LING 320 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Social Inequality, Bellhop, Multimodal Distribution

• School: McGill University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 320
• Professor: Charles Boberg

Document Summary

Any signi cant division in a community will be re ected in language differences. Females and males are distinct subgroups in most societies. Fundamental part of human organization, and so there is a social distinction re ected in linguistic distinctions. These distinctions range in vocabularies, morphology, etc. in cases of sex differences. Much more subtle differences in frequencies of variants in correlational linguistics based on sex in north america. Biggest speech differences are in informal levels of speech, and tend to converge in more formal styles. Japanese uses indicators in regular speech to identify sex of the speaker. Particles and pronouns divided by sex and used in regular speech as an explicit indication of self-identi ed sex. Trend in japan is to use more neutral speech, often dropping the nal particle or even using male pronouns to show resistance to this conventional expression of gender/speech. Deborah tannen researches how people talk and found cultural and gender differences in discourse styles.