Language and Gender 4 pages

Language and Gender

Preliminaries

• The study of language and gender might be roughly divided into two parts:

Preliminaries

• The study of the gender of language. That is, how gender is marked in language, possible social implications of this.

• The study of the language of gender. That is, diferences in how women and men use language, possible social implications of this.

Part I: Gender Marking in Language

• In languages with grammatical gender, nouns are divided into two or more classes, each bearing some distinctive marking.

Gender Marking in Language

• This has consequences for the marking of other words in the clause.

• I.e., agreement with articles, adjectives, etc.

Spanish Gender Marking

la casa blanca ‘feminine’ the house white

el perro blanco ‘masculine’ the dog white

Russian Gender Marking

kniga khorosha ‘feminine’ book (is) good

pidzhak khorosh ‘masculine’ jacket (is) good

pal’to khorosho ‘neuter’ coat (is) good

Gender Marking in Language

• The fact that we call it “gender”, and that there are only two or three of them in Indo- European languages, tends to lead us to think of “gender” as only being about gender.

Gender Marking in Language

• But “gender” is used in Spanish, Russian, etc., on all nouns, whether or not they are gendered.

• For example, mesa ‘table’ is feminine in Spanish; it is masculine in Russian: stol.

Gender Marking in Language

• For ‘dog’ it’s the other way around: perro (masc.) in Spanish, but sobaka (fem.) in Russian.

• For such words, assignment of “gender” seems largely arbitrary.

Gender Marking in Language

• There are languages that have ten “genders” - most Bantu languages, for instance.

• That is, nouns fall into one of ten classes, each having a distinctive marking and pattern of agreement.

Gender Marking in Language

• These include distinctions based on gender, but also things like animacy, humanness, etc.

• Similarly, recall that Navaho marks nouns according to their shape. (Relativity slides)

Gender Marking in Language

• “Gender” is basically a kind of grammatical agreement, more generally called “noun class marking”.

• Many languages do not mark gender at all, e.g., Hungarian, Turkish. Even pronouns for men and women are the same.

Gender Marking in Language

• So is “gender” irrelevant to gender?

Social Implications?

• It’s still true that in languages that mark grammatical gender, actual gender and grammatical gender can correlate to a large degree.

Gender “Associations”

• Recall the studies we’ve seen suggesting that this arbitrary gender marking can afect how people think about seemingly ungendered nouns like “key” and “bridge”.

Masculine bias?

• Other grammatical “marked” versus “default” pairs, for comparison:

“Default” “Marked”

singular plural third person 1st/2nd present tense past/future nominative case other cases masculine feminine

Masculine bias?

• Why does feminine gender need to be marked more often than masculine?

Masculine bias?

• Some lexical examples of the marked versus unmarked pattern for gender:

host hostess poet poetess

Compare:

male nurse nurse

Masculine bias?

• Another well-known fact to consider:

man(kind) = people he/him = somebody

Masculine bias?

• The gender-neutral ‘he’ debate: psycholinguistic evidence?

Masculine bias?

From an abstract of an article by John Gastil appearing in the journal Sex Roles (1990):

“This experiment investigated the propensity of the generic he to evoke images of males…Undergraduates read

sentences aloud and verbally described the images that came to mind. The results provide strong support for the hypothesis that the generic he evokes a disproportionate number of male images.”

Masculine bias? • There have been a lot of studies since then

suggesting a similar conclusion. • For example, “priming” experiments that

show that “generic” “he” or “chairman” etc. trigger masculine associations.

Masculine bias?

Interesting related work (Kreiner et al. 2008)

Real-time, online processing is slowed down by “mismatches” between pronoun gender and an antecedent noun with stereotypical gender when they mismatch.

E.g., surgeon…herself. pilot…herself.

E.g.: Typically the surgeon operated carefully after reminding herself about the regulations.

The measurement: self-paced reading or eye-tracking

Summary

Gender marking is a version of a more general phenomenon found in language, noun class marking.

In some ways it is not about gender.

