You have a very naughty saladQuestions? Tyler Schnoebelentylers at stanford

(Key to reading this deck now that its posted)Most of the content is in the notes field.Check out Appendix A for logistics and follow-up stuff that Lauren started the class off withAppendix B has stuff we didnt get to in class but is probably useful for reviewing

Lets get started with some non-gender categories

Animals of New GuineaRalph Bulmer went and studied the Karam of New Guinea. They have a number of animal categories (think, mammal, fish, bird, pet, etc).KobityYaktKaynKaj

Some yakts

The kobity is a category of its ownIts a strange beastLives wild in the forestWalks on two legs (doesnt fly)Its furryLays eggsHas wingsHas a heavy skullWhen hunted, its blood shouldnt be shed

So a kobity is a yakt (bird), right?

The kobity is irritated now

Go ahead, try to tell me its a birdIts just absurdIt cant flyIts really heavyIt can kill children and dogsIt cant be hunted with arrowsIts our cross-cousinThe more Bulmer probes, the more elements are brought in by his informants that prevent the kobity from being a yakt. (Latour 200)

From the promptWhen pressed on their choices, my respondents actually pushed back, citing more detail and finding more features that support their gender assignment.VersusI asked WAY more than three people what gender my objects were, because I wasn't getting any answers beyond, "I don't know," "Male, I guess -- I don't know why," and, "I don't know... I really don't know.

What to do insteadYou can learn a lot from perturbationsThe number of points linked, the strength and length of the linkage, the nature of the obstacles (201-202).In other words, examining a web of connections that join things together.By denying a claim or shaking an association, we can see how things are joined together, what holds tightly and what gives way easily, what is negotiable and what is not.

(Feel free to perturb this system)

How many genders are there?

Gender grammatical gender

Grammatical genderImagine there were some nice morphemes (little wordlets) for marking gender in English, so that we would say:Frank manwent to the storeManbig Frank is always mangoing to the storeLouise ladywent to the storeLadybig Louise, shes always ladygoing to the storeThelady table is ladybigTheman chair is manpetite

From other languagesFrenchUne petite bote est arrivee de Paris (A small box has come from Paris)Old EnglishSeo brade lind waes tilu and hire lufod (That broad shield was good and I loved it/her)Zuluumfana omkhulu (large boy)isihlahla esikhulu (large tree)

Dyirbal groupingsBayi: men, kangaroos, possums, bats, most snakes, most fishes, some birds, most insects, the moon, storms, rainbows, boomerangs, some spears, etc. Balan: women, anything connected with water or fire, bandicoots, dogs, platypus, echidnae, some snakes, some fishes, most birds, fireflies, scorpions, crickets, the stars, shields, some spears, some trees, etc. Balam: all edible fruit and the plants that bear them, tubers, ferns, honey, cigarettes, wine, cake. Bala: parts of the body, meat, bees, wind, yam sticks, some spears, most trees, grass, mud, stones, noises, language, etc.

How many genders?

Whats the basis of the system?

Well, gender ~ grammatical gender?

PenguinDutch:Neuter

Greek:Masculine

Irish:Feminine

WindDutch:Masculine

Greek:Masculine

Irish:Feminine

HappinessDutch: Neuter

Greek:Feminine

Irish:Feminine

Right. Gender grammatical gender.

Hammer12 out of 13 Indo-European languages have hammer in the masculine

Just chance? Not arbitrary?

Why?Hammers are active, mighty, associated with blacksmiths; all these things make them men

Alternatively, the answer written in to The Washington Post when it asked people to assign genders to English nounsmale, because it hasnt evolved much over the last 5,000 years, but its handy to have around

Ergender=grammatical gender, then?

How would you classify pistol/gun?

The awful German language(Can I get two volunteers?)Gretchen: Wilhelm, where is the turnip?Wilhelm: She has gone to the kitchen.Gretchen: Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?Wilhelm: It has gone to the opera.

Dude! Grammatical gender and genderwhats the story?

The other W(h)orf

Where to lookColors

Where to lookColorsTimeSpatial orientationGrammatical gender

Bugaboos in linguistic relativityAre you only testing inside the language? If youre testing multiple languages, how do you know the translation is really the same?Use bilinguals and keep the test language consistent?If youre judging thinking, can you rule out linguistic interference?Have them count or something else while performing the task?What strategies are participants going to use to answer your direct questions? Can you be more covert?

