Linguistic Resources

LANGUAGE AND GENDER

• Language is a highly structured system of signs, or the combination of form and meaning.

• Gender is embedded in these signs and their use in communicative practice in a variety of ways.

• Gender can be an actual content of a linguistic sign.

For Example:English third-person singular (It)=male and female inanimate (she/her/her; he/him/his)Lexical items referring (male and female)=boy and girlAdjectives (handsome and pretty)

LINGUSTIC RESOURCES• Used to present oneself as

particular kind of person; to project an attitude or stance; to affect the flow of the talk and ideas.

+ Tone and pitch of voice+ Patterns of intonation / tunes+ Choice of vocabulary+ Pronunciation+ Grammatical Patterns

= can signal gendered aspect of the speaker’s presentation

PHONOLOGY• The phonological system of every

language is based in a structured set of distinction of sounds (phonemes).Phonemes do not carry meaning, but

provide the means to make distinctions that are in turn

associated with the distinction of

meaning.pick, tick, sick, thick, lickDifference in /p/, /t/, /s/, /Ɵ/, /l/ sounds

Our perception of sound segments is hardly mechanical.• Joan Robin experiment• Phoneticians Elizabeth Strand

and Keith Johnson (1996) used J. Robin technique to show that speaker’s beliefs about the gender of a speaker actually affect the way the hear phonetic segments.

ResultsThe sibilant sound /s/ vary in frequency. On average, women’s pronunciation tend to have slightly higher frequency than men’s.

“Rhythm and tune clearly carry important meaning gender meanings, and certainly the objects of gender stereotype.”

MORPHOLOGY

• Morphology is the level of grammar at which recurring units of sound are paired with meaning.

• The basic, indivisible combinations of form (sound) and meaning in a language are referred to as morphemes.

• Lexical morphemes are content forms.• Grammatical morphemes are abstract

meanings.

MORPHOLOGYGender in grammarSome grammatical morphemes have gender in their content by requiring the use of gender morphology in people various utterances.Example:“to say someone called but he didn’t leave his name” … is ascribe to male sex to the caller.Grammatically, this means that articles and adjectives “agree” in gender have a noun that they modify.

MORPHOLOGYLexicon-refer to the inventory of lexical morphemes and words in a language.A repository of cultural preoccupationsThe result of link between genderThe most changeable part of language.An important site for bringing new ideas.

Through the use of coining of words in language. It all depends on who’s doing what, and how they’re talking about in

widespread.

MORPHOLOGYSyntaxIt combines words into sentences-linguistic structures that express thoughts or propositions.Sentences describes events or situations and syntax indicates something about relations among the participants.Example:“Joan kissed John.”“John kissed Joan.” However,

“She was raped.”

MORPHOLOGYDiscourse-refer to the study of structure and meaning that goes beyond the level of the sentence. It focus on deployment.Example:A compliment offered to the woman on her appearance might be welcome while men are complimented on the basis of their accomplishment.

“We used language to move our agendas along the world- to pursue

relationships, to engage in activities, to develop ideas.”

MORPHOLOGYSemantics and PragmaticsSemantics-deals with how meaning of grammatical morphemes.Lexical-is the propositional meanings expressed by sentences.

“Communication goes beyond what the language system-it is everything involved in its use-enters so crucially into the social construction of gender (and other areas of social meanings.)”