The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Carol A. Chapelle
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role in that society. These examples inform us again of the importance of seeing gender in interaction with a specific community practice. Indirectness, then, according to Tannen (1994, p. 34), can be used either by the powerful or by the powerless; the interpretation of a given utterance, and the likely response to it, depends on the setting, on an individual's status, and on the relationship of individuals to each other, as well as on the linguistic conventions that are ritualized in the cultural context.
We will end this section with an example of men adopting women's language for strategic purposes. As Holmes (1992, p. 317) observes, researchers recorded the speech of witnesses in a law court and found that male witnesses used more women's language features than women witnesses with more expertise in court or a higher occupational status. The following example illustrates this.
Lawyer: And you saw, you observed what?
Witness C: Well, after I heard—I can't really, I can't definitely state whether the brakes or the lights came first, but I rotated my head slightly to the right, and looked directly behind Mr. Z, and I saw reflections of lights, and uh, very very instantaneously after that I heard a very, very loud explosion—from my standpoint of view it would have been an implosion because everything was forced outward like this, like a grenade thrown into the room. And uh, it was, it was terrifically loud.
In this exchange, the male witness used “women's” language—hedges and boosters—in his account of what happened. Sex (i.e., being a man or a woman) was not a determining factor for this kind of gendered language use. Instead, it was used to enact the “powerless” role of the witness (who is not a woman in this case) in his interaction with the lawyer or in his recounting of what had happened, and may even have other pragmatic effects, such as avoiding accountability or responsibilities and thus expecting leniency or acquittal.
To conclude, gender is a complex social concept embedded in our biological wiring and socialization, as well as in mundane and professional interactions with others. Language can either reflect and reinforce a conventional gendered relationship or subvert stereotypical gendered images, as we see in the sweet talk performed by both men and women in high‐tech phone sex industries in San Francisco, or in men's adoption of women's language for courtroom interactions for strategic purposes.
SEE ALSO: Analysis of Dialogue; Language and Identity
References
1 Brownell, S., & Wasserstrom, J. (Eds.). (2002). Chinese femininities, Chinese masculinities: A reader. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2 Bucholtz, M. (2009). Gender, interaction, and indexicality in Mexican immigrant youth slang. In A. Jaffe (Ed.), Stance: A sociolinguistic perspective (pp. 146–70). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
3 Cameron, D., & Kulick, D. (2003). Language and sexuality. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
4 Eckert, P., & McConnell, S. (1992). Think practically and look locally: Language and gender as community practice. Annual Review of Anthropology, 21, 461–90.
5 Eckert, P., & McConnell, S. (Eds.). (2003). Language and gender. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
6 Gal, S. (1991). Between speech and silence: The problematics of research on language and gender. In M. di Leonardo (Ed.), Gender at the crossroads of knowledge: Feminist anthropology in the postmodern era (pp. 175–203). Berkeley: University of California Press.
7 Hall, K., & Bucholtz, M. (Eds.). (1995). Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self. London, England: Routledge.
8 Holmes, J. (1992). An introduction to sociolinguistics. London, England: Longman.
9 Jaffe, A. (2009). Introduction: The sociolinguistics of stance. In A. Jaffe (Ed.), Stance: A sociolinguistic perspective (pp. 3–25). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
10 Keenan, E. (1974). Norm makers, norm breakers: Uses of speech by men and women in Malagasy community. In R. Brauman & J. Sherzer (Eds.), Explorations in the ethnography of speaking (pp. 125–44). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
11 Lakoff, R. (1990). Talking power: The politics of language. New York, NY: Basic Books.
12 Newman, M. L., Groom, C. J., Handelman, L. D., & Peenebaker, J. W. (2008). Gender differences in language use: An analysis of 14,000 text samples. Discourse Processes, 45, 211–36.
13 Tannen, D. (1990). You just don't understand: Women and men in conversation. New York, NY: William Morrow.
14 Tannen, D. (1994). Gender and discourse. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Suggested Readings
1 Baron, B., & Kotthoff, H. (Eds.). (2001). Gender in interaction: Perspectives on femininity and masculinity in ethnography and discourse. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
2 Charteris‐Black, J. (2012). Shattering the bell jar: Metaphor, gender, and depression. Metaphor and Symbol, 27(3), 199–216.
3 Coates, J. (2004). Women, men, and language: A sociolinguistic account of gender differences in language. Harlow, England: Longman.
4 Crawford, M. (1995). Talking difference: On gender and language. London, England: Sage.
5 Duranti, A., & Goodwin, C. (Eds.). (1992). Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
6 Kiesling, S. (2004). Dude. American Speech, 79(3), 281–305.
7 Li, J. (2014). A sociolinguistic study of language and gender in Desperate Housewives. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 4(1), 52–7.
8 McConnell‐Ginet, S. (2011). Gender, sexuality, and meaning: Linguistic practice and politics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
9 Mendoza‐Denton, N. (2008). Homegirls: Language and cultural practice among Latina youth gangs. Malden, MA: Wiley‐Blackwell.
10 Sauntson, H. (2012). Approaches to gender and spoken classroom discourse. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
11 Sunderland, J. (2006). Language and gender: An advanced resource book. Abingdon, England: Routledge.
12 Wierzbicka, A. (2002). Sexism in grammar: The semantics of gender in Australian English. Anthropological Linguistics, 44(2), 143–77.
Anthropological Linguistics
WILLIAM A. FOLEY
Anthropological linguistics is the subfield of linguistics (and anthropology) concerned with the place of language in its wider social and cultural context, its role in forging and sustaining cultural practices and social structures. While Duranti (2001) denies that a true field of anthropological linguistics exists, preferring the term linguistic anthropology to cover this subfield, this author regards the two terms as interchangeable. With some cogency, Duranti (2001) argues that, due to current concerns of mainstream linguistics with the explicit analysis of the formal structures of language in contrast to anthropology's broader approach of looking at how humans make meaning through semiotic systems in cultural practices, this subfield is properly included within anthropology rather than linguistics. However, this author begs to differ, believing that the current historical divisions of academic turf are just that—historical and contingent—and subject to change, and would be loath to institutionalize such divisions by insisting on rigidly labeled compartments. The current disciplinary concerns of linguistics do not reflect its earlier history, in which it was firmly enjoined to anthropology (Boas, 1940; Sapir, 1949; Haas, 1977). It is hoped that, over time, this more inclusive view will reassert itself, and hence the preference is to use both terms to cover this subfield, although, as titled, the label anthropological linguistics will be used in this entry. For excellent and up‐to‐date coverage of the very wide range of topics dealt with under anthropological linguistics, see Enfield, Kockelman, and Sidnell (2014).
Anthropological linguistics needs