This is Patrick.

Take-awaySince the test was in English, The semantic representation of gender (once it has been established) is not language specific (Boroditsky et al 2007: 69).Why is this?If toaster is masculine, maybe you pull out metallic, technological; if its feminine, maybe you think warmth, domesticity, nourishment.Heres a place where the construction of gender is going on!

Gimme some adjectives about bridgesGerman:BeautifulElegantFragilePeacefulPrettySlender

SpanishBigDangerousLongStrongSturdyTowering

Now English speakers take those adjectives and say +1=fem, -1=masc (not knowing where the adjectives came from)

And there are real consequences

Avert your eyes!

The power of grammatical genderTuma:Ta/Tama:Ta tomato (fem.)khya:r cucumber (masc.)

Lak genders1: Male rationals2: Female rationals3: Other animates (and some inanimates)4 Other stuffQuestion: Where is du (girl, daughter)?Its in (3) instead of (2).

ChangeBut this happened over timeas a sign of politeness for addressing young women (especially those earning their own living).All sorts of nouns for these young women have moved to (3). In fact, you should use (3) for any woman outside your immediate family.So (2) (the feminine) is restricted to mother and grandmother. There arent many nouns left in it, actually.

Similar in Konkani (west coast of India)

And in southern dialects of Polish

Categories!In Lak, Konkani, and some dialects of Polish weve seen the feminine gender subdivideYoung women/out-group women move to a different categoryWhats left in the feminine gender are the in-family, married, older womenHow do we interpret the division?Are some women more female than others?Is it about politeness?Independence?Sexual availability?

Its just culture

Okay, then lets learn GumbuziA made-up language; some words are soupative, other are part of the oosative genderNative English speakers have to learn 20 words4 males soupative4 females oosative12 inanimate objects (randomly assigned to the two genders)Now gimme the adjectives!

Oh yeah? But youre still using words

Lets use pictures and block languageTake Spanish and German natives, test them in EnglishAsk them to assign similarities between picturesBut make them say randomly generated letter strings at the same time so they arent secretly whispering the gender of the things theyre comparingDo this again with the folks who learned Gumbuzi

Maybe gender is just special

Meaning making by categorization!

Some other itemsObjects seem to each be associated with gender in their own wayA large pan is more feminine than a small panA large hammer is more masculine than a small hammer(Recursivity!)

Heres Boroditskys take-awayMore than just a quirkSpanish and German speakers are doing different thingsEven in EnglishWith unlabeled picturesWhile doing a verbal suppression task

How?Deliberately looking for similarities between things in the same categoryAnd finding themWhich is to say, constructing them

The French dont know French

A problematic baseline56 native French speakers (14 adults, 42 teens)93 masculine wordsUniform agreement on 1750 feminine wordsUniform agreement on 1

Adult (n=14)Teenagers (n=42)Significance (p)Victimevictim, casualty71.4%42.9%.008quivoqueambiguity, misunderstanding64.3%97.6%.032Superbearrogance64.3%23.8%.003Oasisoasis50.0%16.7%.014Primeur (avoir la primeur de l'information)to be the first to know42.9%2.4%.001

Ties that bind (differently for different people/different languages)We want to know whether the habits that people acquire in thinking for speaking a particular language will manifest themselves in their thinking even when they are not planning speech in that language (Boroditsky et al 2007: 62)Habits! Naturalization! Ideology!

Will Boroditsky et al get taken up as part of the the hall of mirrors? (Discuss!)

The crucial part of hall of mirrorsSelective attention to results that confirm male-female differenceIncluding non-significant resultsAnd ignoring results that dont confirm stereotypes

If gender is a constructionis it real?

Gods impact on humans

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Questions?

Appendix A

LogisticsExtra Credit: Experimental Participation, but not watching films!

Online Blogs: Min 300 words, Max 350 words (this week & following posts dont require this, but you may want to revise old posts if they dont cut it!)

UptalkHas anyone noticed it more since last Thursday?Have you noticed if your perceptions of it vary depending on the speaker?

