Gender revision

Changing ideas about attitudes towards gender are a hot topic at the moment so read around the topic but focus especially on linguistic ideas like gender neutral pronouns, the supposed need for women to speak more powerfully (contrasted with Beard's idea that we have to value women's voices more), the idea that context drives language use more than gender does, the socialisation of young children to take on gender stereotypes (watch The Secret Life of 5-year-olds on 4OD's gender episodes to get an idea of how powerful the message is) etc. In your essay and opinion piece if they are on gender, remember to only mention non-linguistic ideas very briefly.

Overview (you need to know more than this):

4 Ds:

Deficit

• main proponent Robin Lakoff
• women's language is deficient in comparison to men's due to uncertainty features like hedges and tag questions and women lack humour
• evaluation: Lakoff based her ideas on her long experience as a linguist but no specific research to test them
• contrast: O'Barr and Atkins did research in courtrooms and found that Lakoff's deficit features did appear more in the language of some than others but that the split was not along gender lines but along lines of social power so that the deficit features were 'powerless' features not 'women's' features; Pamela Fishman also argued against Lakoff's idea that tag questions showed uncertainty - she suggested they were powerful tooks for involving others in conversation and seeking consensus

Dominance

• main proponents: Zimmerman and West, Dale Spender (West and Spender are both female, like Lakoff, so watch out for that when using pronouns in your essay - I see a lot of 'he's)
• patriarchal dominance is reflected in language uses by males who are more direct and interrupt more
• evaluation: Zimmerman and West's '96% of interruptions were made by men' findings were widely spread in support of the idea that men spoke in more dominant ways but it was a small study and you know those can't be generalised to all men/women - just because they confirmed what most people felt was the case and became very famous, doesn't mean that the research was valid
• contrast: Geoffrey Beattie criticised Z&W's resaearch on the basis that it was a small sample of white, middle-class speakers from a single area, and he did research himself on a much larger sample of his students where he found that interruptions were much more evenly split between men and women (no statistically significant difference) and he also added that he interpreted many interruptions as co-operative (rather than competitive), offering support or demonstrating enthusiasm

Difference

•  main proponent: Tannen but see also the popular psychology (not linguistics) book by John Grey: 'Men are from Mars, Women Are from Venus'
• men and women speak in different (but equal) ways
• in her book 'You Just Don't Understand' (1990), Tannen offered pairs of antonyms to characterise the way men and women spoke differently (interestingly, she put the male version forst in each pairing) e.g. conflict vs compromise, information vs feelings etc.
• Like Grey's book (both published close together - Grey's in  1992), it was very popular (hers was not as popular as his!) as they both reflected ideas about gender that people found convincing because they were describing traits they already perceived to be the case - Tannen didn't need to work hard to prove the theory
• for contrast, see the next D (Discusive/Diversity) and Janet Hyde found that 78% of features that were supposed to be different between the genders were close to 0 in large-scale research

Discursive/Diversity

•  main proponent: Cameron
• "your genes don't determine your jeans" so why should biology affect language use? - paralleling language and fashion in this quote
• Cameron suggested that context was far more of a factor than biology in how people used language e.g. direct language on a battlefield and supportive language with children
• she suggested that we used certain language features to perform gender, that we 'do' gender not that we are a certain stereotypical set of traits that make up perceptions of male or female genders - that there is a diversity of gender identities and that we can adapt our language (link to Giles's CAT) but that we are socially constructed into choosing to conforming to gender stereotypes that are the norms for our local 'communities of practice' and that these vary by place, class etc. - there are no universal features that men vs women use
• wider reading on this 

 Read this research and notice there is an assumption of the difference rather than discursive approach, but it does go through the approaches in an accessible way.