him/her, he/she, Ms/Miss…What do we use?

At times, the wealth of terms we have at our disposal to refer to someone can become confusing.  For example, should we be saying chairman, chairperson, chairwoman or just chair?  Which is correct and which might be offensive?  Most of us would hope that, over time, language use has become less sexist and one way of investigating this is through corpus based research.  This involves the analysis of large collections of computerised texts, identifying frequent linguistic patterns.  Paul Baker decided to compare four of these large collections or ‘corpora’ from 1931, 1961, 1991 and 2006 to explore whether male and female pronouns and nouns showed any signs of bias in language.

Baker found that, since 1961, there has been a decrease in usage of all male pronouns, especially  he, whilst female pronouns, such as she and her, have increased slightly.  Interestingly, the pronouns I and you have also increased in usage.  This may be due to the fact that written English is becoming more conversational and personalised over time, which could relate to the decline of third person pronouns in favour of the first and second person.

Another type of pronoun which Baker considered was that which attempts to include both males and females, for example him/her, he/she, he or she or s/he. The results showed that they are rarely used and although there was an increase in their usage between 1961 and 1991, the total for 2006 is less than half that of 1991. This suggests that they are becoming unpopular and in time, may even die out.  One reason for this could be that people find some gender neutral terms like s/he distracting or messy.  They seem easier to implement in writing rather than speech, which could prove to be a barrier to their long-term uptake.

When Baker concentrated on the nouns man, men, woman and women, he found that the four words were actually converging and being used as frequently as each other.  However, this wasn’t true when they were considered as affixes (i.e. as part of another word).  For example, the word spokesman still appears to be the most frequently used term, despite other equivalents like spokeswoman and spokesperson existing and the latter being used slightly more frequently in 2006 than ever before.  On analysing his data further, Baker found that spokesman is rarely, if ever, used to refer to a woman and he surmises that perhaps its frequency over other forms reveals the social reality that this is a role that men tend to carry out more than women.

Interestingly, when he analysed the frequencies of the similar type of word chairman / chairperson / chairwoman / chairlady or just chair, he found that, although chairman has always been and remains the most popular choice, there was an increase in the gender-neutral chair in the 2006 data, giving rise to the hope that it may start to replace chairman.  Compared to spokesperson, its popularity could lie in the fact that it is such a neutral term.  Spokes already exists as a completely unrelated plural noun and any word ending in –person can face resistance as it sounds so ‘politically correct’, which users often find off-putting.

Finally, Baker considered the titles Mrs, Miss, Ms and Mr, which have long been of interest to linguists in English-speaking countries due to their inbuilt inequality as labels.  Males are not forced to reveal their marital status with Mr, whereas females have to when they choose between Mrs or Miss.  Ms was conceived in the mid-twentieth century as an equivalent to Mr.  Nevertheless, apart from the confusion surrounding how it is pronounced, it is often connected with being divorced or a lesbian, thereby losing its neutrality.  Baker found that Ms was still very rarely used as a title but, perhaps more interestingly, that all the titles for both genders had decreased over time, so much so that he concludes that if the trend continues, all gender marked titles in English could become very rare in thirty years’ time.  In addition to people becoming more aware of gender inequality in language and the fact that fewer people are married now than in 1931, Baker explains a possible reason for this as being the increasing personalisation of British culture.  Therefore, rather than Mr Smith we may use William Smith or even Bill Smith instead, a much more personal and emotionally involved address. 

Baker concludes, reassuringly, that people are becoming more easily persuaded to stop using a sexist or biased term such as Miss.  He found that if a new term needed to be used then one that sounds more natural and is based on an existing word, such as chair, is more likely to be successful.  However, the invention of a completely new term, such as Ms or -person, is likely to be met with suspicion and resistance.

So in answer to the question of the title, it seems that maybe we’re beginning to NOT use any of the terms.  Such reassuring news is also supported by the fact that the terms feminism and feminist, which occurred just 3 times in the 1931 corpus, were found 59 times in 2006.  Good on her/it/them/us!

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Baker, Paul (2010) Will Ms ever be as frequent as Mr? A corpus-based comparison of gendered terms across four diachronic corpora of British English. Gender and Language 4 (1): 125-149.

doi : 10.1558/genl.v4i1.125

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

What’s new, pussycat?

 such a byootimis littlol kitteh!

                                                                             

 These few words are in Lolspeak, the language created by users of the website www.cheezland.org (formerly www.icanhas cheezburger.com). The language dates from 2005, when users of the website 4chan began to post lolcats every Saturday, renaming the day as Caturday. Lolcats are pictures of cats with captions written in playful, idiosyncratic English, now known as Lolspeak or Kitty pidgin. The cheezland website is now part of the Cheezburger Network, thought to have a fan base of at least 24 million people. There is now even a Lolcat Bible.