Answering Unanswered QsMinor keys as masculine & feminineComposers in the Classical PeriodThe Sonata Principle to strive for balance between two musical themesmasculine key was to always appear first, aligned with the narration; feminine key was the later counterpoint, aligned with the opposing characterse.g., Wagners operas

Answering Unanswered QsPublished by U of Minnesota Press, 2002

Answering Unanswered QsIndirect Indexicality vs. Iconization & Iconicity

Iconization is a process; Iconicity is a feature

Iconicity: when the properties of a sign convey something about the properties of the objectIconization: The creation of an apparently natural connection between a linguistic variety and the speakers who use it (E&McG: p277)

Answering Unanswered QsIndirect Indexicality vs. Iconization & Iconicity

Think of iconization as a potential end product, or a most extreme example, of indirect indexicality

The reading for Thursday (E&McG, Chapter 8) will address this again, in a new context (esp. p.293)

Important ReadingsThursday: E&McG, Chapter 8Section: Peasant Men Cant Get Wives

(Besides the April 2nd lecture) This is your intro to Variationist Sociolinguistics

IPA reference: http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/chapter1.html

Your CallYour call for more current examples of good research in language & gender

is what this part of the quarter is all about!

TODAY: Gender, Grammar, & Thought

Appendix B

Putting it togetherWere problematizing the gender binaryBut we wouldnt want to deny its importance

Discussion!How should we study gender?How should we study things when we think gender might play a role (but in which gender isnt the main focus)?What does it mean to go beyond gender?

Some ideasLooking for male/female difference is okay if you are careful about interpreting results (consider alternate possibilities)

Split your data between boys and girls, but try other stuff like teachers pet/non-teachers petSee what the structure is within the boy/girl division (weve alluded to this with Eckerts study of burned-out burnout girls; sports jocks vs. corporate jocks)This will get you thinking about recursivity and how binaries are constructedLab methods are good, but you also need ethnographic methodsThese allow more nuances to emerge.In other words: use multiple methodologies to get at your research questionAgain, the key is not to take any of our categories/assumptions for granted. If we question those, we stand a pretty good chance of not being part of the problem.

***Thats what Bulmer thought. He calls it a cassowary and looks for why the Karam separate it from birds (when OBVIOUSLY its a bird).*So are the Karam.*Do they mind if Bulmer says it is a bird? Yes, they seem to mind a lot. They throw up their hands in disgust. They say it is absurd. If Bulmer insists, many arguments are brought in as to why it cannot be a bird; the cassowary cannot be hunted with arrows, it is a cross-cousin, it lives in the wilderness...The more Bulmer probes, the more elements are brought in by his informants that prevent the kobity from being a yakt. [Latour: 200]

*http://ling156.ning.com/profiles/blogs/a-xbox-controller-a-thermos by Geoffrey Woohttp://ling156.ning.com/profiles/blogs/i-got-nothin by Eva Grasrud*Each word activates various other words. Meaning emerges from the relationships that people assign to whats been activated. The connections are the interpretation and this is what allows the user to act.

While close analysis of speech can help uncover many expectations, expectations around categories can be clear even without a complete transcript. When we get categories wrong, we are essentially denying a claim or shaking an association, and this helps us see how sets of elements are tied together. Trials trace the limit of a paradigm, that is the set of elements that have to be modified for some association to be broken away or for some new one to be established [Latour: 201]. You dont know in advance what shape it has, but you learn by probing what holds tightly and what gives way easily, what is negotiable and what is not.

Latours point here is that you cant reveal systems of associations without such perturbations and questions. His concept of a paradigm (and a culture) is that its one of the consequences of building longer networks and of crossing other peoples path [Latour: 201]. Disambiguationindeed the entire enterprise of creating categoriesinvolves crossing users paths, reflecting the connections we find, and giving room for new ones to emerge.

*That is, contradict, interrupt, ask questions, etc.**Gender derives etymologically from Latin genus, via Old French gendre, and originally meant kind or sort. We use noun class and gender interchangeably when speaking about grammatical agreeement.

*French and Old English have genders that are based around biological sex; Zulus system isnt.*For a long time, metaphors were neglected children of philosophy and linguistics. People saw them as unimportant curiosities. Starting in the 70s, George Lakoffwho youll find over in the East Bay at Berkeleystarted changing that. One of his early books was called, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. And by the way, people who know of this book often get the title wrong. It is telling that they remember it as Women, fire, and other dangerous things.

This book, in part, is about the way different languages classify things. One of the aboriginal languages of Australia is Dyirbal. Whenever a Dyirbal speaker uses a noun in a sentence, the noun must be preceded by a variant of one of four words: bayi, balan, balam, bala. These words classify all objects in the Dyirbal universe and to speak Dyirbal correctly, one must use the right classifier before each noun.

