You have a very naughty salad

Questions? Tyler Schnoebelentylers at stanford

(Key to reading this deck now that it’s posted)

• Most of the content is in the notes field.• Check out Appendix A for logistics and follow-

up stuff that Lauren started the class off with• Appendix B has stuff we didn’t get to in class

but is probably useful for reviewing

Let’s get started with some non-gender categories

Animals of New Guinea

• Ralph Bulmer went and studied the Karam of New Guinea. They have a number of animal categories (think, “mammal”, “fish”, “bird”, “pet”, etc).

• Kobity• Yakt• Kayn• Kaj

Some yakts

The kobity is a category of its own

• It’s a strange beast– Lives wild in the forest– Walks on two legs (doesn’t fly)– It’s furry– Lays eggs– Has wings– Has a heavy skull– When hunted, its blood shouldn’t be shed

So a kobity is a yakt (bird), right?

The kobity is irritated now

Go ahead, try to tell me it’s a bird

• It’s just absurd• It can’t fly• It’s really heavy• It can kill children and dogs• It can’t be hunted with arrows• It’s our cross-cousin• “The more Bulmer probes, the more elements

are brought in by his informants that prevent the kobity from being a yakt.” (Latour 200)

From the prompt

• “When pressed on their choices, my respondents actually pushed back, citing more detail and finding more features that support their gender assignment.”

• Versus• “I asked WAY more than three people what gender my

objects were, because I wasn't getting any answers beyond, "I don't know," "Male, I guess -- I don't know why," and, "I don't know... I really don't know.“”

What to do instead

• You can learn a lot from perturbations– “The number of points linked, the strength and

length of the linkage, the nature of the obstacles” (201-202).

– In other words, examining a web of connections that join things together.

– By denying a claim or shaking an association, we can see how things are joined together, “what holds tightly and what gives way easily, what is negotiable and what is not.”

(Feel free to perturb this system)

How many genders are there?

Gender ≠ grammatical gender

Grammatical gender

• Imagine there were some nice morphemes (little wordlets) for marking gender in English, so that we would say:– Frank manwent to the store– Manbig Frank is always mangoing to the store– Louise ladywent to the store– Ladybig Louise, she’s always ladygoing to the store– Thelady table is ladybig– Theman chair is manpetite

From other languages

• French– Une petite boîte est arrivee de Paris (‘A small box

has come from Paris’)• Old English– Seo brade lind waes tilu and hire lufod (‘That

broad shield was good and I loved it/her’)• Zulu– umfana omkhulu (‘large boy’)– isihlahla esikhulu (‘large tree’)

Dyirbal groupings• Bayi: men, kangaroos, possums, bats, most snakes,

most fishes, some birds, most insects, the moon, storms, rainbows, boomerangs, some spears, etc.

• Balan: women, anything connected with water or fire, bandicoots, dogs, platypus, echidnae, some snakes, some fishes, most birds, fireflies, scorpions, crickets, the stars, shields, some spears, some trees, etc.

• Balam: all edible fruit and the plants that bear them, tubers, ferns, honey, cigarettes, wine, cake.

• Bala: parts of the body, meat, bees, wind, yam sticks, some spears, most trees, grass, mud, stones, noises, language, etc.

How many genders?

What’s the basis of the system?

Well, gender ~ grammatical gender?

‘Penguin’Dutch:Neuter

Greek:Masculine

Irish:Feminine

‘Wind’Dutch:Masculine

Greek:Masculine

Irish:Feminine

‘Happiness’Dutch: Neuter

Greek:Feminine

Irish:Feminine

Right. Gender ≠ grammatical gender.

‘Hammer’12 out of 13 Indo-European languages have ‘hammer’ in the masculine

Just chance? Not arbitrary?

Why?

• Hammers are active, mighty, associated with blacksmiths; all these things make them men

• Alternatively, the answer written in to The Washington Post when it asked people to assign genders to English nouns– “male, because it hasn’t evolved much over the

last 5,000 years, but it’s handy to have around”

Er…gender=grammatical gender, then?

