Book contents
- Gender in World Englishes
- Studies in English Language
- Gender in World Englishes
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Localisation, Globalisation and Gender in Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Ghanaian English
- Chapter 3 Sociolinguistic Variation in Intensifier Usage in Indian and British English
- Chapter 4 Tag Questions and Gender in Indian English
- Chapter 5 Hedges and Gender in the Inner and Expanding Circle
- Chapter 6 The Role of Gender in Postcolonial Syntactic Choice-Making
- Chapter 7 Social Constraints on Syntactic Variation
- Chapter 8 Linguistic Colloquialisation, Democratisation and Gender in Asian Englishes
- Chapter 9 Gender, Writing and Editing in South African Englishes
- Index
- References
Chapter 3 - Sociolinguistic Variation in Intensifier Usage in Indian and British English
Gender and Language in the Inner and Outer Circle
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2020
By
Edited by
Book contents
- Gender in World Englishes
- Studies in English Language
- Gender in World Englishes
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Localisation, Globalisation and Gender in Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Ghanaian English
- Chapter 3 Sociolinguistic Variation in Intensifier Usage in Indian and British English
- Chapter 4 Tag Questions and Gender in Indian English
- Chapter 5 Hedges and Gender in the Inner and Expanding Circle
- Chapter 6 The Role of Gender in Postcolonial Syntactic Choice-Making
- Chapter 7 Social Constraints on Syntactic Variation
- Chapter 8 Linguistic Colloquialisation, Democratisation and Gender in Asian Englishes
- Chapter 9 Gender, Writing and Editing in South African Englishes
- Index
- References
Summary
Research on gender differences in language use previously focused mainly on affluent, especially Western societies. The present chapter extends this research to acrolectal Indian English, a postcolonial variety of English, investigating how the use of intensifiers (e.g. very, really) is affected not only by the speakers’ gender, but also their age, the gender of the other speakers in the conversation and the formality of the context. Results show some parallels with Western varieties of English, in particular a tendency for women to use more intensifiers than men in informal contexts. However, Indian women modify their usage of intensifiers with respect to the formality of the context more than British women and men, while Indian men do so less than British women and men. In mixed-sex conversations, Indian women also converge with Indian men in their intensifier usage, while neither British women nor men do so. The more flexible use of intensifiers by Indian women may be a response to societal expectations regarding their linguistic behaviour, in order to avoid censure by society. British women likewise continue to be affected by such constraints, but much less so, while the linguistic behaviour of Indian and British men is subject to less criticism.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Gender in World Englishes , pp. 47 - 68Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021
References
Andersen, Gisle. 2001. Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to the Language of Adolescents. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Barbieri, Federica. 2007. ‘Older men and younger women: a corpus-based study of quotative use in American English’, English World-Wide 28(1): 23–45.Google Scholar
Barbieri, Federica. 2008. ‘Patterns of age-based linguistic variation in American English’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(1): 58–88.Google Scholar
Barrett, Rusty. 1998. ‘Markedness and styleswitching in performances by African American drag queens’. In Myers-Scotton, Carol, ed. Codes and Consequences: Choosing Linguistic Varieties. Oxford University Press, 131–61.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan and Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Bradac, James J., Mulac, Anthony and Thompson, Sandra A. 1995. ‘Men’s and women’s use of intensifiers and hedges in problem-solving interaction: molar and molecular analyses’, Research on Language and Social Interaction 28(2): 93–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brescoll, Victoria L. 2011. ‘Who takes the floor and why: gender, power, and volubility in organizations’, Administrative Science Quarterly 56(4): 622–41.Google Scholar
Brescoll, Victoria L. 2016. ‘Leading with their hearts? How gender stereotypes of emotion lead to biased evaluations of female leaders’, The Leadership Quarterly 27(3): 415–28.Google Scholar
