230581 Language and Gender (S) (SoSe 2008)

The use of English varies in many different ways, as is well known, and one of the ways in which does so has to do with the gender of the speaker. A person's sex is, of course, biologically given, but the ways in which the closely related sociolinguistic category of gender affects language use is by no means equally fixed. It can influence a wide variety of behavior, verbal and nonverbal, such as topics of conversation, styles of talk, pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary choice, and much else as well. Yet despite wide areas of differentiation along the lines of the sex of the user, in English all these differences are relative. That is, what we find are not absolute (or: "sex-differential") differences, but quantitative tendencies for males/females to give particular forms their preference ("sex-preferential" differences).

In this class we will look at the following areas: language, both as it is used to make reference to males and females and how it is differently employed by males as opposed to females. This will include the often dissimilar behavior of men and women in conversational interaction as well as male-female differences in nonverbal behavior.

Students will be offered a series of projects which they can carry out individually or in small groups and whose results they can present to the class as a whole. There will be a final exam.

There will be a reserved reading shelf with a selection of useful and relevant literature.