COURSEWORK

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.)