18.  BONNIE MCELHINNY, Stanford University

March 1993

I've designed the following syllabus for the next language 
and gender course I teach.  The changes reflect the renewed 
interest that language and gender has recently received in 
linguistics.  There has been a spate of recent articles, and a 
major conference (Locating Power:  The 1992 Berkeley 
Conference on Women and Language).  As always happens as 
a field of study develops, articles have become increasingly 
specialized.  One doesn't find articles on "Women and Men's 
Speech in Culture  X"; rather one finds articles detailing 
aspects of interaction (affect, politeness, etc.).  The 
organization of this syllabus also reflects however changing 
theoretical understandings of how gender ought best to be 
studied.  Rather than isolating gender from other aspects of 
social identity, we're coming to understand that the best way 
to understand how gender is constructed is to understand 
how it is normatively and actually linked to the construction 
of a variety of other identities (ethnic, age-related, regional, 
class, occupational, sexual) and to the display of other social 
stances and emotions (affect, politeness,  affiliation with 
traditional/modern norms, formality, and more). 

I've borrowed the idea of a semester's-end class conference 
from John Rickford's African-American Vernacular English 
class.  In that class, as in this, students regularly produce 
original and innovative work.  In a traditional college 
classroom, this work would only be seen by the instructor. 
A one-day mini-conference affords students' additional 
experience in the valuable skill of public presentations, as 
well as allowing them to hear the research results of their 
fellow students, and engage in the questioning and academic 
discussion that seeing such presentations often engenders. 
John also regularly "publishes" this work in a course-reader 
proceedings--a measure that serves to further legitimate 
and recognize the work done by these students.  It's a 
particularly effective technique to use with students (like 
women and minorities) whose academic work we may 
particularly want to recognize.

Bonnie McElhinny

LANGUAGE AND GENDER
Bonnie S. McElhinny
Stanford University

Course Description:
This course is a comprehensive introduction to the study of 
language and gender.  Students need not have any previous 
linguistic training to enroll in the course, though students 
with some linguistic background will probably reap 
additional benefit from the course.  The course has a strong 
international focus, drawing on descriptions of women and 
men's speech in Europe (Spain, Newfoundland, the 
Netherlands, Wales, Germany,  Hungary), Asia (Java, Japan), 
North America (African-American, European-Amerian, 
Native American, Puerto-Rican), Africa (Egypt, Madagascar), 
South America (Warao, Tenejapa, Mexicano, Kuna) and the 
Pacific Islands (Samoa).  Students will consider some of the 
debates currently taking place in sociolinguistic studies of 
gender about which theoretical frameworks to use in 
understanding why,  how and when gender differences in 
language use exist.  Though this debate takes a particular 
form within sociolinguistics (often, dual culture models vs. 
power/resistance models), similar debates take place in 
psychology, history, anthropology and other fields.  This 
course thus also provides an introduction to some of the 
principal questions of feminist theory, as viewed from 
sociolinguistics.  The course introduces students to a variety 
of sociolinguistic concepts as they are used and useful in 
studies of language and gender (including style, dialect, 
standard and nonstandard language, speech community, 
bilingualism, politeness and communicative competence). 

Course Requirements:
An important part of this course is the set of attached mini-
fieldwork exercises.These are intended to provide students 
with practice in the gathering, analysis and interpretation of 
naturally-occurring conversational data.  Near the beginning 
of the quarter students will tape a conversation somewhere 
on campus, and then will use that audiotape to consider a 
number of questions about language and gender.  I expect 
that these exercises done by the students will in some cases 
provide evidence against some overly hasty generalizations 
made in the sociolinguistic literature about men and 
women's speech. Further, these exercises provide students 
with firsthand evidence about how one's choice of methods 
and data can influence the outcome of a study. 

Students will also be expected to turn in a weekly one-page 
response to the readings.  This response should NOT be a 
summary of the readings (I've read them!) but rather than 
attempt to consider some point in more detail--illustrating it 
with data from one's own tape or experience, questioning it, 
offering an alternative interpretation, relating it to other 
reading we've done.

