.
And once one is in the circumstance, one must be able to express the thought in
question– to use that specific phrase on a particular occasion. Thus, the investigation
of language and gender begins at the very beginning.
First off, speaking rights are different for different categories of people e.g. Children
are supposed to keep quiet in some cultures while speaking freely in others.
 In Chile’s Araucanian
culture:
Speaking is encouraged among men at all times since it demonstrates their
wisdom and leadership.
The ideal wife is
 obedient,
 Meek,
 silent
when her husband is around. Women sit idly by one another at events when
males chat a lot, conversing just in whispers or not at all.
 Access to situation and events

Two things are important;

Competence Communicative Competence
As supported by traditional linguistic As supported by anthropologist’s and
notion. sociolinguist’s expanded notion

Pierre Bourdieu challenges traditional linguistics for two reasons;

 Its narrow focus on the speaker’s ability to produce and recognize sentences,
 its neglect of what happens to those sentences once they are put out in the
world.
How an utterance is determined?
A person’s contribution about discussion that is going on is determined by two
things;

1. an utterance the person produces

2. The ways in which an advance is received and interrupted by others.
Looking like a professor
A congenial man who frequents the ‘‘College town’’ neighborhood near
Cornell cheerily greets us as we walk to campus. ‘‘Hi, girls.” He turns to Carl,
Sally’s partner, also a professor, ‘‘Hi, Professor.’’
He doesn’t know who any of us are, but one of us looks like the prototypical
professor and the other two don’t. We joke about it -- it’s trivial. But the fact
is that any small act has a large potential.
 Fidell (1975) sent resume summaries of ten fictitious psychology Ph.D.’s to 147
heads of psychology departments in the US, asking them to assign an
academic rank to each resume. The respondents consistently ranked the same
dossiers higher when they believed them to be men’s than when they
believed them to be women’s.
The practice of a woman’s putting her words into a man’s mouth, should not
be surprising.
George Eliot is a famous case of a woman writing under a man’s name in
order to get published, read, and attended to.

Decision Making:
It is said that women does not make decisions.
Their absence in decision making was very likely structured by gender.
Networks
 Division of labour work to allocate meaning making opportunity.
 Informal or formal ways to allocate meanings and information.
 Unintentional and invisible labour of work is also included in networks.
 Personal network, Professional network, Institutional network.Individual &
professional network is the overlapping of institutional and personal
networks.
 Combination of individual and professional network build personal
information that helps in building personalities institutional networks.
 Long time talks with people who make up networks will be in formative.
 Combination of personal & institutional network maximize the flow of
career resources but it also puts people at a disadvantage for several reasons
known as negative networking
Speech activities
 Speech Activities means leafleting, picketing, speech making,
demonstration, petition circulation, and similar speech-related activities.
Once in the situations where verbal exchange is taking place,our ability to
get our words and ideas out depends on our ability to participate in the in
the speech activities and events that take place in those situations .
 Every speech community and every community of practice, engages in a
limited set of speech activities: lecturing, sermonizing, gossiping, griping,
talking dirty , joking, arguing, fighting, therapy talk and small talk. There are
some speech activities that occur in all speech communities, while others
may be specific to ,or more common in , particular communities. And
although a particular activity may occur in many communities,it may figure
differently in ideology.
.
 Argument in an academic community might be quite different from
argument at a family dinner.Speech activities can be quite specific at the
most local level. Particular communities of practice may engage regularly in
– or even be be built around gossip, exchanging salacious stories, mutual
insults , talking about problems, complaining, reading aloud , praying. Scott
kieslings research on verbal practice in an American college fraternity shows
how joking and ritual insults are commonly used in this community of
practice to enforce heterosexuality. Highly similar exchange in English are
sometimes classified differently depending on who the participants are .
Speech activities is often used to reinforce gender hierchies
 Gossip Reconsidered
 Deborah Jones (1980) was one of the first to develop this approach.
The word gossip, she notes, descends from Old English god sib , which
originally meant something similar to godparent or supportive friend .In Middle
English the sense was a close friend, a person with whom one gossips’, hence ‘a person
who gossips’, later (early 19th century) ‘ idle talk’.
 Jennifer Coates (1988), for example, seems to suggest that any informal talk among
close women friends counts as gossip whether or not it focuses on reporting and
evaluating activities of absent parties.
Coates (1996) offers transcripts and analyses of a number of conversations in which
the women participating collectively explore topics that matter a lot to them in a
supportive and positive Way assume that any women talking together in an ‘‘
informal” and ‘‘unrestrained ” way,
‘‘esp. about people or social incidents,” must be up to no good, venturing into territory
that is ‘‘none of their business.
•Talk among women about absent others by no means always implies a focus on
making absent others look bad. The talk may be very sympathetic and
understanding .women can and sometimes do forge bonds with one another by
sharing damaging observations or critical comments about absent others.
Example
use of all kinds of information they gather through frequent
informal talking with one another while washing clothes, shopping, preparing food
 Arguing

