scholarly journals Many Words, Many Turds: Middle English Proverbial Wisdom and the Alleged Incontinence of Female Speech

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-120
Author(s):  
Mary C. Flannery
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Women's Speech ◽  
Feminist Discourse ◽  
Female Speech

In a passage from The Castle of Perseverance, the reprehensible Malus Angelus dismisses the speech of the personified virtues who are attempting to lead mankind to salvation: ‘Ther wymmen arn, are many wordys. (…) Ther ges syttyn are many tordys’ (2649-51). As the quotation illustrates, likening someone’s words to turds is both an effective brush-off and a colourful insult. This particular insult derives its force from the familiar anti-feminist trope of the voluble woman: like women, the wicked angel implies, the female personifications of virtue talk too much, and the incontinence of their speech is presented in terms that are both scatological and bestial. These lines transform the virtues’ words into logorrhea, an object of ridicule rather than reverence. But upon closer examination, this eminently quotable passage and the dramatic context in which it is situated also suggest new ways in which we might approach such examples of anti-feminist discourse concerning women’s speech. This essay examines how the terms of Malus Angelus’s insult both rely on and destabilize anti-feminist proverbial sayings concerning women’s bodies and women’s speech.

scholarly journals METACOMMUNICATIVE PRAGMATIC MARKERS: GENDER ASPECT

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 40-50
Author(s):  
Tatiana I. Popova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Roles ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Age Group ◽  
Women's Speech ◽  
Discursive Analysis ◽  
Pragmatic Markers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dependent Position ◽  
Female Speech ◽  
Gender Aspect

The article deals with the use of metacommunicative pragmatic markers in the gender aspect, taking into account the social roles of the speaker. The research is carried out based on the data of the ORD corpus of Russian Everyday Speech, known as ‘One Speaker’s Day’, which contains transcripts of audio recordings obtained under natural conditions. The subsample includes about 200 thousand words. It features episodes of ‘speaker’s days’ of 15 women and 15 men belonging to three age groups. The informants act in various social roles, opposed by the principle of symmetry/asymmetry. Pragmatic annotation of the material and further discursive analysis have demonstrated that metacommunication is actively used in the speech of the informants, but it is much more common for the women’s speech. The men use markers of this type with specific speech tasks, for example, for a refusal (slushay / u menya net deneg <look / I have no money>); in the women’s speech, the variability of metacommunicative markers is wider but there is no functional diversity. This confirms the observations of linguists, obtained from the material of various languages, that women tend to cooperate and maintain dialogue to a greater extent than men. From the perspective of feminist linguistics, this feature of female speech is directly related to the issues of the women’s dependent position since it reflects their passivity and the habit of yielding. However, more than half of the detected uses belong to the speech of women of the older age group (from 55 years old) who communicate with relatives and friends, while in the younger age group the metacommunicative pragmatic markers become multifunctional and also act in speech as a start marker.

Female Speech in Menander

Antichthon ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 24-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Bain
Keyword(s):  
Women's Speech ◽  
Ancient Society ◽  
Female Speech ◽  
Considerable Length ◽  
Legal Position ◽  
Nature Development ◽  
Points Of View

In recent years the place (or plight) of women in ancient society has attracted much attention. Their legal position, the attitudes towards them on the part of men, the characterization of women in drama, the personality of known and spectacular individuals like Sappho and many other topics have been studied at considerable length from various points of view. It is on the surface, then, somewhat surprising that scarcely any attention has been paid to a topic which in another discipline, linguistics, has proved very popular of late, the question of women’s speech. Sixty years ago the idea that women exhibit a distinctive form of speech was already current; Jespersen devoted a chapter of his Language: its Nature, Development and Origin to ‘The Woman’. Since then with the growth of interest on the part of linguists in sociolinguistic questions an impressive body of literature relating to this topic has accumulated.

Expletives of lower working-class women

1992 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Inner City ◽  
Economic Situation ◽  
Female Group ◽  
City Area ◽  
Women's Speech ◽  
Female Speech ◽  
The Face ◽  
Working Class Women

ABSTRACTFor many decades, women's speech has been seen as being very different from that used by men. Stereotyped as swearing less, using less slang, and as aiming for more standard speech style, women were judged according to their sex rather than other aspects of their lives, such as class and economic situation. With many critics now challenging these ideas, this article sets out to look at the reality of the swearing used by a group of women from a deprived inner-city area. Their constant use of strong expletives flies in the face of the theories proffered of the “correctness” of the language of women. (Expletives, taboo words, working-class women, female speech, female group, social networks, sociolinguistics, inner-city England)