Finally students will  be required to write a final paper (20 
pages) on a some issue relating to language and gender.  This 
paper may be an extension of one of the fieldwork exercises, 
or an investigation of some issue not addressed by class 
readings, or a theoretical critique of some aspect of language 
and gender research.

Many of the articles listed below could be classified under 
more than one of the weekly subject headings.  When an 
article from previous weeks is particularly relevant, that 
article is included in parentheses at the end of the brief 
paragraph describing that week's readings.  So, for instance, 
Briggs 1993 is included under week 4 (power and 
resistance) but also under week 7 (gender and affect). Such 
articles should be reviewed carefully, along with the other 
readings assigned for that week.

We'll be using the following texts in this course:

Cameron, Deborah.  1985.  Feminism and Linguistic Theory 
   (London:  Macmillan Press).
Coates, Jennifer.  1986.  Women, Men and Language:  A 
   Sociolinguistic Account of Sex Differences in Language 
   (London:  Longman).
Lakoff, Robin.  1974.  Language and Woman's Place (NY: 
   Harper's Row).
Thorne, Barrie, Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley (eds.). 
   1983.  Language, Gender and Society (Rowley MA: 
   Newbury).

Week 1:  Theoretical Overviews
These articles provide an overview of theoretical 
perspectives on the study of gender in general, and on 
language and gender in particular.  The questions these 
articles raise are ones we'll return to frequently throughout 
the semester.  Come to class prepared to discuss the 
definitions of 'gender' offered in these articles.
 
Borker, Ruth and Daniel Maltz.  1989.  "Anthropological 
   Perspectives on Gender and Language" in Gender and 
   Anthropology:  Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching 
   (AAA:  Washington DC).
Cameron, Deborah.  1985.  "Chapter 2.  Linguistic Theory: 
   Frameworks and Approaches" in Feminism and Linguistic 
   Theory, pp. 9-29.
Eckert, Penelope and Sally McConnell-Ginet.  1992.  "Think 
   Practically and Look Locally:  Language and Gender as 
   Community-Based Practice"  Annual Review of 
   Anthropology.
Gal, Susan.  1991.  "Between Speech and Silence:  The 
   Problematics of Research on Language and Gender" in 
   Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge:  Feminist 
   Anthropology in the Postmodern Era (Berkeley:  Univ. of 
   California Press), pp. 175-203.
Jaggar, Alison and  Paula Rothenberg.  1984.  "Theories of 
   Women's Oppression" in Feminist Frameworks: 
   Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the Relations Between 
   Men and Women (NY:  McGraw-Hill), pp. 81-91.
McElhinny, Bonnie.  1993.  "Theories of Gender in 
   Sociolinguistics" Chapter 1 of How Gender Talks:  Discourse 
   and Dialect as Symbols of Professional Identity (Ph.D. 
   dissertation, Stanford University).
Rhode, Deborah.  1990.  "Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual 
   Difference" in Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual 
   Difference (New Haven:  Yale University Press), pp. 1-13.

Week 2:  Gossip
Stereotypes about men and women's speech shape many 
speakers'  (and many scholars'!) ideas of what differences 
exist between men and women's language.  One  negative 
stereotype attached to women's speech in many cultures is 
that women talk all the time, or talk too much, about trivial 
things and other people.  This week's articles consider the 
functions of gossip in three very different communities:  a 
Spanish village, a Newfoundland village and an African-
American  urban community.  Borker reviews studies of 
gossip across Europe, while Spacks develops an account of 
the way that subordinate groups more generally (servants, 
women, slaves) use gossip as a way of disseminating 
information, promoting unity, and keeping their distance 
from the superordinate group.  Consider the functions of 
gossip discussed here in light of Gal's views on silencing and 
resistance.  Come into class with a short list of stereotypes of 
men's and women's speech in languages and communities 
with which you are familiar. Are there any patterns?  How 
do you think the stereotypes correspond to the way men and 
women actually talk?