How would you classify ‘pistol’/’gun’?

The awful German language

• (Can I get two volunteers?)• Gretchen: Wilhelm, where is the turnip?• Wilhelm: She has gone to the kitchen.• Gretchen: Where is the accomplished and

beautiful English maiden?• Wilhelm: It has gone to the opera.

Dude! Grammatical gender and gender—what’s the story?

The other W(h)orf

Where to look

• Colors

Where to look

• Colors• Time• Spatial orientation• Grammatical gender

Bugaboos in linguistic relativity• Are you only testing inside the language? • If you’re testing multiple languages, how do you

know the translation is really the same?– Use bilinguals and keep the test language consistent?

• If you’re judging thinking, can you rule out linguistic interference?– Have them count or something else while performing

the task?• What strategies are participants going to use to

answer your direct questions? – Can you be more covert?

This is Patrick.

Take-away

• Since the test was in English, “The semantic representation of gender (once it has been established) is not language specific” (Boroditsky et al 2007: 69).

• Why is this?– If ‘toaster’ is masculine, maybe you pull out ‘metallic’,

‘technological’; if it’s feminine, maybe you think ‘warmth’, ‘domesticity’, ‘nourishment’.

– Here’s a place where the construction of gender is going on!

Gimme some adjectives about bridgesGerman:

BeautifulElegantFragilePeacefulPrettySlender

SpanishBigDangerousLongStrongSturdyTowering

Now English speakers take those adjectives and say “+1=fem, -1=masc” (not knowing where the adjectives came from)

And there are real consequences

Avert your eyes!

The power of grammatical gender

• Tuma:Ta/Tama:Ta ‘tomato’ (fem.)• khya:r ‘cucumber’ (masc.)

Lak genders

• 1: Male rationals• 2: Female rationals• 3: Other animates (and some inanimates)• 4 Other stuff• Question: Where is duš (‘girl’, ‘daughter’)?• It’s in (3) instead of (2).

Change

• But this happened over time—as a sign of politeness for addressing young women (especially those earning their own living).

• All sorts of nouns for these young women have moved to (3).

• In fact, you should use (3) for any woman outside your immediate family.

• So (2) (the ‘feminine’) is restricted to ‘mother’ and ‘grandmother’. There aren’t many nouns left in it, actually.

Similar in Konkani (west coast of India)

And in southern dialects of Polish

Categories!• In Lak, Konkani, and some dialects of Polish

we’ve seen the ‘feminine’ gender subdivide• Young women/out-group women move to a

different category• What’s left in the feminine gender are the in-

family, married, older women• How do we interpret the division?– Are some women more female than others?– Is it about politeness?– Independence?– Sexual availability?

It’s just culture

Okay, then let’s learn Gumbuzi

• A made-up language; some words are soupative, other are part of the oosative gender

• Native English speakers have to learn 20 words– 4 males soupative– 4 females oosative– 12 inanimate objects (randomly assigned to the two

genders)

• Now gimme the adjectives!

Oh yeah? But you’re still using words

Let’s use pictures and block language

• Take Spanish and German natives, test them in English

• Ask them to assign similarities between pictures• But make them say randomly generated letter

strings at the same time so they aren’t secretly whispering the gender of the things they’re comparing

• Do this again with the folks who learned Gumbuzi

Maybe gender is just special

Meaning making by categorization!

Some other items

• Objects seem to each be associated with gender in their own way– A large pan is more feminine than a small pan– A large hammer is more masculine than a small

hammer– (Recursivity!)

Here’s Boroditsky’s take-away

• More than just a quirk• Spanish and German speakers are doing

different things– Even in English– With unlabeled pictures– While doing a verbal suppression task

How?

