Connected speech is defined here as any speech in units larger than single words, including phenomena that happen at word boundaries even in careful speech, as well as phenomena of spontaneous or conversational speech. The former includes abstract phonological processes that are triggered by word boundaries (e.g. insertion of /r/ in some English dialects, as in Australia[ɹ] is) but that are accompanied by sub-phonemic, phonetic effects. The latter topic covers acoustic characteristics and perception of connected speech, regardless of word boundaries. For example, the vowel space appears to shrink in more connected and/or spontaneous speech, phonemically voiced stop consonants are often reduced to approximants, and segmental deletions and reduction in the number of syllables are common. It is often difficult to believe the extent of the reduction that one finds in spontaneous speech, and even when listening to recordings, one frequently fails to notice the reductions until one zooms in and examines individual syllables. Providing an array of examples (audio available online) may help to demonstrate the pervasiveness of reduction in connected speech.

This chapter starts by giving a theoretical definition of gender and its relation to language. It gives the rationale for the focus of the book on women politicians and a critical overview of work in the field of gender and language research investigating language and gender in the professional workplace. It also critically reviews linguistic research into political discourse and the much smaller body of work relating to gender, language and politics. In doing so it highlights the originality of the book’s focus on gender and the interactional details of political discourse in political institutions. The chapter also explains relevant theories and empirical research on women’s representation in politics from the discipline of political science. It describes research into the descriptive and substantive representation; examines current re-evaluations of the ‘critical mass’ theory; and examines the ‘different voice’ ideology relating to expectations about gender and communicative styles. It concludes by citing calls from political scientists for additional methods from a wider range of disciplines with which to measure women’s substantive representation and describes the overall structure of the book.