Borker, Ruth.  1980.  "Anthropology:  Social and Cultural 
   Perspectives" in Women and Language in Literature and 
   Society, pp. 26-44.
Coates, Jennifer.  1986 "Ch. 2:  The Historical Background: 
   Folklinguistics and Early Grammarians" in Women, Men 
   and Language, pp. 15-34.
Goodwin, Marjorie.  1980.  "He-said-she-said:  Formal 
   Cultural Procedures for the Construction of a Gossip 
   Dispute Activity"  American Ethnologist 7(4):674-695.
Foris, James.  1966.  "The Dynamics of Verbal Exchange:  A 
   Newfoundland Example" Anthropologica 8(2):235-248.
Harding, Susan.  1975.  "Women and Words in a Spanish 
   Village" in Toward an Anthropology of Women (NY: 
   Monthly Review)
Spacks, Patricia Mayers.  1985.  "Ch. 2:  Its Reputation" in 
   Gossip (NY:  Knopf).

Exercise 1 --Transcription  of  Conversation-is due.

Week 3:  Dual Culture Models and Critiques
One explanation for gender differences in speech is that boys 
and girls in a given society are socialized so differently that 
communication between them (and between men and 
women) is like communication between two different 
cultures.  Borker and Maltz 1982 first presented this dual 
culture model; Tannen 1990 provides the most elaborated 
and well-known version of it.  In psychology Carol Gilligan's 
work (especially, In a Different Voice) makes a similar 
argument.  Before class you will want to review Eckert and 
McConnell-Ginet's critique of this dual-culture model. Also 
reconsider Goodwin's 1980 article.  Does her work provide 
evidence for or against a dual-culture model?

Freed, Alice.  1993.  "We Understand Perfectly:  A Critique of 
   Tannen's View of Cross-Sex Communication"  in M. 
   Bucholtz, K. Hall and B. Moonwomon (eds.), Locating Power: 
   Proceedings of the 1992 Berkeley Conference on Women 
   and Language (Berkeley:  Dept. of Linguistics, Univ. of 
   California-Berkeley).
Gilligan, Carol.  1982.  "Ch 2:  Images of Relationship" in In a 
   Different Voice:  Psychological Theory and Women's 
   Development (Cambridge:  Harvard Univ. Press), pp. 24-63.
Maltz, Daniel  and Ruth Borker.  1982.  "A cultural approach 
   to male-female miscommunication"  in Language and Social 
   Identity (NY:  Cambridge University Press).
Tannen, Deborah.  1990.  You Just Don't Understand:  Men 
   and Women in Conversation (NY:  William Morrow and Co, 
   Inc.)  (selections) 

Week 4:  Power and Resistance
Critics of the dual-culture model argue that thinking of men 
and women as separate but equal cultures doesn't take 
power differences between men and women into account. 
They argue that that model doesn't explain how these 
different cultural styles arose for men and women, and the 
ways that differences in men and women's speech might 
reflect and support differential access to power in their 
shared culture. These articles explore a variety of ways of 
thinking about power and resistance to power as it is 
expressed in language (See also Gal 1991, Eckert and 
McConnell-Ginet 1992).

Abu-Lughod, Lila.  1986.  "Ch 7.  "Modesty and the Poetry of 
   Love" and Ch. 8 "Ideology and the Politics of Sentiment" in 
   Veiled Sentiments:  Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, 
   pp. 208-261.
Briggs, Charles.  1992.  "Since I am a Woman, I Will Chastise 
   My Relatives:  Gender, Reported Speech and the 
   (Re)production of Social Relations in Warao Ritual Wailing" 
   American Ethnologist 19(2):336-361.
Cameron, Deborah.  1985.  "Chapter 6:  Silence, Alienation 
   and Oppression:  Feminist Models of Language" and 
   "Chapter 7:  Feminist Models of Language:  Semiology and 
   the Gendered Subject" in Feminism and Linguistic Theory, 
   pp.  91-133.. 
Radway, J.  1984.  Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy 
   and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill:  Univ. of No. Carolina 
   Press) (selections).

