Search

This review article addresses the correlation between gender and speaking performance in language learning, focusing on various factors influencing learning outcomes. By analyzing internal and external factors, including gender, the article highlights the complex interplay between personal attributes and environmental conditions in shaping speaking abilities. Additionally, the review discusses the implications for educators in creating inclusive learning environments and adapting teaching approaches to accommodate gender differences. The results underscore the significance of comprehending gender dynamics to improve language skills and support fair educational methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Everyday observations seem to indicate an increase in gender-inclusive language (GIL) in Germany; however, previous research on the prevalence of GIL suggests that it is a marginal phenomenon. Moreover, from a theoretical side, an increase in GIL seems unlikely because of the cognitive challenge language change holds, the existence of multiple GIL variants, and the antagonistic environment that Germany poses for language change. This study empirically measures the use of GIL in five media sources in Germany. Over four million articles from 2000 to 2021 are analysed using the IDS Deutscher Referenzkorpus (DeReKo), supplemented by an in-depth analysis of 500 newspaper articles scraped in 2021. A fine-grained analysis along the dimensions of political orientation of the outlet, type of GIL, and author's gender is conducted. In addition to observing an unexpectedly rapid increase in GIL, two different trends are identified: whilst non-binary inclusive forms of GIL are increasingly used in the left-leaning newspaper, GIL that adheres to a binary notion of gender is favoured in the mainstream and right-leaning media. This sheds light on how difficult behavioural change can occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates speech production under various room acoustic conditions in virtual environments, by comparing vocal behavior and the subjective experience of speaking in four real rooms and their audio-visual virtual replicas. Sex differences were explored. Males and females (N = 13) adjusted their voice levels similarly to room acoustic changes in the real rooms, but only males did so in the virtual rooms. Females, however, rated the visual virtual environment as more realistic compared to males. This suggests a discrepancy between sexes regarding the experience of realism in a virtual environment and changes in objective behavioral measures such as voice level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the trends and processes of feminization and gender-neutralization in English and Polish, discussing how the social and cultural aspects of life influence language development. The study highlights the emergence of gender-fair language and the neutralization trend in Western non-Slavic cultures and languages, exploring the use of feminitives or corresponding masculine forms in specific textual contexts. It is shown that Slavic languages have focused more on the gender-fair, gender-distinctive track for vocabulary. The paper analyzes the usage of feminine and masculine nouns and adjectives in English and Polish, and compares the grammatical gender dimensions between the two languages to specify the ways language structures contribute to gendered representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Linguistika: Buletin Ilmiah Program Magister Linguistik Universitas Udayana is the property of Program Studi Magister Linguistik Program Pascasarjana Universitas Udayana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The observation that gender differences in Japanese language use are becoming less prevalent as women increasingly use 'men's language' appears in popular media from time to time. Some empirical studies support this view. However, such observations are usually based on the consideration of only one or two linguistic features, especially sentence‐final forms and personal pronouns. In contrast, this study analyzes the use of multiple linguistic and paralinguistic features related to gender, regarding them as resources for styling identity. According to our analysis of eight same‐gender and mixed‐gender dyadic conversations of college students, these speakers' use of features other than sentence‐final forms, which we found to vary little by gender, is normatively gendered to a large extent. The study thus demonstrates that the analysis of multiple and multilevel variables enables us to better understand the complex process of styling through the speaker's negotiation of linguistic gender norms in actual practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing studies have described the diachronic development of modals in early periods, or their uses in more recent times. Works with a synchronic orientation have examined modals in contemporary English, and sociolinguistic variation linked to age. There are no studies that investigate gender variation and change of modals in contemporary spoken British English. The present research is a corpus-based investigation that aims to fill this gap and to describe the use of the central modals can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would in the years 1994 and 2014, and gender-based differences/similarities. The analysis has been undertaken on the spoken section of the BNC1994 and the Spoken BNC2014. The analysis reveals that there are limited differences between men and women and ongoing innovation in the years 1994 and 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the differences between males’ and females’ speech among Algerians. It focuses on the vocabulary items used by both genders. It is an attempt to see whether differences of this kind have an influence on the speech styles of men and women and to see how these differences develop and spread in a society. The research tries to analyse