A helpful guide for English Majors

1. Linguistic Resources

2. LANGUAGE AND GENDER
• Language is a highly structured system of signs,
or the combination of form and meaning.
• Gender is embedded in these signs and their
use in communicative practice in a variety of
ways.
• Gender can be an actual content of a linguistic
sign.

3. For Example:
English third-person singular (It)
=male and female inanimate
(she/her/her; he/him/his)
Lexical items referring (male and female)
=boy and girl
Adjectives (handsome and pretty)

4. LINGUSTIC RESOURCES
• Used to present oneself as particular
kind of person; to project an attitude or
stance; to affect the flow of the talk
and ideas.

5. + Tone and pitch of voice
+ Patterns of intonation / tunes
+ Choice of vocabulary
+ Pronunciation
+ Grammatical Patterns
= can signal gendered aspect of the
speaker’s presentation

6. PHONOLOGY
• The phonological system of every
language is based in a structured set of
distinction of sounds (phonemes).
Phonemes do not carry
meaning, but provide the
means to make
distinctions that are in
turn associated with the
distinction of meaning.
pick, tick, sick, thick, lick
Difference in /p/, /t/, /s/, /Ɵ/, /l/ sounds

7. Our perception of sound segments is
hardly mechanical.
• Joan Robin experiment
• Phoneticians Elizabeth Strand and
Keith Johnson (1996) used J. Robin
technique to show that speaker’s
beliefs about the gender of a speaker
actually affect the way the hear
phonetic segments.

8. Results
The sibilant sound /s/ vary in frequency. On
average, women’s pronunciation tend to have
slightly higher frequency than men’s.
“Rhythm and tune clearly carry
important meaning gender meanings,
and certainly the objects of gender
stereotype.”

9. MORPHOLOGY
• Morphology is the level of grammar at which
recurring units of sound are paired with
meaning.
• The basic, indivisible combinations of form
(sound) and meaning in a language are referred
to as morphemes.
• Lexical morphemes are content forms.
• Grammatical morphemes are abstract
meanings.

10. MORPHOLOGY
Gender in grammar
Some grammatical morphemes have gender in their
content by requiring the use of gender morphology in
people various utterances.
Example:
“to say someone called but he didn’t leave his name”
… is ascribe to male sex to the caller.
Grammatically, this means that articles and adjectives
“agree” in gender have a noun that they modify.

11. MORPHOLOGY
Lexicon
-refer to the inventory of lexical morphemes and
words in a language.
A repository of cultural preoccupations
The result of link between gender
The most changeable part of language.
An important site for bringing new ideas.
Through the use of coining of words in
language. It all depends on who’s doing what,
and how they’re talking about in widespread.

12. MORPHOLOGY
Syntax
It combines words into sentences-linguistic
structures that express thoughts or propositions.
Sentences describes events or situations and
syntax indicates something about relations among
the participants.
Example:
“Joan kissed John.”
“John kissed Joan.”
However,
“She was raped.”

13. MORPHOLOGY
Discourse
-refer to the study of structure and meaning that
goes beyond the level of the sentence. It focus on
deployment.
Example:
A compliment offered to the woman on her
appearance might be welcome while men are
complimented on the basis of their
accomplishment.
“We used language to move our agendas
along the world- to pursue relationships, to
engage in activities, to develop ideas.”

14. MORPHOLOGY
Semantics and Pragmatics
Semantics-deals with how meaning of grammatical
morphemes.
Lexical-is the propositional meanings expressed by
sentences.
“Communication goes beyond what the
language system-it is everything involved in
its use-enters so crucially into the social
construction of gender (and other areas of
social meanings.)”