Week 5:  Interpreting Linguistic Forms and their Social 
Functions
Some of the earliest work on gender differences suggested 
that women's speech isn't as effective as men's because 
women tend to use certain negatively evaluated forms more 
than men do.  The next wave of linguistic research suggested 
that often linguistic forms that were negatively evaluated 
when used by women were sometimes positively evaluated 
when used by men, and that where linguistic forms were 
consistently negatively evaluated, people of lesser status 
(whether male or female) used such forms more than people 
of greater status (male or female).   All this suggested that it 
isn't a linguistic form itself which should be considered to 
have an inherent meaning, but rather the social position of 
the speaker, and the context in which that speaker is 
speaking.   Recently this has been used as evidence for the 
necessity of studying the use and interpretation of linguistic 
forms within the norms of a given community by scholars 
like Penny Eckert, Marjorie Goodwin and Cindie McLemore. 
They've suggested that the categories of 'men' and 'women', 
unless defined within the context of a given community, are 
too abstract to be useful in understanding why people use a 
given linguistic form and what it means. We'll consider the 
question of the interpretation of linguistic forms and their 
relationship to cultural context with this week's readings. 
Coates surveys studies of a number of linguistic forms 
(intonation, hedges, tag questions) associated with sex 
differences in English.   Tannen and West focus on the role of 
interruptions in Dutch and English interactions. McLemore 
and Ochs provide theoretical accounts of how to determine 
the meaning of a linguistic form within a community. Does 
the work of Tannen here best support a dual-culture model 
of gender difference, or a power/resistance model?  How 
about the work of Zimmerman and West?

Coates, Jennifer.  1986.  Ch. 6 "Sex Differences in 
   CommunicativeCompetence" in Women, Men and Language, 
   pp. 96-118.
Lakoff, Robin.  1974.  Language and Women's Place (NY: 
   Harper). 
McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 1988.  "Language and Gender" in 
   Frederick Newmeyer (ed.), Language:  The Sociocultural 
   Context (Vol. IV. in Linguistics:  The Cambridge Survey) 
   (Cambridge:  Cambridge Univ. Press), pp. 75-99.
McLemore, Cynthia.  1991.  "The Interpretation of L*H in 
   English" in C. McLemore (ed.), Linguistic Forum 32: 
   Discourse (Austin:  University of Texas Dept. of Linguistics).
Ochs, Elinor. 1992.  "Indexing Gender" in C. Goodwin and A. 
   Duranti (eds.), Rethinking Context:  Language as an 
   Interactive Phenomenon (Cambridge:  Cambridge 
   University Press).
Tannen, Deborah.  1989.  "Interpreting Interruption in 
   Conversation" in Papers from the 25th Annual Meeting of 
   the Chicago Linguistics Society, Part 2, 266-287.
West, C. and Don Zimmerman.  1983.  "Small insults:  A study 
   of Interruptions in Cross-Sex Conversations between 
   Unacquainted Persons"  in Language, Gender and Society 
   (Rowley, Mass:  Newbury House).

Exercise 2--Gender Differences in Interruptions--is due.

Week 7:  Politeness
Expressions of politeness not only indicate one's attitude 
towards an interlocutor (one is generally more genuinely 
polite to those one respects than those one does not), and 
one's social distance from them (for instance, one is 
generally more likely to be polite to a stranger than to 
family, in the West), but they also often index one's own 
social position (so that in the West one is often more polite to 
a social superior than to a peer, and one is differently polite 
to a social superior than to a social inferior).  Levinson and 
Brown is a seminal attempt to codify the principles 
governing the expression of politeness.  The other articles 
included here discuss the ways that use of politeness by men 
and women in a number of cultures indexes, and often 
reproduces, their social positions.