the impact of differences at the level of vocabulary on gendered behaviour in the society. The results obtained revealed that each gender uses a language vocabulary in his own way. Males and females in Algerian society use different linguistic forms and vocabulary items when they speak about the same thing. Furthermore, they have different speech styles. For example; they talk about different topics; while females talk about emotions and feelings and use prestigious language, males avoid talking about their feelingsand use simple Algerian dialectal Arabic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, I propose that the commentary on Virgil by the grammarian Servius shows us how gender agreement was approached in school texts or school contexts. In focusing on the actual process of Latin composition, his approach differs from the usual one found in ancient Roman grammatical writings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Etnolingual is the property of Universitas Airlangga and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Emotional words are assumed to have a processing advantage over neutral words due to their emotional content. Meanwhile, this advantage depends on other word features such as frequency and the characteristics of the processor and context of learning. Accordingly, the current study investigated the simultaneous impacts of L2 words‟ emotional valence and frequency, and L2 user‟s gender on word recognition time in a natural reading context. 43 intermediate EFL learners read 36 sentences in a coherent text for comprehension while their eye movements were recorded by eye -tracker. The findings revealed that participants processed the positive, negative, and neutral words identically based on eye fixation time. However, the frequency effect was attained for both valenced and neutral words. Also, no significant gender differences were approved in terms of recognition time though male participants tended to process all word types slightly faster than female ones. The lack of processing difference between valenced and neutral words is attributed to the disembodiment of L2 emotional words and learning experience of the participants as late EFL learners. These learners have been deprived of affective socialization and the affective sensory experience in their development of L2 emotional words. The absence of valence/frequency interaction is attributed to the L1/L2 relationship in terms of the target words. Although witnessed gender effect did not reach a significance level, it is suggested that the processing of emotional words be viewed in a multidimensional framework where the characteristics of the word, the processor, and the learning context are taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most interesting issues in the study of language is the relation between language and gender. A lot of studies have been conducted so far to find out if men speak and write differently from women. The present study is also an attempt in the same area but it considers gender differences in love poetry. It aims to find out the differences between male and female poets in their love poems. The data of the study consists of three male love poems, and three female poems. Leech and Short's (1981) checklist is used as a framework to analyze the selected love poems. The findings of the study reveal that there are differences between male and female poets with regard to lexical categories, grammatical categories and figures of speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we address gender differences in the host language proficiency of humanitarian migrants. Prior research has produced inconclusive results with regard to women's host language proficiency relative to that of men: sometimes women's proficiency exceeds that of men, sometimes women lag behind men, and sometimes there are no substantial differences. Using data on recent humanitarian migrants in Germany, we investigate factors contributing to similarities and differences in men's and women's language proficiency. We consider gender differences with respect to the family-related factors: marital status, children's ages and children's childcare situations are important for women but not for men. These findings point to the continued relevance of a gendered division of work. It also becomes clear that gendered role expectations are particularly consequential for mothers and wives. Moreover, we find evidence that women are more efficient learners than men are, while they have fewer learning opportunities than men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study endeavors to investigate the learning of the comprehension of semantic interpretation of metaphor in the expository writing by EFL learners at Albalqa Applied University, Jordan. Moreover, the study attempts to see the role of mother tongue influences in the learning and comprehension of semantic interpretation of metaphor in expository writing by Jordanian EFL learners. Thereafter, the collected data on the semantic interpretation of metaphor are analyzed by using SPSS (22.0), One-Way ANOVA, and Mann-Whitney U test. The results indicate that: (1) the learners have good learning and comprehension of semantic interpretation of metaphor in the expository writing by EFL learners at Albalqa Applied University (mean = 3.25). (2) There is no significant difference between the male and female learners in their learning and comprehension of semantic interpretation of metaphor in the expository writing by EFL learners (P. = .057). (3) There is an agreement on using learning and comprehension of semantic interpretation of metaphor in the expository writing (M = 2.96). Finally, it was found that learners’ mother tongue (i.e., Arabic) has a negative effect in the course of learning and comprehension of semantic interpretation of metaphor in the expository writing by the Jordanian EFL learners at Albalqa Applied University as most of the errors were attributed