But in our segment on Determinism and Relativity, we saw evidence that gender marking carries associations that conceivably afect one’s thinking about seemingly ungendered things (keys, bridges).

If this is true, it raises doubts about supposed “neutral” or “generic” uses of words like “he”, “man”, “chairman”, etc. Indeed, studies show that, at least in certain respects, these really do carry masculine bias.

Sex and Gender  For this lecture...  Sex: physical differences between male

and female  Gender: social differences between

masculine and feminine  These are not perfect definitions, but

we'll make these simplifying assumptions for now

Sex Differences  Women and men have different vocal tracts  Men's vocal folds are, on average, longer and

thicker than women's (post-puberty)  Men have lower pitched voices than women

 Men's vocal tracts are longer than women's  Men have slightly larger heads (and bodies)  Men have a more descended larynx  Consequence: men have slightly different vowels

from women

Pitch  That being said...  The differences in pitch between

genders differs across languages (and dialects!)

 Classic study: Dutch speakers have fairly small differences in pitch between males and females while Japanese speakers have relatively large differences

Pitch  Not only that...  Prepubescent children, who should have

nearly equivalent vocal tracts and larynges exhibit different average pitches

 Girls generally have higher pitch voices than boys for the same age group

 What? Why would this be?

Vowel Spaces  Males generally have different vowel

spaces from women due to their longer vocal tracts

 Cross-linguistically, this difference is highly variable, if generally true

Sex, Gender, Phonetics  So what's going on?  The anatomical differences determine

general trends  Social considerations determine the

exact realization of those differences

Japan and the Netherlands  Gender differences in the Netherlands

are not as extreme as in Japan  This is reflected linguistically—gender

differences (pitch, vowel space) are not as differentiated in the Netherlands, compared to Japan (though recent evidence suggests this is changing!)

Extreme Gender Differences  Yanyuwa

 A language spoken in Northern Australia  Endangered

 Has separate “male” and “female” dialects  Men and women use different morphological

forms  They only use each others' forms when

quoting

Yanyuma  Female: nya-buyi nya-ardu kiwa-wingka

waykaliya wulangindu kanyilu-kala nyikunya-baba

 Male: buyi ardu ka-wingka waykaliya wulangindu kila-kala nyiku-baba

 Gloss: He is going to the fire to cook food

Differences in the U.S.  Male and female speech patterns differ

in the U.S.  Female speech compared to male speech

 More standard  Less use of stigmatized forms (“ain't”,

“might could”)  More precise articulation

 Why?

Like, dude, I'm totally not gay. But he's more attractive than that other guy. But I'm not

gay. Totally.  Some research in the UCSC phonetics lab...  We asked 30 Californians (15 male, 15

female) to rate the attractiveness of 60 voices (30 male, 30 female) on a scale from 1 (unattractive) – 9 (attractive)

 One result:  Females and Males agreed quantitatively and

qualitatively on the attractiveness of female voices, but not male ones

Vocal attractiveness  California women and men (18-25) agreed on

female voices  If women assigned a female voice a 7, the men

did too  They agreed on male voices, but differed in

absolute value  If women assigned a male voice a 7, the men gave

it a 5.75.  That is, they agreed on relative attractiveness,

but differed in absolute values  ???

Gender differences in America  Women tend to be more standard and

more precise in their speech.  Why?

More on Gender in English – Pronouns

 That guy was really nice, [?] was someone I'd go out with again.

 What a cute baby! It's really cute!  I like a person who listens to Pylon. He

has great taste in music.  I really like a person who listens to

Pylon. They have great taste in music.

Gender in speech—some issues to think about

 How old can a “girl” / “boy” be?  “Girls' baskeball team”?

Sexuality  Gay speech?  Common view – gay males use more “feminine”

speech, gay females use more “masculine” speech?

 True? Not really  Some characteristics could be argued to be more

masculine or feminine, but this is cherry-picking the data

 However, speakers can often tell gay speech from straight in the laboratory setting – but it's unclear what people are focusing on

Sexuality  What to keep in mind  People have multiple “identities”  This gets reflected in speech  There's no one “gay” or “straight”

speech style