Why do so many people find this way of communicating attractive? The users, who call themselves cheezpeeps, claim that it is simply ‘silly fun’. Ilaria Fiorentini, though, suggests that it is more than this: through Lolspeak, she says, people playfully manipulate their language to construct an online fantasy group community and an identity that is simultaneously both of a cat and themselves.

Fiorentini analysed 1067 comments (17, 195 words) on the icanhazcheezburger website. She argues that although there are Lolspeak glossaries to help people use and understand Lolspeak, many of the features depend on the creativity of its users.  Interestingly, the elaborate language that cheezpeeps are constructing is evolving through processes that are typical of ‘normal’ language change.

One such process involves regularizing English verb forms. Whereas standard English has a present tense –s suffix with third person subjects only, Lolspeak – like many English dialects – has the –s suffix with all subjects of the verb (e.g. we awl needs sumfing tu gib us teh comfort, ‘we all need something to give us comfort’). In Lolspeak the regularization process is generalised still further, so that the suffix also occurs with past tenses (ai jus hadz a baff, ‘I just had a bath’) modal verbs (yu cants be a nan teak, ‘you can’t be an antique’) and infinitives (awl ob dose, and mebbe sum ivys oar fernz tu puts aroun it, ‘all of those and maybe some ivies or ferns to put around it’.

Cheezpeeps also make irregular past tense verb forms more regular: examples are kommed in wi kommed home, ‘we came home’, and seed in I nebber seed a kitteh do wat dey otter, ‘I never saw a kitten do what they ought to’. Double marked past tenses also occur in the posts that Fiorentini analysed, like wented in hubcat and ai wented tu the grossree store today, ‘my husband and I went to the grocery store today’. As she points out, regularisation of this kind is a very frequent phenomenon, typically occurring when children acquire a first language and when we learn a second language.

‘Lexicalisation’ is another typical process of language change, where a phrase becomes used as a fixed word: a well-known example is the word goodbye, from the phrase God be with you. In Lolspeak, the phrase I think so has been lexicalised in this way into an adverb  meaning ‘I think’ or ‘in my opinion’ (aifinkso mebbe it fell behynde the shelfs, ‘I think maybe it fell behind the shelves’).

Examples such as dey lublublubs u foarebber, ‘they love you forever’ or too oar free daze ov sleepsleepsleep, ‘two or three days of sleep’ illustrate intensifying repetition; again, this is a well known process of language evolution, in this case a feature that is characteristic of pidgin languages.

Typical suffixes in Lolspeak are –mus for –ful or –ous (as in byootimus, above, or dangermus). Many suffixes extend the basic form: some examples are –ity, -full and –ify in obviousity, windowfull and insultify (e.g. she dint wanna insultify himz, ‘she didn’t want to insult him’. These forms, together with the deliberate misspelling seen in all the examples here, are typical of internet varieties more generally.  There are new words, too, like nawt sekkund, ‘first’ (kitteh needz tu reed the bukk nawt sekkund so hur can splain it to U layter, ‘kitten needs to read the book first so she can explain it to you later’).

What kind of people belong to the cheezpeeps community? We cannot be sure, since what users say about their identity is not necessarily truthful; nevertheless, it seems likely from their comments and the user profiles that most are women in their forties or older. They are also native or very fluent speakers of English (70% claimed to be from the USA, 10% from Australia, 7% from the UK and about 5% from Canada (with the rest from Europe, Saudi Arabia and Mexico). This is important: cheezpeeps may be enjoying themselves by playing with their language, but at the same time they are trying to impress their audience by demonstrating their high levels of linguistic skill. As Fiorentini points out, being able to play with language in this way, pushing it as far as possible whilst still being comprehensible, needs a high level of understanding of language.

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Fiorentini, Ilaria (2013) ‘Zomg? Dis iz a new language’: The case of Lolspeak. Newcastle Working Papers in Linguistics 19 (1): 90-108.

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/linguistics/assets/documents/5.Fiorentini_NWPL.pdf

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Do men show their emotions?

There is a pervasive gender stereotype that men don’t – or can’t – express their feelings. To what extent does the stereotype reflect reality, though?

Jonathan Charteris-Black and Clive Seale’s research claims to find as much evidence of variation in how men express their emotions as there is of men’s claimed deficiency in expressing them. They analysed 198 interviews asking men and women about their experiences of undergoing a life-threating illness. The sample was matched for age, social class, type of illness and the gender of the interviewer, and consisted of roughly the same number of words for men and women. The aim of the interviews was to provide publicly available information on a website about patients’ experiences of illness (http://www.healthtalkonline.org/).