to learners’ mother tongue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This investigation explored the voice onset time (VOT) values of word-initial bilabial stops/p/and/b/as realized by Arabic-speaking male and female Saudi ESL learners. It sought to identify the differences, if any, between these two groups with regard to this acoustic measure (i.e., VOT). The VOT measurements were then compared with those of native English speakers to test the contrastive analysis (CA) hypothesis. The VOTs were measured from the recordings of the 20 participants (10 females and 10 males). This study used the Praat speech analysis software to measure VOT values. The results revealed a statistically significant difference between male and female participants in their VOT values for/b/. For the VOT values of/p/, no statistical difference was found in the results. Further, an increase was detected in the male participants' VOTs for/b/compared with those of native English speakers. The remainder of the results were relatively in line with the VOT values of native English speakers; namely, both males and females acquired the voiceless phoneme/p/despite the lack of this phoneme in their native language (Arabic). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aims to find out types and functions of speech fillers used by politician interviewees. It also investigates gender and nativeness differences in the use of SFS among participants. The data of this study come from eight extracted episodes taken from the corpus of conflict zone (CZ) talk show. The data have been analyzed and classified based on the theories proposed by Stenstrom (1994) and Rose (1998). A qualitative analysis has been followed in dealing with functions of SFs. A quantitative analysis is also applied in the course of counting frequencies and percentages of SFs. The results show that time is required for planning, especially when difficult topics are discussed. Results show that all participants used all types of SFs with unlexicalized SFs being used more frequently. In terms of functions of SFs, Female participants used all functions of SFs based on the theory of Stenstrom. They are breathing, filling pause, hesitation mark, starter, shift marker, empathizing, mitigating, editing term, time creating device, holding the turn and sequencer, while the male groups used all functions except shift marker. Breathing is the dominating function of SFs used by all participants with vast distinction with other functions. In contrast, shift marker has the least used function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the words that 265 pre-university (12th grade) English as a foreign language learners produce in response to the prompt 'Food and drink'. Specifically, it aims to (i) ascertain the number of cultural words this sample of learners retrieved overall and in their first responses to the abovementioned word stimulus; (ii) classify the culture these terms represent, i.e., source, target and international, and (iii) account for sex-based differences in cultural word elicitation. Our findings evince that the number of cultural tokens corresponded to one fourth of the total number of the words students retrieved in response to the aforementioned prompt. These tokens mostly belonged to international culture. As for sex-based differences, our data revealed that males obtained higher mean values and retrieved a higher rate of cultural types in their first responses than females did. However, differences between male and female learners in regard with cultural word elicitation were not statistically significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Language Problems & Language Planning is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Language is one of the most important factors affecting the formation of perceptions, thoughts and behaviors about gender in society. In China, studies on the relationship between gender and language began after the 1980s. The Chinese language, which evolved from pictograms, does not have any prefixes or suffixes indicating gender. However, even though Chinese grammatically does not seem like a sexist language, this does not mean that Chinese is a language that does not demonstrate gender discrimination or classification. Gender discrimination can be reflected in the language in different ways. This article will attempt to answer the question: "How is the inferior position of Chinese women in society reflected in language?" To answer this question, gender discrimination in the Chinese language will be evaluated in terms of Chinese word formation, idioms, proverbs, word order and the third-person singular pronoun. With this objective in mind, this research refers to a Chinese dictionary and uses recent findings about this issue to source the words relating to gender, specifically women. Before analyzing the examples in the Chinese language, it will be beneficial to give a brief background on what kind of language Chinese is. Then, some examples of gender related words, especially consisting of the character? (nu-woman, female), pronouns, proverbs and idioms will be given and examinedز [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigated the effects of English study using smartphone applications (apps) on the speaking performance and perception of EFL university students concerning gender difference. Forty-seven students participated and were required to practice English outside of the classroom using apps for a 10-week period. All participants took pre and post narrative speaking tests based on a series of eight pictures and answered a questionnaire. The findings of the study are as follows. First, there was no significant difference between the male and female students in speaking performance in the post-test. However, statistically significant differences were found between the pre- and post-tests in both groups. Second, the participants responded positively that the practice using an app was interesting