Cameron, Deborah. 2006. ‘Theorising the female voice in public contexts’. In Baxter, Judith, ed. Speaking Out: The Female Voice in Public Contexts. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 3–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dube, Leela. 1988. ‘On the construction of gender: Hindu girls in patrilineal India’, Economic and Political Weekly: WS11–WS19.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope and McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 1999. ‘New generalizations and explanations in language and gender research’, Language in Society 28(2): 185–201.Google Scholar
Fahs, Breanne. 2011. ‘Dreaded “Otherness”: heteronormative patrolling in women’s body hair rebellions’, Gender and Society 25(4): 451–72.Google Scholar
Ferrara, Kathleen and Bell, Barbara. 1995. ‘Sociolinguistic variation and discourse function of constructed dialogue introducers: the case of be + like’, American Speech 70(3): 265–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fuchs, Robert. 2017. ‘Do women (still) use more intensifiers than men?’, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22(3): 345–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fuchs, Robert and Gut, Ulrike. 2016. ‘Register variation in intensifier usage across Asian Englishes’. In Pichler, Heike, ed. Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change: Insights from English: New Methods and Insights. Cambridge University Press, 185–210.Google Scholar
Gray, John. 1992. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting what you Want in your Relationships. New York, NY: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Griffin, Penny. 2007. ‘Sexing the economy in a neo-liberal world order: neo-liberal discourse and the (re)production of heteronormative heterosexuality’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 9(2): 220–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Günther, Ulrike. 2003. What’s in a Laugh? Humour, Jokes and Laughter in the Conversational Subcorpus of the BNC (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany. Retrieved from www.freidok.uni-freiburg.de/volltexte/735/.Google Scholar
Hancock, Adrienne B., Stutts, Holly W. and Bass, Annie. 2015. ‘Perceptions of gender and femininity based on language: implications for transgender communication therapy’, Language and Speech 58(3): 315–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hansen, Beke. 2017. ‘The ICE metadata and the study of Hong Kong English’, World Englishes 36(3): 471–86.Google Scholar
Hansen, Beke. 2018. Corpus Linguistics and Sociolinguistics: A Study of Variation and Change in the Modal Systems of World Englishes. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Hebert, Luciana E., Bansal, Suchi, Lee, Soo Y., Yan, Shirley, Akinola, Motolani, Rhyne, Márquez, Menendez, Alicia and Gilliam, Melissa. 2019. ‘Understanding young women’s experiences of gender inequality in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh through story circles’, International Journal of Adolescence and Youth 25(1): 1–11.Google Scholar
Holmes, Janet. 2000. ‘Women at work: analysing women’s talk at New Zealand workplaces’, Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 22(2): 1–17.Google Scholar
Holmes, Janet, Vine, Bernadette and Johnson, Gary. 1998. The Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English: A Users’ Guide. Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington.Google Scholar
Ito, Rika and Tagliamonte, Sali. 2003. ‘Well weird, right dodgy, very strange, really cool: layering and recycling in English intensifiers’, Language in Society 32(2): 257–79.Google Scholar
Jespersen, Otto. 1922. Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin. London: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Katiyar, Shiv P. 2016. ‘Gender disparity in literacy in India’, Social Change 46(1): 46–69.Google Scholar
Korobov, Neill. 2005. ‘Ironizing masculinity: how adolescent boys negotiate hetero-normative dilemmas in conversational interaction’, The Journal of Men’s Studies 13(2): 225–46.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change, Vol. 2: External Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Maltz, Daniel N. and Borker, Ruth A. 1982. ‘A cultural approach to male-female miscommunication’. In Gumpertz, John J., ed. Language and Social Identity. Cambridge University Press, 196–216.Google Scholar
McEnery, Anthony and Xiao, Richard Z. 2004. ‘Swearing in modern British English: the case of fuck in the BNC’, Language and Literature 13(3): 235–68.Google Scholar