The researchers found that, overall, men did talk about their feelings. They used a wide range of strategies to do so, perhaps because illness challenges a ‘masculine’ identity more than it challenges an equivalent ‘feminine’ identity. Some men indexed a conventional masculine identity through swearing, and in this way expressed their feelings directly. Swear words were about 8 times more frequent in the male interviews, expressing feelings such as frustration at physical pain (I was feeling pretty bloody at the time) or mental anguish (for example, a teenager with cancer said it was full of these bloody kids running around kicking footballs and I thought sod this I’m not … staying up here), or performing humour and irony. Women, by contrast, expressed their feelings directly through the use of negative adjectives such as frightened, awful or terrified.

Other men expressed their feelings indirectly rather than directly, for example by treating themselves as a serious problem to be examined from the outside, like fixing a leaking roof or a dripping tap. Words such as problem or difficult were far more frequent in the male interviews. The researchers argue that in this way men can conceal their intimate feelings and keep an emotional distance. They point out, though, that a masculine identity as a problem-solver becomes endangered if the problem cannot be fixed. The example in the box shows how one man who was unable to resolve his chronic pain communicated his frustration about what he presents as a major problem:

….. the enjoyable things that I used to do.. they’re way beyond my reach now. So I’ve really got to put them out of my mind and start afresh. And that was a major problem at the beginning with me. It took me two years, at least two years, to come to terms with that. … I must admit.. er ..I was getting angry with myself for not being able to do simple things.

On the other hand some men were no less prepared than women to express their feelings about being faced with particularly serious or debilitating illnesses: words such as emotional, vulnerable or lonely were used just as often by men as by women. The researchers suggest that many men with illness undergo a degree of identity transformation as illness forces them to discover more about themselves and accept their vulnerability. Some of the metaphors that men used, though, suggested their difficulties in expressing their feelings: they talked of their anger ‘boiling up’ inside them, or frustration ‘boiling over’, using the concept of a liquid under pressure within a container and implying therefore that their feelings should really be kept in, and under control.

Charteris-Black and Seale conclude that our cultural beliefs about how men should behave have not prepared some men well for illness. As a result they undergo tensions between their beliefs about a ‘masculine’ gender role and an experience that requires them to perform according to what they might perceive as a ‘feminine’ role. Other men, though, are experimenting with an identity in which frustration is replaced by self-knowledge and emotional understanding. Ultimately, they point out, an acknowledgement of feelings of powerlessness in the face of illness is something that is human, rather than being specifically male or female.

_________________________________________

Charteris-Black, Jonathan and Seale, Clive (2009) Men and emotion talk: Evidence from the experience of illness. Gender and Language 3: 81-113.

doi : 10.1558/genl.v3i1.81

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Switching languages = switching personalities?

Multilinguals often report feeling different depending on which language they are speaking.  Learning to operate in a second or foreign language seems to have the ability to affect the behaviour of the individual, suggesting that learning a new language is not just about learning words and grammar, but also about learning to behave in a completely new way.

Jean-Marc Dewaele and Seiji Nakano were keen to explore this idea. They questioned 106 multilingual students from Birkbeck College in London, who spoke a total of 56 different languages between them.  Dewaele and Nakano asked the participants to complete an online questionnaire comprising five questions about each of the different languages that they spoke:

1)    How logical do you feel in this language?

2)    How serious do you feel in this language/

3)    How emotional do you feel in this language?

4)    How fake (not yourself) do you feel in this language?

5)    How different do you feel in this language?

The participants were asked to respond on a scale of 1 = feel the same, to 5 = feel very different (if answering question number 5 for example).  These closed questions were followed up with more open questions building on their responses.

Overall, the participants reported feeling significantly less logical, less emotional and marginally less serious in languages that they had acquired later in life, whilst also feeling significantly more fake and different in these languages.  Results for questions 4 and 5 were interesting as they seemed to suggest that participants felt the greatest difference and ‘fakeness’ when moving between their first (L1) and second (L2) languages.  Although they felt just as different speaking L3 and L4 as they did speaking L2, the shift in feeling was no greater than moving from L1 to L2.  The researchers speculated that this may be due to the fact that L3 and L4 are used more infrequently and are not mastered well enough to experience such a difference when switching to them. 

It was interesting to see that most participants reported feeling more authentic, more logical, more emotional and more serious in languages that they had acquired earlier in life compared to those acquired later.  It seems that maybe multi-linguals feel more restricted in these later languages.  These findings correspond to a well-known phenomenon in acquiring a second language, which suggests that those learning and using a L2 are unable to vary their speech styles  between formal and informal as well as they are able to in their L1.  In fact, speakers tend to be ‘stuck’ in the middle of the formal-informal continuum in their L2, whilst they can function over its whole range in their L1.