Abrahams, Roger.  1975.  "Negotiating Respect:  Patterns of 
   Presentation Among Black Women" Journal of American 
   Folkore 88, pp. 58-80.
Brown, Penelope.  1990.  "Gender, Politeness and 
   Confrontation in Tenejapa"  Discourse Processes 13(1):123-
   141.
Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson.  1987.  Politeness: 
   Some Universals in Language Use (Cambridge:  Cambridge 
   Univ. Press), pp. 55-84.
Deuchar, Margaret.  1988.  "A Pragmatic Account of Women's 
   Use of Standard Language" in Women in Their Speech 
   Community (London:  Longman), pp. 27-32.
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness.  1980.  "Directive-Response 
   Sequences in Girls' and Boys' Task Activities" in Women 
   and Language in Literature and Society (NY:  Praeger), pp. 
   157-173.
Keenan, Elinor.  1974.  "Norm-makers and Norm-breakers: 
   Uses of Speech by Men and Women in a Malagasy 
   Community"  in Explorations in the Ethnography of 
   Speaking (NY:  Cambridge University Press).
Smith, Janet.  1992.  "Women in Charge:  Politeness and 
   Directives in the Speech of Japanese Women" Language in 
   Society 21(1):59-82.
Smith-Hefner, Nancy.  1988.  "Women and Politeness:  the 
   Javanese Example" Language in Society 17(4):535-554.

Week 7:  Affect
In many cultures the expression of certain emotions like 
anger or sorrow are considered appropriate only in certain 
carefully defined contexts and/or for certain members of the 
society.  Often such expression is implicated (or indexed--see 
Ochs 1992) in cultural notions about what women and men 
are like.  These articles explore the expression of affect 
among Bedouins, Americans, Malagasy and Tenejapan men 
and women, and its role in the construction of gender.   (See 
also Briggs 1992.)

Lutz, Catherine.  1990.  "Engendered emotion:  gender, power 
   and the rhetoric of emotional control in American 
   discourse" in Language and the Politics of Emotion, pp. 69-
   91.
Lutz, Catherine and Lila Abu-Lughod.  1990.  "Introduction: 
   Emotion Discourse and the Politics of Everyday Life" in 
   Language and the Politics of Emotion, pp. 1-23.
McConnell-Ginet, Sally.  1983.  "Intonation in a Man's World" 
   in Language, Gender and Society, pp. 69-88.
McElhinny, Bonnie.  1993.  "I Don't Smile Much Anymore: 
   Gender, Affect and the Discourse of Pittsburgh Police 
   Officers" in Locating Power:  Proceedings of the 1992 
   Berkeley Conference on Women and Language (University 
   of California, Berkeley Department of Linguistics).
Ochs, Elinor and Bambi Schieffelin.  1989.  "Language has a 
   Heart"  Text 9(1):7-25.
Philipsen, Gerry.  1975.  "Speaking like a Man in 
   Teamsterville"  Quarterly Journal of Speech, pp. 13-22.
Sattel, Jack.  1983.  "Men, inexpressiveness and power" in 
   Language, Gender and Society (Rowley Mass:  Newbury 
   House).

Exercise 3-- Gender Differences in the Expression of Affect--
is due.

Week 8:  Political Economy and Gendered Language
We continue our consideration of how power shapes gender 
relationships as we turn to the ways that larger economic 
and political structures shape speech and possibilities for 
speech.  Gal provides a theoretical overview of language and 
political economy.  Coates reviews the interaction of 
language, gender and class in quantitative (Labovian) 
sociolinguistic studies of largely First World countries, while 
Sherzer develops a typology of the sorts of gender 
differences one might expect in developed and non-
developed societies.  Consider the different notions of 
stratification developed in the anthropological articles (Ochs, 
Sherzer, Thomas) and in the more sociologically-influenced 
articles (e.g. Labov), and the influence that has on definitions 
of gender and how gender affects language use.