and helpful for decreasing anxiety toward English with no significant gender difference. Finally, the students chose an app, 'Cake', as the most preferred one as it included a variety of useful English expressions regularly on various topics. Most participants replied positively about using the apps as a means for speaking practice due to accessibility. The findings suggested that smartphone apps could be useful to provide opportunities for both male and female university students to practice English in an EFL context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tetun Dili is an Austronesian language and one of the two official languages in Timor-Leste, alongside Portuguese with which it has been in contact for centuries. In this detailed study, we describe various aspects of gender in Tetun Dili, in both native and borrowed vocabulary. We identify marked differences between gender marking in native and borrowed Portuguese words, with Tetun prioritizing the feminine, and Portuguese the masculine. We show that through contact with Portuguese, Tetun Dili has also developed "marginal" gender, with grammatical gender agreement being optional but increasingly common for Portuguese loans, mainly in the acrolect. Grammatical agreement is also spreading to a handful of non-Portuguese words, to which there is evidence of incipient grammatical gender assignment. Some comparisons are made with developments in Chamorro and Tagalog, two Austronesian languages heavily influenced by Spanish (closely related to Portuguese), for which gender contact effects have previously been described in some detail. We conclude with a set of more general typological observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas Standard Dutch only distinguishes between two adnominal grammatical genders, substandard varieties of Belgian Dutch distinguish between three such genders. German, too, distinguishes between three genders. Nevertheless, when assigning gender to German nouns with Dutch cognates, speakers of Belgian Dutch are strongly influenced by Standard Dutch gender but to a much lesser degree (if at all) by substandard gender. On the hypothesis that a lack of metalinguistic knowledge about L1 substandard gender decreases its use as a source for transfer, I experimentally manipulated the metalinguistic knowledge about L1 substandard gender of 45 speakers of substandard Belgian Dutch varieties. I then assessed how strongly this manipulation affected the participants' reliance on substandard gender distinctions when they assigned gender to L2 German nouns with Dutch cognates. Results confirm the strong influence of Standard Dutch, hint at a weak influence of substandard Dutch, and show no appreciable effect of the experimental manipulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate cross-linguistic lexical and syntactic influences in grammatical gender in early bilingualism, we tested 12 simultaneous, 12 early successive bilingual Russian-German children, and 15 monolingual German children aged 8-9 years. An elicited production task in German shows that all bilingual children assign target gender to nouns, irrespective of whether nouns belong to the same (gender-congruent) or different gender class in German and Russian. In visual-world eye tracking, we tested whether children use gender marking on German articles or adjectives to anticipate upcoming nouns. Like monolingual children, simultaneous bilingual children made predictive use of gender irrespective of gender congruency. In contrast, the successive bilingual children showed predictive gender processing only for lexically congruent nouns. We argue that the asynchronous acquisition of the L2 in successive bilinguals implicates that L2 gender is first accessed through the L1 lexicon. In contrast, syntactic differences between Russian and German gender do not affect early bilingual processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Suvremena Lingvistika is the property of Suvremena Lingvistika and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Suvremena Lingvistika is the property of Suvremena Lingvistika and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The focus of this article is Faroese children’s early vocabulary acquisition using a Faroese adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MBCDI) parental report. The study is a population-based cross-sectional study including 1135 children aged 8–36 months. The article has two objectives: the first is to describe the Faroese adaptation of the MBCDI, and the second is to examine Faroese children’s early vocabulary acquisition. Selected percentile levels for vocabulary comprehension and production are presented, as well as gender differences and developmental trends. The study finds evidence for a spurt in productive vocabulary in the second year of life, and that vocabulary comprehension preceded production, with both showing increases with age similar to those described in the literature for other languages. Girls had an advantage in vocabulary production over boys, resulting in a significant gender difference. Finally, the early lexical composition of Faroese children is notable in that it contains a substantial number of baby-word forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tocharian had a large number of demonstrative pronouns and determiners, whose basic element derives from the Proto-Indo-European genderdifferentiated pronoun *so (masc.), *seh2 (fem.), *tod (nt.) 'this, that'. This article is chiefly concerned with the diachronic evolution of the endings and forms of these demonstratives, paying particular attention to the inflection of the feminine and the subsequent evolution of the category of gender. I argue that the feminine plural paradigm of both Tocharian A and B can be derived directly from Proto-Indo-European, with further analogical adjustments within Tocharian B. