A STUDY OF GENDER-CONDITIONED USE OF INFLECTIONAL AND PERIPHRASTIC FORMS IN ENGLISH ADJECTIVE COMPARISON

Jelena Grofulović, Vladimir Ž. Jovanović

DOI Number
10.22190/FULL1602189G
First page
189
Last page
208

Abstract


First introduced to the study of language by Robin Lakoff in her 1975 book Language and Woman's Place, gender has gained a status of a significant variable when it comes to language realization (Frank, 1978). As such, gender is an object of many sociolinguistic studies (Jespersen, 1922; Kramer, 1974; Edelsky, 1976; Thorne et al, 1983; Crawford, 1995) and is assumed not only to play a role in the pragmatics of language usage, but also to influence the frequency and nature of different lexical and structural realizations, resulting in what Kramer termed “a genderlect” (Kramer, 1974). The aim of this paper is to present the results of a case-study of periphrastic and inflectional instances of the grammatical category of comparison in English, attempting at answering the question whether gender causes a preference for periphrasis in language usage, which, in the broadest sense, presents a multi-unit alternative to a single-unit meaning, be the meaning lexical or grammatical, and the unit a word or a bound morpheme. We analyzed a sex-wise and quantity-wise symmetrical corpus, comprised of different registers and genres – fiction, scientific non-fiction, and on-line magazine articles, encompassing a million words approximately per sex, and looked for the frequency of periphrastic instances of the two categories. Our assumption is that gender on its own, with all other social and textual variables excluded (discourse, register, author’s age and social groups, personal language background) is not a sufficient factor to unambiguously and conspicuously determine an author’s/speaker’s preference for the periphrastic form of the studied grammatical values.


Keywords

grammatical meaning, inflectional forms, periphrasis, gendered language, adjective comparison

Full Text:

PDF

References


Ackerman, F./ G. Stump/ Webelhuth, G. 2011. “Lexicalism, Periphrasis and Implicative Morphology” in: Borsley R./ Börjars, K. (eds) Non-Transformational Syntax: Formal and Explicits Models of Grammar, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp 325-358.

Barber, Ch. 1964. Linguistic Change in Present-Day English. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd.

Bauer, L. 1994. Watching English Change:An Introduction to the Study of Linguistic Change in Standard Englishes in Twentieth Century, London: Longman.

Biber, D. et al. 1999.Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.

Börjars, K./ N. Vincent / C. Chapman. 1997. “Paradigms, periphrases and pronominal inflection: a feature” in: G. Booij / J. van Marle, (eds.), Yearbook of Morphology. 1996. Dordrecht: Kluwer. pp 155-180.

Brinton, L. J., E. C. Traugott. 2005. Lexicalization and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bussmann, H. 1996. Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, translated and edited by G. Trauth and K. Kazzazi, London: Routledge.

Coates, J. 2007. Gender. In Llamas, C., Mullany, L., &Stockwell, P. (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistic. London: Routledge. pp 62-68.

Corbett, G. G. 2013. “Periphrasis and Possible Lexemes” in: Chumakina, M./ G. G. Corbett (eds) Periphrasis: The Role of Syntax and Morphology in Paradigms, Oxford: OUP. pp 169-190.

Crawford, M. 1995. Talking Difference: on Gender and Language, Los Angeles and London: Sage Publishing.

Crosby, F./ L. Nyquist, 1977. ”The Female Register: An empirical Study of Lakoff's Hypothesis”. Language in Society, 6, 313-32

Crystal, D. 2008. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Downing, A. / P. Locke. 2006. A University Course in English Grammar, London and New York: Routledge.

Eckert, P./ S. McConnell-Ginet 2003. Language and Gender, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Edelsky, C. 1976. The acquisition of communicative competence: recognition of linguistic correlates of sex roles, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 22:47-59

Flannery, R. 1946. “Men’s and Women’s Speech in Gros Ventre”. International Journal of American Linguistics. 12 (3): 133-135.