Cameron, D. and J. Coates.  1987.  "Some Problems in the 
   Sociolinguistic Explanation of Sex Differences" in Women in 
   their Speech Communities (London:  Longman), pp. 13-26.
Coates, Jennifer.  1986.  Chapter 4  "Quantitative Studies" and 
   Chapter 5 "Social Networks" in Women, Men and Language.
Eckert, Penelope.  1989.  "The Whole Woman:  Sex and 
   Gender Differences in Variation"  Language Variation and 
   Change 1:254-267.
Gal, Susan.  1989.  "Language and Political Economy" Annual 
   Review of Anthropology 13:345-67.
Ochs, Elinor.  1985.  "The Impact of Stratification and 
   Socialization on Men and Women's Speech in Western 
   Samoa"  in Language, Gender and Sex in Comparative 
   Perspective, pp. 50-71.
Sherzer, Joel.  1987.  "A diversity of voices:  Men's and 
   Women's Speech in Ethnographic Perspective"  in 
   Language, Gender and Sex in Comparative Perspective, pp. 
   95-120.
Stanback, Marsha Houston.  1985.  "Language and Black 
   Woman's Place:  Evidence from the Black Middle Class" in 
   For Alma Mater:  Theory and Practice in Feminist 
   Scholarship, pp. 177-193.
Thomas, Beth.  1988.  "Differences of Sex and Sects: 
   Linguistic Variation and Social Networks in a Welsh Mining 
   Village" in Women in their Speech Communities (London: 
   Longman), pp. 51-60.

Week   9:  Gender and Language Change
As socio-political structures change, so often does language. 
People within a given society can indicate changing 
orientations towards social structure by the language they 
choose to use.  These changes may be part of their life cycle 
(so that adolescents and students often rebel against parents 
and extant political structures) or part of a historical change 
(as wars, legislative revolutions, changing populations, and 
changing occupational opportunties give people new ways of 
thinking about  or participating in old political economies). 
These articles consider how changing gender roles affect, and 
are affected by, changing language use. 

Abu-Lughod, Lila.  1990.  "The Romance of Resistance: 
   Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin 
   Women" in Beyond the Second Sex:  New Directions in the 
   Anthropology of Gender (Philadelphia:  Univ. of 
   Pennsylvania Press). pp. 311-338.
Coates, Jennifer.  1986.  "Ch. 8:  The role of sex differences in 
   language change" in Women, Men and Language , pp. 135-
   150.
Eckert, Penelope.  1988.  "Adolescent Social Structure and 
   the Spread of Linguistic Change" Language in Society 
   17(2):183-208.
Hall, Kira and Alissa Shethar.  1992.  "zu Hause jesprachen, 
   von der Strasse jehabt:  Women's Use of Berlinisch in East 
   and West" Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the 
   Linguistic Society of America, Philadelphia, Jan. 9-12, 
   1992.
Labov,  William.  1990.  "The Intersection of Sex and Social 
   Class in the Course of Linguistic Change"  Language 
   Variation and Change 2:205-251.
Nichols, Patricia.  1983.  "Linguistic Options and Choices for 
   Black Women in the Rural South"  in Language, Gender and 
   Society (Rowley, MA:  Newbury House), pp. 54-68.
Rothstein, Robert.  1973.  "Sex, Gender and the October 
   Revolution" in Festschrift for Morris Halle, pp. 460-66.

Exercise 4--Quantitative Analysis of Phonological Variation 
in English--is due.

Week 10:  Bilingualism:  Gender as Linguistic Broker
In multilingual or multidialectal societies, different 
languages or dialects may be differently accessible to, or 
have different values for, different members of a society--
old/young, men/women, members of different ethnic 
groups.  The articles by Gal, Hill, Medicine and Urciulu 
consider these complex interactions.  Consider the work of 
Gal and Hill in light of last week's discussion about language 
change.  To what extent do these anthropological studies 
support or contradict the generalizations made by Labov 
1990? 