Mills, Sara. 2006. ‘Gender and performance anxiety at academic conferences’. In Baxter, Judith, ed. Speaking Out: The Female Voice in Public Contexts. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 61–80.Google Scholar
Mills, Sara. 2011. ‘Communities of practice and politeness’. In Davies, Bethan L., Haugh, Michael and Merrison, Andrew, eds. Situated Politeness. London: Continuum, 73–87.Google Scholar
Mulac, Anthony, Bradac, James J. and Gibbons, Pamela. 2001. ‘Empirical support for the gender‐as‐culture hypothesis’, Human Communication Research 27(1): 121–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pugh, Tison and Wallace, David L. 2006. ‘Heteronormative heroism and queering the school story in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter Series’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 31(3): 260–81.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey and Svartvik, , Jan. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Rayson, Paul, Leech, Geoffrey and Hodges, Mary. 1997. ‘Social differentiation in the use of English vocabulary: some analyses of the conversational component of the British National Corpus’, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 2(1): 133–52.Google Scholar
Röndahl, Gerd, Bruhner, Elisabeth and Lindhe, Jenny. 2009. ‘Heteronormative communication with lesbian families in antenatal care, childbirth and postnatal care’, Journal of Advanced Nursing 65(11): 2337–44.Google Scholar
Rühlemann, Christoph. 2007. Conversation in Context: A Corpus-Driven Approach. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Rühlemann, Christoph. 2010. ‘Conversational grammar – feminine grammar? A sociopragmatic corpus study’, Journal of English Linguistics 38(1): 56–87.Google Scholar
Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2003. ‘Do women and men really live in different cultures? Evidence from the BNC’. In Wilson, Andrew, Rayson, Paul and McEnery, Tony, eds. Corpora by the lune: A Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 185–221.Google Scholar
Schweinberger, Martin. 2014. The Discourse Marker LIKE: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Selected Varieties of English (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.Google Scholar
Stenström, Anna-Brita. 1999. ‘He was really gormless – She’s bloody crap: girls, boys and intensifiers’. In Hasselgård, Hilde and Oksefjell, Signe, eds. Out of Corpora. Studies in Honour of Stig Johansson. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 69–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stenström, Anna-Brita, Andersen, Gisle and Hasund, Ingrid K. 2002. Trends in Teenage Talk: Corpus Compilation, Analysis and Findings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shastri, S. V. 2002. Overview of the Indian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-India). Distributed with the Indian section of the International Corpus of English.Google Scholar
Singler, John V. 2001. ‘Why you can’t do a VARBRUL study of quotatives and what such a study can show us’, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 7(3): 258–78.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali and Roberts, Chris. 2005. ‘So weird; so cool; so innovative: the use of intensifiers in the television series Friends’, American Speech 80(3): 280–300.Google Scholar
Valentine, Tamara M. 1985. ‘Cross‐sex conversation in Indian English fiction’, World Englishes 4(3): 319–32.Google Scholar
Valentine, Tamara M. 1986. ‘Language and power: cross-sex communicative strategies in Hindi and Indian English’, Economic and Political Weekly: WS75–WS87.Google Scholar
Valentine, Tamara M. 2008. ‘Language and gender’. In Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru and S. Sridhar, N., eds. Language in South Asia. Cambridge University Press, 429–49.Google Scholar
Wallis, Sean A., Nelson, Gerald and Aarts, Bas. 2006. ICE-GB: The British Component of the International Corpus of English [Software].Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth. 2015. ‘Gender and language: cultural concerns’. In Wright, James D., ed. International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition. Oxford: Elsevier, 698–703.Google Scholar
Xiao, Richard Z. 2009. ‘Multidimensional analysis and the study of world Englishes’, World Englishes 28(4): 421–50.Google Scholar
Xiao, Richard Z. and Tao, Hongyin. 2007. ‘A corpus-based sociolinguistic study of amplifiers in British English’, Sociolinguistic Studies 1(2): 241–73.Google Scholar
- 1
- Cited by