The multilinguals in Dewaele and Nakano’s study also reported feeling more colourful, rich, poetic and emotional if they switched to using a language which they perceived to be more colourful, rich, poetic and emotional.  For example, one participant observed:

Speaking in my L1 is like being in my own skin – a completely natural and comfortable feeling.  Using my L2 is perhaps like wearing gorgeous clothes and evening make-up – a not completely natural state of affairs but one which allows me to shine and appear ‘beautiful’.

Many of the participants who reported feeling like this tended to also report a change in context when switching languages and it could be this change in context and environment which causes a change in feeling, rather than the actual switch in language itself.  In a community of bilinguals who often switch between their two languages these feelings of difference would be minimal as the context remains unchanged.   

In fact, this area appears to be very complex and the only things Dewaele and Nakano were able to establish for certain is that multi-linguals often feel different when switching between languages and that how they feel about operating in their different languages does depend on the age that the language was acquired.  However, they concluded that a lot of this difference remains unexplained and that this is possibly due to the fact that language is so bound up with various contextual and environmental factors.

______________________________________________

Dewaele, Jean-Marc and Nakano, Seiji (2012) Multilinguals’ perceptions of feeling different when switching languages. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 34: 107-120.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2012.712133

This summary was written by Gemma Stoyle

I don't know

                            

What does I don't know mean?

The most frequent three-word phrase in both British and American spoken English turns out to be I don’t know, according to corpus research.

Lynn E Grant’s work reveals why we use this little phrase so often.  It would be reasonable to expect it to indicate that the speaker can’t give the information they’ve been asked for, as in example (1) in the box. In fact, though, Grant’s analyses of the spoken component of the British National Corpus (BNC) and the New Zealand Wellington Corpus (WSC) finds that we use I don’t know more often as an ‘affective device’ to convey our feelings or as an ‘epistemic’ device to show how confident we are about the truth of what we are saying.

Example (2) shows its use as an affective device. Here I don’t know softens disagreement. It can also soften an assessment, as in (3). Grant points out that in both cases the phrase is a politeness marker, toning down a remark that could be seen as face threatening.

(1) speaker A:           how much is the subscription

     speaker B:           I don’t know, you’ll have to ask Mary
                                                                             (BNC)

(2) speaker A:           you don’t really need a big bathroom do you

     speaker B:           oh I dunno, if you see a big bathroom it’s nice
                                                                             (BNC)

(3) speaker A:           oh well maybe I could be more lenient

     speaker B:           oh doesn’t matter not for this year anyway                                      tut the balls are already in motion                            

     speaker A:           tut yeah I don’t know                                                                    
                                                                             (WSC)

In (4) I don’t know is an epistemic device, acting as a polite hedge to avoid commitment.

(4) speaker A:           so wha – what Andy’s done, and what other                                     people have done have pitted, picked out a few                               great examples, but I would say that erm
                              <pause> the majority are quite reasonable                                     comments, if, if perhaps a little bit simple at                                   times, I don't know 
                                                                               (BNC)

It can also downplay a compliment, as in (5). As Grant explains, English speakers can feel uncomfortable when they receive a compliment, and a common response is I don’t know.

(5) speaker A:           I mean you’ll find something I mean I I can’t                                    imagine YOU being unemployed it just won't                                    happen

     speaker B:           well I don’t know it’s going to happen in two                                  weeks time but I'll be calling it a holiday

     speaker A:           yeah but not yes well give yourself a holiday                                    for a month
                                                                              (WSC)                                                                                                  

The shortened form I dunno or simply dunno has the same pragmatic functions, though overall speakers mainly use it as a polite hedge, to show uncertainty.

Grant uncovers some interesting differences between speakers of New Zealand English and speakers of British English. New Zealanders use I don’t know more often to avoid disagreement and to avoid committing themselves to their answers. And although in both the British English corpus and the New Zealand corpus I don’t know often occurs with a discourse marker (especially oh, I mean, you know and well), for New Zealanders the discourse marker is more likely to be oh, whereas for British English speakers it is more likely to be well. The reasons remain a mystery.

Grant concludes that there are implications here for language learning and language teaching. Language learners use I don’t know less often than native speakers do, and when they do use the phrase, it is not for the same functions. Even advanced learners of English, she maintains, need to be specifically taught how we use chunks like I don’t know in spoken English, since the meanings they create in discourse are fundamental to successful human interaction.

_______________________________________________

Grant, Lynn E. (2010). A corpus comparison of the use of I don’t know by British and New Zealand speakers. Journal of Pragmatics 42: 2282-2296.

doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2010.01.004

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire