خلاصة:
The question, Do men and women use language differently played a central part in the emergence of feminist socio linguistics more than two decades ago, and it casts a long shadow. This paper focuses on the literature that has contributed to the understanding of the major research questions underlying two major strands, language and gender, concentrating on the development of the literature from the deficit and dominance models to the social constructivist era of post-modernism in order to provide a context for recent developments in language and gender theories. This article tries to investigate the social cognition of gender and language.
ملخص الجهاز:
"Social Cognition of Gender and Language The question, Do men and women use language differently played a central part in the emergence of feminist socio linguistics more than two decades ago, and it casts a long shadow.
The authors also provide a comprehensive list of Lakoff’s (1975) claims as provided below: Use of expletives while women use weaker ones Women’s speech is more polite than men’s Trivial, unimportant topics are considered to be women’s domain Women use empty adjectives Women use tag questions more often than men Women express uncertainty through the use of the question intonation pattern Women tend to speak in ‘italics’ (women use more intensifiers) Hedges are used more often by woman Hyper – correct grammar is a feature of women’s speech Women don’t tell jokes (Freeman & McElhinny, 1996 : 232) The above features have been critically studied empirically by other researchers to determine the accuracy of Lakoff’s (1975) claims.
The inherent problem with the difference approach is that the theory is almost based on men’s dominant position in society, with women being portrayed as " weak, helpless victims of a patriarchy that forces them to act in weak, passive, irrational or ineffective ways" (Freeman & McElhinny, 1996: 236).
While the social constructivist theory of language and gender provides a much better framework for the study of gender than the difference\ dominance paradigms, Sunderland identifies a series of questions which still need to be answered , namely that of construction and its relationship to gender."