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of a larger study, whose main objective is to postulate the existence of intonation differences between linguistic regions of Chile in the issuance of subordinate clauses substantive objective, this work exposes a characterization of three types of pauses (silence, elongations and vacillations) found inside the sentence structures listed above, issued by professional speakers from Iquique and Punta Arenas. The main purpose of the study was to determine the existence of differences in the types of pauses observed in relation to the sentence complexity analyzed, the gender of the informants and their geographical origin. For this, a total of 100 statements taken from interviews of 37 professionals (men and women) born in both cities were analyzed. The results indicated that there were differences in the observed pauses, in relation to the types of sentences analyzed, the geographic origin and gender of the informants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among various linguistic and extralinguistic factors which may affect speech tempo, the gender of the speaker has received considerable attention. In a number of publications it has been reported that women tend to read at a slower rate than men. However, other studies cast doubt on these findings and the issue needs further investigation. This paper attempts to compare the reading rate of male and female speakers of English on the basis of selected chapters from audiobooks. The recordings analysed are considerably longer than the samples used in previous research. The rate of speech has been measured using phonemes per second, syllables per second and words per second. The results consistently indicate that gender does not affect reading tempo. They are directly applicable in text-tospeech (TTS) software development and may be useful in other disciplines, such as forensic linguistics, clinical linguistics or education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examined gender gap in Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) Reading and mediators of the gender gap in a Finnish sample (n = 1,309). We examined whether the gender gap in PISA Reading performance can be understood via the effects of reading fluency, achievement behaviour (mastery orientation and task‐avoidant behaviour) or the amount of time spent with leisure reading and homework. Girls outperformed boys in all measures except for achievement behaviour. The models explaining PISA Reading were not different: For boys and girls, reading fluency, mastery orientation, leisure book reading and homework explained the variance in PISA Reading scores. The gender effect on PISA Reading was, however, for the most part mediated by differences in reading fluency. These findings suggest that while mastery orientation, homework activity and leisure book reading are concurrent predictors of PISA Reading over and above reading fluency, they do not explain gender difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the treatment of lexical items related to gender inIsichazamazwi sesiNdebele(ISN;a monolingual Ndebele dictionary). Lemmata that carry gender sensitive overtones and what they reveal about Ndebele society are examined. Information for this article was gathered through an analysis ofISNlemmata and paraphrases of meaning of gender lexical items, as well as through questionnaires administered toISNusers, namely Ndebele teachers, Ordinary level and Advanced level Ndebele students, Bachelor of Arts students in Ndebele from tertiary institutions and Ndebele language lecturers. In the paraphrase of meaning of gender lexical items such asiwule, isifebe, impumangingene(which all mean prostitute), these terms associate anti-social behaviour with females, while exonerating their male counterparts. It is argued that, apart from novels, proverbs and folktales, the dictionary can also provide insight into societal values and attitudes from a gender perspective. Although a dictionary is supposed to be neutral and objective, its terms may reflect the ideology of the definer. The study suggests ways of improving paraphrases of meaning for lexical items relating to gender. The researcher recommends that lexicographers should use both the corpus and intuition in selecting lemmata. All this should be done in order to produce acceptably functional and objective dictionaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work explores the order of linguistic references to the two genders (e.g., men and women vs. women and men). It argues that a gender is more likely to be mentioned first when it is perceived to have higher relevance in a context rather than lower relevance, and audiences assign stronger relevance to a party when the party is mentioned first rather than second. Studies 1-3 document the current prevalence of male-first conjoined phrases in the public (but not family) domain and link the pattern to historical changes in women’s public presence over the 20th century. Study 4 shows that contextual relevance cues affect the odds of first mention, such that people are more likely to refer to a woman before a man, when the two are in a primary school classroom rather than a corporate office. At the same time, Studies 4 and 5 find that people often choose to reproduce collectively preferred word order patterns (e.g., men and women). Studies 6 and 7 show that these choices matter because people assign more relevance to a party when it comes first rather than second in a conjoined phrase. Overall, this work offers theoretical grounding and empirical evidence for word order as a means of expressing and perpetuating gender stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings together the study of sociolinguistic variation and the area of grammatical analysis by investigating demonstrative cleft constructions in spoken British English such as That's what I wanted to talk about and This is where I saw him. Using the Spoken BNC2014S, I ask whether speaker characteristics, including gender, age, education and