Date of Award
Spring 5-2-2019
Document Type
Honors Project
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
English, Linguistics, and Communication
Department Chair or Program Director
Richards, Gary
First Advisor
Lee, Janie
Major or Concentration
English
Abstract
Features of women’s speech are typically characterized by excessive politeness and submission in the forms of hedges, fillers, indirect requests, or tag questions. Additionally, women are statistically far less likely to commit interruptions, more likely to commit retrievals, and more likely to use intensifiers, excessive adjectives, and HRT. These features combine to depict women in a negative light. Traditionally, sociolinguistics has examined the ways in which women are stigmatized and how our patriarchal society has conditioned us to view women as vapid, uncertain, unintelligent, and annoying for using these features. For this thesis, I wanted to examine the ways in which one of my most significant linguistic influences, my mother, subverts these expectations of women’s speech in order to assert her social dominance and power. My mother uses joint production, gap times, turn-taking, and strategic interruptions to thwart misogynistic generalizations surrounding the way that women are expected to communicate. Instead of using features of women’s or men’s speech, she redefines gendered linguistic norms to create a new method of oral communication that is free from sexist judgement.
Recommended Citation
Skinner, Mary, "Subverting Gendered Language Expectations: A Look at My Mother" (2019). Student Research Submissions. 294.
https://scholar.umw.edu/student_research/294