Gal, Susan.  1978.  "Peasant Men Can't Get Wives:  Language 
   and Sex Roles in a Bilingual Community"  Language in 
   Society 7(1):1-17.
Hill, Jane.  1987.  "Women's Speech in Modern Mexicano"  in 
   Language, Gender and Sex in Comparative Perspective 
   (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press), pp. 50-70.
Medicine, Bea.  1987.  "The Role of American Indian Women 
   in Cultural Continuity and Transition" in J. Penfield (ed.), 
   Women and Language in Transition (Albany:  SUNY Press), 
   pp 159-166.
Urciuli, Bonnie.  1991.  "The Political Topography of English: 
   The View from a New York Puerto Rican Neighborhood" 
   American Ethnologist 18(2):295-310.
Velasquez, Maria Dolores Gonzales and D. Letticia Galindo. 
   1993.  "A Sociolinguistic Description of Linguistic Self-
   Expression, Innovativeness, and Power among Chicanas in 
   Texas and New Mexico" Locating Power:  Proceedings of 
   the 1992 Berkeley Conference on Language and Gender.

Week 11:  Semantics and Pragmatics
In the past weeks we've considered differences in the ways 
men and women talk.  This week and next week we consider 
differences in the ways that men and women are talked 
about, differences in the ways they may interpret language, 
and the ways that sexist language arises.

Cameron, Deborah.  1985.  "Ch. 4.  False Dichotomies: 
   Grammar and Sexual Polarity" in Feminism and Linguistic 
   Theory, pp. 57-71. 
Martin, Emily.  1987.  "Medical Metaphors of Women's 
   Bodies:  Menstruation and Menopause" in The Woman in 
   the Body:  A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: 
   Beacon Press), pp. 27-53. 
McConnell-Ginet, Sally.  1989.  "The Sexual (Re)Production of 
   Meaning:  A Discourse-Based Theory" in Language, Gender 
   and Professional Writing:  Theoretical Approaches and 
   Guidelines for NonSexist Usage, (NY:  MLA),  pp. 35-50.
Michell, G.  1990.  "Women and Lying:  A Pragmatic and 
   Semantic Analysis of 'Telling it Slant'" in Hypatia Reborn: 
   Essays in Feminist Philosophy (Bloomington IN:  Indiana 
   University Press), pp. 175-191.
Morgan, Marcyliena.  1992.  "Indirectness and Interpretation 
   in African-American Women's Discourse"  Pragmatics.

 Exercise 5--Sexism in Language--is due.

Week 12:  Sexism in Language
One ongoing debate in sociolinguistics is between people who 
say that language is sexist, and others who say that language 
is not sexist, but its users are.  As you read the articles 
below, try to decide which claim is most convincing to you, 
and why.

Cameron, Deborah.  1990.  "Making Changes:  Can We 
   Decontaminate Sexist Language?"  in Feminism and 
   Linguistic Theory, pp. 72-90.
Ehrlich, Susan and Ruth King.  1993.  "Feminist Meanings and 
   Sexist Speech Communities"  in Locating Power: 
   Proceedings of the 1992 Berkeley Conference on Women 
   and Language.
Graddol, David and Joan Swann. 1989.  "Is Language Sexist?" 
   in Gender Voices (Cambridge:  Basil Blackwell), pp. 95-135. 
   (See especially "Sexism in Europe" pp. 119-123).
Linguistic Society of America Guidelines for Nonsexist Usage.
Martyna, Wendy.  1983.  "Beyond the He/Man Approach: 
   The Case for Non-Sexist Language" in Language Gender and 
   Society (Cambridge:  Newbury House), pp. 25-37.

Week 12:  Class Conference/Summing Up
We'll use this week for the presentation of work done by 
students this semester.  Instead of meeting in our regularly 
scheduled slot, we'll hold a one-day mini-conference for the 
presentation of student research.  Dozens of questions 
remain unresearched in language and gender--it's quite 
likely that the research you're doing for this class is original 
and innovative!  Each student will have 20 minutes to give a 
research presentation based on research done for the final 
paper, followed by 10 minutes for questions from other 
students in the class.  Your final paper will be due ONE WEEK 
after the date of the conference.  If you're interested, we 
may try to publish the papers in a course-reader type 
format conference proceedings.