Lakoff 1975: Women use; hedges + fillers; tag questions; apologetic requests, indirect requests, speak less; use fewer expletives, more intensifiers. She argued that these features of speech make women seem more inferior, weak and needy and prevents women from being taken seriously.
My Hypothesis:
- Women’s rights speeches written by females shortly before a
significant change in a women’s right movement will contain less of Lackoff’s
deficit features than those written/delivered at a period of no change.
I will collect *famous feminist speeches, throughout a
period of time in which women were fighting for equality i.e. the suffragette
movement in the late 19th and early 20th century. I will carry out a longitudinal study,
comparing and contrasting speeches throughout the movement, how the language in
those towards the end differs from those at the beginning. I thought that I
would compare speeches at different times as Lackoff argued that women cannot
be taken seriously when using this ‘deficit’ language, so perhaps I will find
that speeches toward the *end will contain more ‘masculine’ language.
I will create a corpus of data and then possibly use
systematic sampling to choose a random sample; i.e. giving each speech a number
and then generating numbers on a computer. However, if there are not many
significant speeches then I would have to re-evaluate how I would go about
choosing the data I am studying.
I am aiming to quantify the amount of deficit features in
each speech in order to create graphs to easily compare data. However, I think
that it could become subjective as some of Lackoff’s deficit features could be
arguable in certain situations, i.e. emotional evaluations rather than
intellectual.
Although it is ‘dangerous’ to have a strong opinion before
acting the ‘neutral researcher’ in a study, I think that many of these types of
speeches will not contain many of Lackoff’s features, because the aim of them
is to appear strong and intelligent. However I was thinking that this in itself
almost is on par with her ideas, i.e. to use masculine language to be taken
seriously.
I may change my mind with the theorist that I choose to use
because I think that there would be lots of interesting things to explore
regarding language gender theories and women rights speeches.
In respect to my media
text, I was thinking something along the lines of why women may have
changed the way they speak. Why there is such a difference in the language of
men and women. So if women’s language is deficit- I was thinking of exploring
why. I was speaking with some people who are interested in feminism etc. and
they suggested that when/if women had their power taken away from them by men
in the past then they had to adapt their language in order to make ‘things’ run
smoothly. For example if a ‘woman’ was not acting like a ‘woman’ they may not
have gotten married? So lots of different aspects came together to create the
“female”. But I’m not sure if this even makes sense. So I was hoping to talk
about something interesting and slipping in some knowledge of language & gender
theory as an addition or to back up my points. I think it would be purely an
opinion article.
(*Speeches which would be regarded as important, those which
are well known and were said/written by well-known activists.)
(*when there was a final push and things started to change/governments
noticed.)