Frank, F. W. 1978. Women's language in America. In D. Butturty and E. L. Epstein (eds), Women's language and style. Akron, OH: University of Akron. pp. 47 61

Grady, K. E. 1981. Sex bias in research design. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 5, 628-636.

Greenbaum, S. 1996. The Oxford English Grammar, Oxford: Oxford Universiy Press.

Hall, K. 2003. “Exceptional Speakers: Contested and Problematized Gender Identities”, in: Holmes, J./Meyerhoff , M. (eds), The Handbook of Language and Gender, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp 353-380.

Haspelmath, M. 2000. Periphrasis, in: Geert Booij, Christian Lehman and Joachim Mugdan (eds.). Morphologie / Morphology. EininternationalesHandbuchzur Flexion und Wortbildung / An International Handbook on Inflection and Word formation, Vol 1. 2000, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp 654 - 664.

Haspelmath, M. / Sims, A. 2010. Understanding Morphology, London: Hodder Education.

Huddleston, R. / Pullum, G. K. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Cambridge: CUP.

Kramer, C. (1974) Women's speech: separate but unequal? Quarterly Journal of Speech, 60, 14-24.

Jacklin, C. N. (1981). Methodological issues in the study of sex-related differences. Developmental Review, 1, 266-273.

Jesperson, O. 1922. Language: its nature, development, and origin. London: Allen and Unwin.

Jespersen, O. 1965. AModernEnglishGrammaronHistoricalPrinciples, Vol. 7 Syntax, London/Copenhagen: GeorgeAllen&Unwin/EjnarMunksgard.

Lakoff, R. 1975. Language and Woman's Place, New York: Harper and Row.

Lakoff, R. 2004. Language and Woman's Place, Text and Commentaries, edited by Mary Buholtz, New York: Oxford University Press.

Leap, W. L. 2003. “Language and Gendered Modernity” in: Holmes, J./Meyerhoff , M.(eds), The Handbook of Language and Gender, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp 401-422.

Leech, G. / Deuchar, M./Hoogenraad, R. 1982. English Grammar for Today, The Macmillan Press, Houndmills/London.

Leech, G. / M. Hundt/ C. Mair/ N. Smith. 2009.Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study . Cambridge: CUP.

Litosseliti, L. 2006. Gender and Language, London: Routledge.

Mulac, A. et. al, 1986. “Male/female language differences and attributional consequences in a public speaking situation: Toward and explanation of the gender-linked language effect, Communication Monographs, 53, 115-129.

Potter, S. 1969. Changing English. 2nd ed, revised (1975). London: Andre Deutsch.

Quirk, R. et al. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, London: Longman.

Richardson, J. T. E. 1997. Introduction to the Study of Gender Differences in Cognition. In Caplan, P. J., Crawford, M., Hyde J. S. & Richardson, J. T. E. (Eds.). Gender Differences in Human Cognition. Counterpoints: Cognition, Memory and Language. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp 3-29.

Sadler, L/ A. Spencer. 2001. “Syntax as an exponent of morphological features”. Yearbook of Morphology 2000. pp 71-97.

Scott, M., 2012, WordSmith Tools version 6, Stroud: Lexical Analysis Software.

Szmrecsanyi, B. 2012. “Analyticity and syntheticity in the history of English” in: Nevalainen, T. / E. Traugott (eds) The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, New York: OUP, pp 654-665.

Spencer, A. 2001. “The Word-and-Paradigm approach to morphosyntax”. Transactions of the Philological Society, 99: 279-313.

Stump, Gregory T. 2001. Inflectional Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stump, Gregory T. 2002. “Morphological and syntactic paradigms: Arguments for a theory of paradigm linkage”. Yearbook of Morphology 2002. pp

Teschner, R. V./ Evans, E. E. 2007. Analyzing the Grammar of English, Washington: Georgetown University Press.

Thorne, B. et al. 1983. Language, gender and society, Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.

Trask, R. L. A.1996. A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics, London: Routledge.




DOI: https://doi.org/10.22190/FULL1602189G

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


ISSN 0354-4702 (Print)

ISSN 2406-0518 (Online)