Argument is another kind of speech activity that comes in many forms , and that is highly
gendered . As Milton Says that ,
‘’ In argument with men a women ever Goes by the worse.’’
Milton’s line is offered to illustrate the following sense of argument
 Statement of pros and cons of a proposition
 Discussion
 Debate
 A verbal dispute
 A quarrel
 Argument involves giving reasons and evidence and using rational principles
to support a position .in contrast quarrels are seen more emotional and a
menifestation of temper . Particular dispute or a quarrel depends less on
how the dispute actually proceeds than on the labeler’s assumptions about
the intellectual capacities of disputants.
 Argument is important in many different communities of practice .in
communities the main focus is on scientific and scholarly practice. An
adversarial style of argumentation is the norm in some such communities.
 In some communities of practice, argument functions as a kind of activity
that is focused on the stuff of argument not on the arguers themselves.
Cultural norms are quite variable .

Example
In many Italian-speaking communities of practice, for example lively and
loud arguments involving both women and men are frequent . In such
contexts , argument can mark the strength of participants ‘ connections to
one another.
Speech situations and events
Speech Situations:
A speech situation is the social context of interaction. It is determined by different
situational factors – the elements of a speech situation. These include:
(1) The participants (speaker(s) / addressee(s) ) and their social relations (grade of
familiarity, power) define their social roles in the communicative situation.
(2) The location or physical setting of communication (e.g. school, at home, in a
shop).
(3) The purpose of the communication.
(4) The topic: what is being talked about?
(5) The mode or channel of linguistic expression: spoken or written language.
Together these factors make up the speech situation. Based on the aspects of the
speech situation, the participants consciously or subconsciously choose a
language variety which they deem appropriate for a certain speech situation
(see Register and Style)
Speech events
All social activities, in which language plays an important role, can be referred to as
speech events.
Whatever type of conversation we are looking at, we will find that it is always
underlying a certain structure and that people follow certain (culturally specific)
“rules” and rituals. In a conversation, the interlocutors (the people talking to
each other) generally face each other and do not speak simultaneously. Most
people start their conversations greeting one another, then continue in a turn-
taking way of speaking (without interrupting each other too often). At the end
of the conversation, people have, at the best, finished what they wanted to say
and say goodbye to each other in an appropriate way.
A focus on speech events allows us to consider the ways in which speech activity is
embedded in situations – how a particular activity is initiated, how it is
structured, how it ends.
Different speech events take place in different settings and social situations.
Frames
• Erving Goffman (1974) refers to the interpretive schemes that people
apply to interaction as frames.
• For example: if a girl student wants a lunch meeting with her professor
to discuss her dissertation, her professor may see this as a date.
• Conversational frames are not gender-neutral.
• Intentional manipulation of the frame can transform a speech event
 References
 Language and Gender

 PENELOPE ECKERT
SALLY McCONNELL-GINET