urnouts: Social categories and identity in the high school. New York: Teachers College Press. Gender asymmetry by age (Labov): Gender asymmetry by age (Labov) Women lead men in most linguistic changes in progress that have been studied by quantitative methods (Labov 1990).
The figure below shows M and F patterns by age for the devoicing of (j) in calle, llame, etc. in the Spanish of Buenos Aires (Wolf and Jiménez 1979).
Women show higher % devoicing from the outset; males lag behind.
The dotted arrows suggest, moreover, that this is a lag of one generation:
Males 15-24 approximate the values of women 38-55
12 year old males have values in the range of women 24-35. Non-canonical genders: Non-canonical genders Non-canonical genders: Non-canonical genders Intonation
Stereotypically, female speech includes a greater intonation range than male speech (McConnell-Ginet 1983, Henton 1989)
What about non-canonical genders?
Stereotypical lesbian speech includes a narrow pitch range and generally flat intonation patterns (Queen 1997)
Disconfirmed experimentally by Waksler 2001
Schuler 2003: significant correlation between 95% pitch range, speaker orientation, and listener rating Waksler, Rachelle. 2001. Pitch range and women’s sexual orientation. Word 52.1:69-77. Influence of sexual orientation on vowel production: Influence of sexual orientation on vowel production Pierrehumbert et al 2004
Phonetic study of vowel production in gay, lesbian, bisexual (GLB), and heterosexual speakers
Differences in the acoustic characteristics of vowels were found as a function of sexual orientation:
Lesbian and bisexual women produced less fronted /u/ and /a/ than heterosexual women.
Gay men produced a more expanded vowel space than heterosexual men.
However, the vowels of GLB speakers were not generally shifted toward vowel patterns typical of the opposite sex.
These results are inconsistent with the conjecture that innate biological factors have a broadly feminizing influence on the speech of gay men and a broadly masculinizing influence on the speech of lesbian/bisexual women.
They are consistent with the idea that innate biological factors influence GLB speech patterns indirectly by causing selective adoption of certain speech patterns characteristic of the opposite sex. Gender-based linguistic differences, part 3: Gender-based linguistic differences, part 3 Pragmatics Question tags: Question tags Showing solidarity:
His portraits are quite static by comparison, aren’t they?
You were missing last week, weren’t you? (Coates/Cameron 1989: 82)
This particular utterance could be confrontational with the right intonation
Men use question tags more often to express uncertainty while women use them largely to facilitate communication (Holmes 1992:319).
Coates, Jennifer/Cameron, Deborah. (eds.) (1989): Women in Their Speech Communities. London.
Holmes, Janet (1984): 'Women's Language: A Functional Approach'. General Linguistics 24/3: 149-178. Interruptions: Interruptions Eakins/Eakins 1978: status seems to be a factor in the pattern of interruptions.
Males initiated more interruptions than females in their study of faculty meetings, but…
there was a clear ranking along status lines.
The chair of the department suffered the least number of interruptions
Nevertheless, the most interrupted person was a woman.
But, Holmes 1992:
in doctor-patient conversations female doctors were interrupted more often than male physicians
in business organisations, men but not women tended to dominate the interactions
And West 1998: study of interaction between doctors and patients: female physicians were interrupted more often by patients of all social status groups than male physicians.
Gender of Physician # of Interruptions by Physicians by Patients # of Patients
Male 188 67% 33% 17
Female 59 32% 68% 4 Eakins, Barbara/Eakins, Gene: 'Verbal Turn-Taking and Exchanges in Faculty Dialogue'. In: Dubois, Betty/Crouch, Isabel (eds.) (1976): The Sociology of the Languages of American Women. San Antonio, TX: 53-61.
Holmes, Janet (1992): An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Londo