Women in charge: Politeness and directives in the speech of Japanese women

1992 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet S. Smith
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Japanese Women ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
Japanese Men ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Women's Speech ◽  
Language And Gender ◽  
Japanese Female ◽  
Female Speech ◽  
And Gender

ABSTRACTThis article explores the linguistic practices of Japanese men and women giving directions to subordinates. Previous research on language and gender across a number of languages has equated the speech of women with powerlessness. The literature on Japanese women's speech would support this notion. It characterizes Japanese female speech as soft, polite, indirect, in sum, as powerless. This presents problems for women who must command. The present study, an extension of my previous work on Japanese female speech (Shibamoto 1985, 1987) centered on women in more typically female roles, examines the directives of women in positions of authority in traditional and nontraditional domains and compares them with the directive forms chosen by men in similar positions. Explanations for the differences found are placed within the frameworks of a general theory of politeness and the culturally specific, gendered strategies for encoding politeness and authority in Japanese. (Sociolinguistics, language and gender, politeness)

scholarly journals Gender-Specific Features in the Speech of Russian Germans of Kirov Region

2020 ◽  
pp. 24-36
Author(s):  
Olga Baykova ◽  
◽  
Natalya Kryukova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
Communication Styles ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Gender Group ◽  
Women's Speech ◽  
Female Speech ◽  
Russian Germans ◽  
The Impact

The article will be of interest to researchers involved in studying the characteristics of male and female speech since it examines gender differences in the speech of Russian Germans living in the territory of the Kirov region. The relevance of this study is enhanced by the sociolinguistic significance of island dialectology, associated with studying speech behavior of a German ethnic community that exists in isolation from the parent ethnic group. The study seeks to analyze gender differences in the speech of Russian Germans living in the Kirov region which add to other socio-demographic factors that affect the speech behavior of Russian Germans in the region. The authors discuss the impact of gender on the linguistic competence of the older generation of Russian Germans in the Kirov region as exemplified by the analyzed stories of eleven respondents, Russian Germans of the first, older subgroup (10 women and 9 men aged 70 to 95 years) on the topic “Deportation of Volga and Ukraine Germans into the Kirov Region.” By using direct observation, audio speech recording as well as content and functional analysis of male and female speech, it was demonstrated that the speech of each gender group was characterized by specific linguistic and extra-linguistic features. For instance, one characteristic difference between male and female communication was the ability of the women to quickly switch from one topic to another. In terms of linguistic characteristics of men’s and women’s speech, there were clear differences in the grammatical structure of sentences, while extra-linguistic features included psychological differences in speech characteristics typical of a particular gender group, different communication styles as well as different goals that men and women seemed to pursue when entering into a conversation. However, such differences cannot be considered to be essential characteristics of speech of all women or all men: in our opinion, it would be more correct to class them as certain gender features of male and female speech.

Some experimental findings about the question of politeness and women's speech (Research note)

1984 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Rosa Baroni ◽  
Valentina D'urso
Keyword(s):  
Research Note ◽  
Linguistic Variation ◽  
Women's Speech ◽  
Female Speech ◽  
Tag Questions ◽  
Experimental Findings ◽  
Speech Research

A particular factor in linguistic variation which has often been connected to female speech is politeness, as first described by Lakoff (1973a, 1973b), manifested not only by means of intonation, but also through the use of particular formulae of courtesy, through the use of tag questions at the end of interrogatives, and the use of longer, less direct and peremptory sentences.

Re-imagining Reproduction: Unsettling Metaphors in the History of Imperial Science and Commercial Surrogacy in India

Somatechnics ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalindi Vora
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Commercial Surrogacy ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Travel Industry

This paper provides an analysis of how cultural notions of the body and kinship conveyed through Western medical technologies and practices in Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) bring together India's colonial history and its economic development through outsourcing, globalisation and instrumentalised notions of the reproductive body in transnational commercial surrogacy. Essential to this industry is the concept of the disembodied uterus that has arisen in scientific and medical practice, which allows for the logic of the ‘gestational carrier’ as a functional role in ART practices, and therefore in transnational medical fertility travel to India. Highlighting the instrumentalisation of the uterus as an alienable component of a body and subject – and therefore of women's bodies in surrogacy – helps elucidate some of the material and political stakes that accompany the growth of the fertility travel industry in India, where histories of privilege and difference converge. I conclude that the metaphors we use to structure our understanding of bodies and body parts impact how we imagine appropriate roles for people and their bodies in ways that are still deeply entangled with imperial histories of science, and these histories shape the contemporary disparities found in access to medical and legal protections among participants in transnational surrogacy arrangements.

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