occupation, might be correlated with the use of demonstrative clefts and with various aspects of their structure (preference for the distal or proximal demonstrative pronoun, use of negative polarity, and use of stance adverbs). Findings suggest that in British English, demonstrative cleft use is more likely to be present in the speech of male compared to female speakers, working adults in higher-skilled occupations compared to semi-skilled adults, and in adults of middle age compared to younger adults. This work shows that even highly abstract grammatical constructions can be sensitive to speaker preferences and linguistic communicative style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late twentieth century, the usage of intensifiers, such as absolutely, very or slightly, has been investigated in relation to gender. Whereas previous literature has widely agreed that women and men do indeed use intensifiers differently, there has been some disagreement as to which gender uses them more frequently. Taking up this discussion, this study explores authentic data provided in the Spoken BNC2014S by investigating 39 intensifiers. After establishing the ten most frequently used intensifiers by women and men, these are subcategorized and investigated for gender and age effects. The results generally support earlier findings, however, they also illustrate that there is much interindividual variation and variation regarding individual intensifiers and that there are fascinating interactions with other variables such as age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how age, gender, social class and dialect influence how frequently speakers of British English use intensifiers (e.g. very) in private conversations and whether this has changed over the last two decades. With data drawn from over 600 speakers and 4M words included in the Spoken British National Corpus (1994 and 2014 Sample), it is the most comprehensive study of intensifier usage to date, taking into account 111 intensifier variants. Results show that, in most age groups and social classes, men use intensifiers less frequently than women, and gender differences have diminished to a very limited extent, notably for the middle class. Moreover, intensification rate has increased across the board over time. This could be due to a shift towards a stereotypically more feminine communicative style as the perception of gender roles has changed, a process by which the middle class might have been particularly affected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to find out whether there is a gender based difference between male and female native speakers of Turkish in using intensive adverbs in Turkish. To achieve this, 182 voluntary native speakers of Turkish (89 female/93 male) with age ranging from 18 to 22 were asked to complete a photo description task. The task required choosing one of the statements in Turkish to describe twenty photos taken from International Affective Picture System (IAPS-Lang, Bradley & Cuthbert, 2008). Each set of statements were nominal affirmative sentences and they included a description of the photo with a normal adjective and another one re-written to include an intensive adverb to modify the adjective in the previous statement. Results revealed no statistically significant difference between male and female participants in total. Yet, female participants used intensive adverbs more for certain photos. Discussion of the results and suggestions for future research are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the importance of gender differences in the voice, sociolinguists have not paid sufficient attention to the sociolinguistic processes through which phonetic resources are mobilized in the construction of a gendered voice. This article argues that gender differences in the voice—including those influenced by physiology—are best understood as elements of sociolinguistic style rather than static properties. With a focus on transgender speakers in the early stages of masculinizing hormone therapy, the analysis demonstrates the complex interrelationship of the gendered meanings attributable to characteristics like fundamental frequency and /s/. Trans speakers challenge systems for categorizing voices as female or male, which assume that different aspects of the gendered voice will pattern together in normative ways. Yet a voice's gender is not a unidimensional feature, but a cluster of features that take on meaning only in context with one another, leaving them open for recombination and change through stylistic bricolage. (Transgender, style, gender, voice, pitch, sibilants) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose: We investigated cross-linguistic differences in fundamental frequency range (FFR) in Welsh-English bilingual speech. This is the first study that reports gender-specific behavior in switching FFRs across languages in bilingual speech. Method: FFR was conceptualized as a behavioral pattern using measures of span (range of fundamental frequency—in semitones—covered by the speaker's voice) and level (overall height of fundamental frequency maxima, minima, and means of speaker's voice) in each language. Results: FFR measures were taken from recordings of 30 Welsh-English bilinguals (14 women and 16 men), who read 70 semantically matched sentences, 35 in each language. Comparisons were made within speakers across languages, separately in male and female speech. Language background and language use information was elicited for qualitative analysis of extralinguistic factors that might affect the FFR. Conclusions: Cross-linguistic differences in FFR were found to be consistent across female bilinguals but random across male bilinguals. Most female bilinguals showed distinct FFRs for each language. Most male bilinguals, however, were found not to change their FFR when switching languages. Those who did change used different strategies than women when differentiating FFRs between