Language and Gender:

Within language and gender, this is the study of the forms and functions of talk, in which we investigate when studying men and women speak. In particular, we examine further by looking at conversational styles, historical and contemporary changes, how language is used by each gender in terms of the context, the list goes on. 

Many theorists have studied such questions, and as a result there has been a number of theory's attempting to find answers, such as:

DEFICIT THEORY - Robin Lakoff

Robin Lakoff, in 1975, published an influential account of women's language. In a related article, Woman's language, she published a set of basic assumptions about what marks out the language of women. Among these are claims that women:

• Hedge: using phrases like “sort of”, “kind of”, “it seems like”, and so on.
• Use (super)polite forms: “Would you mind...”,“I'd appreciate it if...”, “...if you don't mind”.
• Use tag questions: “You're going to dinner, aren't you?”
• Speak in italics: intonational emphasis equal to underlining words - so, very, quite.
• Use empty adjectives: divine, lovely, adorable, and so on
• Use hyper correct grammar and pronunciation: English prestige grammar and clear enunciation.
• Use direct quotation: men paraphrase more often.
• Have a special lexicon: women use more words for things like colours, men for sports.
• Use question intonation in declarative statements: women make declarative statements into questions by raising the pitch of their voice at the end of a statement, expressing uncertainty. For example, “What school do you attend? Eton College?”

Lakoff further pointed out that women tend to

•  Speak less than men, 
• Use fewer expletives - expletive ɪkˈspliːtɪv,ɛk-/ noun - an oath or swear word.
• and use more intensifiers, such as 'so' and very'

She further argued that these features of women's language reflected women's inferior social status, and made it worse by making them seem somewhat indecisive and needy. In conclusion of her findings, she claimed that women's language is weak and compared to men’s language, and therefore this prevents women from being taken seriously.

DOMINANCE THEORY - Zimmerman and West.

This is the theory that within mixed sex conversations, (according to Z+W) men are more likely to interrupt conversations and tend to speak out within conversations, and as a result of this, theorists resulted in naming this as females being the subordinate participant, due to the patriarchal actions going on within mixed-sex conversations. This is evident as they found that almost 96% of interruptions were made by men, this then suggested that men are much more dominant in male-female conversations. they argued that this reflects male dominance in society.

DIFFERENCE THEORY: DEBORAH TANNEN:

Tannen described male and female conversational style in terms of difference.

She has summarised her findings and as a result came up with specific terms that have been paired, which describes a male and a female. For example:

• STATUS VS SUPPORT

Men grow up in a world in which conversation is competitive - they seek to achieve the upper hand or to prevent others from dominating them. For women, however, talking is often a way to gain confirmation and support for their ideas. Men see the world as a place where people try to gain status and keep it. Women see the world as “a network of connections seeking support and consensus, as well as being more cooperative.

• Independence vs intimacy

Women often think in terms of closeness and support, and struggle to preserve intimacy. Men, concerned with status, tend to focus more on independence. These traits can lead women and men to starkly different views of the same situation

• Advice vs understanding

Tannen claims that women tend to show more understanding by compromising, and offering support rather than solutions, in order to seem more gentle, whereas with men, they may want to be seen as 'knowledgeable' and 'powerful' therefore they tend to give more advice to others and show their status, rather than being more 'inferior' and asking for support, according to tannen.

Conflict vs compromise:

This shows that since men tend to be more 'vocal' they may find solutions to problems by involving conflict in order to show their masculinity, whereas women may tend to find a more calmer, humble solutions by compromising and finding agreements and solutions in a peaceful manner.

Horizon - Notes.

Within the human brain, we use thousands of thought decisions, which is seen as a more unique ability. Accoring to partiuclar expers, language and our way of communicating defines us as humans, as we are the only ones who have the ability to do such incredible interactions, since we have a variety of different ways to interact to each other. When we communicate, particularly to babies and younger children, they comprehend and listen to the sequence of noises that we give to them, and during the process of this, their cognitive development begins to articulate, in a slightly more understanable way and reply back to our message, through the intonation of our voices.


INTONATION
      ɪntəˈneɪʃ(ə)n (noun)

''the rise and fall of the voice in speaking.''


In terms of communication, speech and language distinguishes us from each other, this tends to make us different, as each and every human have sophisticated skills. If a grown adult had attempted to learn a new language, this is particularly difficult in adults despite the fact that we learn in a natural process, however, within children, they acquire such advanced language skills with minimal effort, and being explicitly told.  According to Lennenberg, a critical acquisition period is a maturational time period during which some crucial experience will have its peak effect on development and learning, for example, Genie.