• Deliberately looking for similarities between things in the same category– And finding them– Which is to say, constructing them

The French don’t know French

A problematic baseline

• 56 native French speakers (14 adults, 42 teens)

• 93 masculine words– Uniform agreement on 17

• 50 feminine words– Uniform agreement on 1

Adult (n=14) Teenagers (n=42) Significance (p)

Victime‘victim, casualty’

71.4% 42.9% .008

Équivoque‘ambiguity, misunderstanding’

64.3% 97.6% .032

Superbe‘arrogance’

64.3% 23.8% .003

Oasis‘oasis’

50.0% 16.7% .014

Primeur (avoir la primeur de l'information)‘to be the first to know’

42.9% 2.4% .001

Ties that bind (differently for different people/different languages)

• We want to know “whether the habits that people acquire in thinking for speaking a particular language will manifest themselves in their thinking even when they are not planning speech in that language” (Boroditsky et al 2007: 62)

• Habits! Naturalization! Ideology!

Will Boroditsky et al get taken up as part of the “the hall of mirrors”?

(Discuss!)

The crucial part of hall of mirrors

• Selective attention to results that confirm male-female difference

• Including non-significant results• And ignoring results that don’t confirm

stereotypes

If gender is a construction…is it real?

God’s impact on humans

God’s impact on humans

Questions?

Appendix A

Logistics

• Extra Credit: Experimental Participation, but not watching films!

• Online Blogs: Min 300 words, Max 350 words (this week & following posts don’t require this, but you may want to revise old posts if they don’t cut it!)

Uptalk

• Has anyone noticed it more since last Thursday?

• Have you noticed if your perceptions of it vary depending on the speaker?

Answering Unanswered Qs

• Minor keys as “masculine” & “feminine”– Composers in the Classical Period– The Sonata Principle • to strive for balance between two musical themes• “masculine” key was to always appear first, aligned

with the narration; “feminine” key was the later counterpoint, aligned with the opposing characters• e.g., Wagner’s operas

Answering Unanswered Qs

Published by U of Minnesota Press, 2002

Answering Unanswered Qs

• Indirect Indexicality vs. Iconization & Iconicity

– Iconization is a process; Iconicity is a feature

• Iconicity: when the properties of a sign convey something about the properties of the object

• Iconization: “The creation of an apparently natural connection between a linguistic variety and the speakers who use it” (E&McG: p277)

Answering Unanswered Qs

• Indirect Indexicality vs. Iconization & Iconicity

– Think of iconization as a potential end product, or a most extreme example, of indirect indexicality

– The reading for Thursday (E&McG, Chapter 8) will address this again, in a new context (esp. p.293)

Important Readings

• Thursday: E&McG, Chapter 8• Section: “Peasant Men Can’t Get Wives”

• (Besides the April 2nd lecture) This is your intro to Variationist Sociolinguistics

• IPA reference: http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/chapter1.html

Your Call

Your call for more current examples of good research in language & gender…

… is what this part of the quarter is all about!

TODAY: Gender, Grammar, & Thought

Appendix B

Putting it together

• We’re problematizing the gender binary• But we wouldn’t want to deny its importance

Discussion!

• How should we study gender?• How should we study things when we think

gender might play a role (but in which gender isn’t the main focus)?

• What does it mean to “go beyond gender”?

Some ideas• Looking for male/female difference is okay if you are careful

about interpreting results (consider alternate possibilities)

– Split your data between boys and girls, but try other stuff like teacher’s pet/non-teacher’s pet

– See what the structure is within the boy/girl division (we’ve alluded to this with Eckert’s study of burned-out burnout girls; sports jocks vs. corporate jocks)• This will get you thinking about recursivity and how binaries are constructed

– Lab methods are good, but you also need ethnographic methods• These allow more nuances to emerge.• In other words: use multiple methodologies to get at your research question

– Again, the key is not to take any of our categories/assumptions for granted. If we question those, we stand a pretty good chance of not being part of the problem.