languages. Detected cross-linguistic differences in FFR can be explained by sociocultural factors. Therefore, sociolinguistic factors are to be taken into account in any further study of language-specific pitch setting and cross-linguistic differences in FFR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of standard language varieties on rural dialects is an important factor involved in dialect loss, which is widespread in Europe. In this study, we look at how the three-gender system in the Jämtlandic dialect of Sweden is changing under pressure from the two-gender system of Standard Swedish. The Jämtlandic dialect is an understudied Swedish dialect and an interesting object of study, in part because of the social and economic changes that have occurred over the past century. We performed a survey using profiled stimuli to elicit indefinite articles, definite articles and anaphoric pronouns for 36 target nouns. An analysis was conducted on the traditionalness of gender agreement in the material. We consider linguistic features (traditional gender and type of agreement), as well as sociological features (age, gender, education, geographical location, socioeconomic status, and language attitudes). The results show that most participants maintain the traditional three-gender system to a large degree. Age is the most significant predictor of traditionalness. While the youngest participants show the highest variability in gender assignment, they still retain the three-gender system to some degree. In addition, participants to whom the dialect is very important tend to use more traditional agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This note tries to assess the syntactic locus of grammatical Gender in the nominal structure with evidence mainly drawn from Spanish. Data from ellipsis resolution and its licensing in a variety of contexts, and for different types of syntactic objects, suggest the conjecture that noun classifying devices, such as grammatical Gender, may constitute the inflectional correlate of hierarchically organized, and possibly universal, nominality descriptors. Such descriptors would be coded in the structural space that, under different theoretical proposals, has been labelled as 'lexical phase', 'first phase' or 'little-n' space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a feminist literary analysis of the representation of shame in Dominique Botha’sValsrivierand it demonstrates how shame manifests itself in the spaces where gender, sexuality, race and class intersect. The study of shame offers myriad analytical possibilities and these have largely been left unexplored in scholarly engagements with Botha’s critically acclaimed text. By focusing on the embodied experiences of shame of the character of Dominique and those of a number of other, often peripheral, characters, I contend that the politics of shame are as crucial to understanding these women’s lived realities as those of race and class. Because of its very nature, a number of challenges crop up when one attempts to broach the topic of shame, not least of which is the fact that it makes people extremely uncomfortable. I argue that it is crucial that feminist critics move beyond the desire to turn away so that we can turn the scholarly gaze on shame in order to expose it to analysis. This article has entered into this uncomfortable and challenging conversation by considering how selected female literary characters experience shame at the intersections of gender, race, sexuality and class. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nominal classification remains a fascinating topic but in order to make further progress we need greater clarity of definition and analysis. Taking a Canonical Typology approach, we use canonical gender as an ideal against which we can measure the actual gender systems we find in the languages of the world. Building on previous work on canonical morphosyntactic features, particularly on how they intersect with canonical parts of speech, we establish the distinctiveness of gender, reflected in the Canonical Gender Principle: In a canonical gender system, each noun has a single gender value. We develop three criteria associated with this principle, which together ensure that canonically a noun has exactly one gender value; we give examples of non-canonicity for each criterion, thus gradually building the typology. This is the essential groundwork for a comprehensive typology of nominal classification: the Canonical Typological approach allows us to tease apart clusterings of properties and to characterize individual properties with respect to a canonical ideal, rather than requiring us to treat the entire system as belonging to a single type. This approach is designed to facilitate comparisons of different noun classification systems across languages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses a kind of ellipsis in Cayuga (Northern Iroquoian) known as stripping. We show that while person, number and gender feature mismatches are generally tolerated in this construction, gender mismatches are not tolerated with most predicate nouns referring to humans. Merchant (2014) discusses gender mismatches under ellipsis in Greek human nominals and proposes that certain human nouns are lexically encoded to presuppose the gender of their respective referents. We show that Merchant's general proposal can be accommodated to the Cayuga facts, the specifics of his proposal cannot be carried over. We reject the lexicalist stance in Merchant's proposal and instead propose that human noun roots in Cayuga carry an interpretable humanness feature [H], which is obligatorily valued for gender. It is this interpretable [H] feature that gives rise to the lack of tolerance for gender mismatches on human predicate nouns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Language & Linguistics Studies is the property of Journal of Language & Linguistics Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)