However to other experts, the answer to knowing how to speak is still currently unknown.

DEB ROY - Cognitive Scientist.
Deb Roy has created the Speech home project, which he designed in order to seek better understanding of how children learn the meaning of words through analysis of observational recordings of child-caregiver interactions in natural contexts.
As a result, our understanding of language acquisition hinges on surprisingly sparse and incomplete data. Motivated by this basic problem, Roy has begun a pilot project in which he is recording his son's development at home by gathering approximately 10 hours of high fidelity audio and video on a daily basis from birth to age three.

Roy then discovered different types of stages followed by the speech of children.

The first stage is from babbling to use single words
And the second stage is the two word stage.

Parents simplify their speech and converge towards child’s language, therefore they begin to speak and intonate their voices in the way children may do, in order to encourage them to interact further, as their phonological outcomes outstrips their semantic awareness.
 By the time a child reaches the age of 5, they will then be able to understand at least one thousand words, and mainly use determiners in order to get attention to certain nouns, such as 'that desk over there'

All of these noun naming, as well as using determiners is slowly pointing towards being born with the mechanics to speak and interact with others.

NOAM CHOMSKY 
Noam Chomsky believes that children are born with an inherited ability to learn any human language. He claims that certain linguistic structures which children use so accurately must be already imprinted on the child’s mind. Chomsky believes that every child has a ‘language acquisition device’ or LAD which encodes the major principles of a language and its grammatical structures into the child’s brain. Children have then only to learn new vocabulary and apply the syntactic structures from the LAD to form sentences.

AQA Link - http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/english/as-and-a-level/english-language-b-2705 

This AQA Website includes a wide range of sections which is highly useful to me as well as my academic studies, as it includes useful past papers that I can work on throughout the year and enhance my exam skills gradually, as well as the examiner reports, which are additionally a source which helped me throughout my AS course, in terms of what I need to achieve to fulfil a particular grade, and since A2 examiner reports are on there too, it will help me throughout the way to achieve the grade I desire. In addition, this link also includes further information to students on the type of skills gained when they choose this course, this includes skills such as developing knowledge on key concepts and theories, using the Audience, Purpose and Form in a more advanced manner, and realising how the context, APR and cultural values impact on the language chosen within a text. These skills are ones that I have developed within my AS year of English language, and in terms of A2, it includes information about the coursework I will have to produce within this year. The coursework element, according to AQA is ‘very popular’ as students investigate an area of their choice that particularly fascinates them and independently allows them to independently collect and evaluate data.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/may/08/singing-children-development-language-skills

Here's an interesting article about how experts say that children may be able to develop their language acquisition skills if they were sang to much more often. According to consultants, singing traditional lullabies and nursery rhymes to babies and infants are a major benefit towards their intellectual development, rather than attempting to speak ordinary words. Personally, I found this fascinating because I have always thought that singing would have a somewhat emotional impact to a child, due to the melodies, tone and pitch of a song, rather than an intellectual impact to babies and infants. According to Blythe, a song is a special type of speech. For example, lullabies, songs, and rhymes of every culture carry the ‘signature melodies’ and inflections of a mother tongue, preparing a child’s ear, voice, and brain for language.

Analysis - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4GjPlR6BAE

For my analysis, I have chosen my own clip, which is the video of a little boy attempting to say 'Peanut Butter' and a variety of other words. What particularly amused me with this clip is that the pronunciation of the particular words were different to what other toddlers may say, through the use of non-standard grammar 'bettus' rather than stating the full completion of the word 'peanut butter'. This could perhaps indicate that the child may have been using such amusing language in order to entertain. Because it is posted on well-known sites, such as YouTube, as well as being easily acceptable, we can see there that the audience is for not just little children, but for a multi-audience. For example, adults who may be interested in baby pronunciation may find this amusing, as well as teenagers who could perhaps find this sort of entertainment hilarious, which thus gives the purpose away, in which is predominantly is to entertain groups of individuals who could perhaps have been ‘surfing the web’ and suddenly came across this particular clip.

Since it is a child attempting to speak particular words, this video would highly suit its audience as because, contextually, the use of pauses, fillers, and false starts such as ‘Buutus-butus (.) honey’ as well as the paralinguistic features such as the laughter and smiles this could highly appeal to a wide range of groups and would suddenly realise that the child may not have the ability to fluently pronounce 'Peanut butter' and instead states the noun 'Honey' in order to perhaps try and gain laughter from others within the room. The use of the multiple interrogatives 'You want me to do it? you want me to fix it?' suggests a sense of reassurance upon the child, therefore in terms of theory, this can show some elements of Language and power through the use of repetition, for instance, as the child demanded his mother to fix it, the mother immediately gave in and allowed herself to feel inferior due to the child's age.

Second Transcript of my choice.
This transcript is a choice of my own, a little boy is attempting to say a variety of words, and i chose this one in particular because this clip gives me a variety of things to discuss about as well as being amusing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4GjPlR6BAE 

(.) - Brief pause
 (1.0) longer pause ↑  A Rising intonation
 ↓  A Falling intonation.
 (3) a slightly longer pause
//Overlap
|| Unidentified noise & information
A: //Overlap (with B) (Mutters)
B:Maybe we can glue it.
A:No!  ↑
B: Ya think we can fix it? (1.0)
A:Yeah  ↓(voice slightly breaks)
B:With Glue
A:         // Yeah
B: Let's ask mum and see if she can do it
A: (Background voices overlap) //
                       y-you do it!
YOU DO IT!  ↑
C: You want me to do it? (,) want me to fix it?
A: yeah (.)
C: Can you say glue?
A: goo-g (.)
C: Glue?
A: y-yes (.)
|| Background chatter
A: gluu (.)
C: Can you say Horse Shoes?
A: Horse (.) shoes (.) 
C: wow! (.) that was really good!
(2.0) Can you say itsy bitsy spider?
A: (non-fluent response) itsy(mumbles)
C: can you say Peanut butter?
A: Pitchy (2.0) Butter
C: Can you say peanut butter and honey?
A: buttus(.)honey(.)butt(2) Honey..
              [Both laugh and smile together]

Transcript of a Little Girl describing star wars.

(.) - Brief pause
 (1.0) longer pause ↑  A Rising intonation
 ↓  A Falling intonation.
 (3) a slightly longer pause

Well (1.0) Well (2.0) Ok (.) The sound people capture robots (.) and drive ↑  (.) and (.) and sell 'em (2.0) in a garage sale (.) its like a garage sale (.) except you're selling robots ↓ (2.0) and nobodys gonna buy R2 and the sindy guy ↑ the sindy guy always worries. Lukes gonna guy loads (.) and obi kanobis is a teaser ↑ hes (.) teasing (.) Luke. how to (.) l-learn how to do his little light up sword (.) hes gonna try and block the little pokey ball (.) he tried to to do it (.) without seen. Obi Kanobi sometimes moves things around (.) sometimes he disappears. Princess leya got outta jail and on this basip (.) and they got (1.0)  the big thing that blown up (mutters) we blown it up together (1.0) it blown up princess leyas planet! But don't talk back to Darth Fader ↑  or he'll get ya! it's an exciting movie! (.) 

Group Task - Our Hero Text

In our group, we have chosen to discuss a text that contains two different texts which both contrast, in terms in gender. For example, one text we discussed had contained persuasion, by influencing 'strong' men to donate blood. What we found highly interesting within this is that the text is indirectly implying that, women are not as strong? And this is evident by the title containing 'weakened' which, pragmatically is directing women to be somewhat weak. Whereas the other contrasting text is mainly aimed at women as well as using the conventions of a movie poster.

One of the most interesting things we discussed in our group is the type of audience that the text is trying to appeal to. In the first text, the title immediately captivated us and allowed us to generalise and as a result we came to a conclusion that the first text was aimed at mainly males because of the title, which had been ''Strong men help those who are weakened''. The use of 'weakened' also intrigued us, as we were all discussing that the text may imply that those who are potentially weakened are 'female' and may be dependent on men to 'come to the rescue' and treat them. What also intrigued us is the particular 'entry requirements' that are needed to access the blood donation. For example, one requirement was that they had to be 'male' and 'strong' therefore this clearly gives away that the text targets men and portrays men having masculinity and strength and ability. 
Initially, for the other text our group thought that the text was mainly aimed at men too due to the conventions of a film poster, which allowed the man to feel like he was the 'hero' and trying to 'get her back' and this further implies that, if he can get 1/3rd off his railcard, he can 'get' her back too? this almost makes the woman feel like an object, according to our discussion in class.

We also found that there were a couple of theories that linked closely to certain aspects of this text, such as the gender theory, as well as the power theory. within the first text, our group discussed that the text was slightly influential due to its direct address, persuading to give blood, this will further allow the reader to 'give in' and try to prove their 'masculinity' therefore the use of 'strength' will help reinforce this. In terms of gender, is also evident, for example, the use of 'strong' will help the reader define their status, therefore the pairings 'Status vs Support by Tannen is significant in this text, and in terms of support, it is almost seen that the women who are possibly portrayed as 'weakened' are those who are in need of support, so the man therefore needs to show this strength and build his status.