*Feature 30: Number of genders

Nigerian Fula is exceptional, having around twenty genders, depending on the dialect (Arnott 1967; 1970: 67-75; Koval 1979; Breedveld 1995: 295-460).

*Feature 31: Basis of noun class/gender (based on sex or not?)

*Given that most of the genders in language are sex-based (when they exist), maybe gender and grammatical gender are connectedbut*Fwiw, in most of the 13 languages reported, wind is actually masculine.*Well, all that looks arbitrary.

But not so fast.

(What Im doing here is problematizing the gender/grammatical gender relationship. Theres something there, but we dont get muchother than troubleby saying they are identical or not. Better to figure out what sorts of relationships they have.)*(Greek has neuter)

*English and Spanish speakers tend to think of natural objects as feminine and artifacts as masculine (Mullen 1990; Sera, Berge, and del Castillo 1994). English speakers are pretty consistent with gender assignments even though English doesnt have a formal grammatical gender system (Sera, Berge, and del Castillo 1994).

English speakers tend to match animal categories in Spanish, German, and Russian (Boroditsky and Schmidt 2000).

Found by Boroditsky:

The Washington Post asked its readers to assign a gender to a noun of their choice andexplain their reasons:KIDNEYS -- female, because they always go to the bathroom in pairs.HOT AIR BALLOON: male, because to get it to go anywhere you have tolight a fire under it... and, of course, there's the hot air part.HAMMER -- male, because it hasn't evolved much over the last 5,000 years,but it's handy to have around.REMOTE CONTROL -- female. It gives man pleasure, he'd be lost without it,and while he doesn't always know the right buttons to push, he keeps trying.*Ah, but not so fast.

(What Im doing here is problematizing the gender/grammatical gender relationship. Theres something there, but we dont get muchother than troubleby saying they are identical or not. Better to figure out what sorts of relationships they have.)*Whats your guess for pistol?

Feminine (7/14):Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Icelandic, Albanian, Kurdish

Masculine (5/14): French, Irish, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian

Neuter (2/14):Dutch, Greek*But lets even look inside a language. Heres a translation of German that Mark Twain gives us (http://www.yolanthe.de/stories/twain01.htm). *Ah, but not so fast.

(What Im doing here is problematizing the gender/grammatical gender relationship. Theres something there, but we dont get muchother than troubleby saying they are identical or not. Better to figure out what sorts of relationships they have.)*From Lera Boroditsky

The idea is that categorization may affect object representation.*Some Amazon reader summaries:

1. "The Languages of Pao," by Jack Vance, is set in part on the planet Pao, a world populated by the descendants of human colonists. Pao's huge population is extremely docile by nature. Because the people's passivity makes them easy prey for conquest and exploitation, the planet's monarch seeks help from Lord Palafox, an official from the technologically advanced world of Breakness. Palafox's plan is to make the Paonese able to defend themselves in the following way: newly created languages will be used as tools to transform Pao's culture and mass psychology.

2. "The Languages of Pao" was first published in 1957. It is written in the classic style of my favorite SF author. The story is set on one of those typical, out-on-the-edge-of-the-galaxy worlds that Vance loves to create, complete with the typical flowery anthropological descriptions of eccentric human societies he is famous for. Beran Panasper is the "Medallion," heir to the throne of his father, the "Panarch" or emporer of the planet Pao. The Panarch is assasinated by Bustamonte, the "Ayudor," Beran's uncle, who becomes regent. Bustamonte tries to kill Beran so that he can become emporer. Beran is saved by Lord Palafox, a dominie of the Breakness Institute, where he takes Beran for safety. Palafox has a plan to change the character of the docile people of Pao by creating new languages which will morph them into technicants, warriors, merchantilists and diplomatic managers, depending on which language is learned. This is Jack Vance in his relative youth and a very enjoyable story. *Comic by Stephanie Shih: http://moralessfunology.blogspot.com/ *This is what Benjamin Whorf really looked like. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lee_Whorf*Where do you divide up the color wheel? Is it based on the words you have for colors? If we do perception tests, are Russians and Japanese speakers different from English speakers since they lump green/blue together?*For time:

Imagine that you had a meeting on Wednesday but then someone said it had been moved forward two days.

When is the meeting?

About to get off the train: overwhelmingly FridayIn the middle of their journey: split pretty evenly, slight preference for Friday

For spatial orientation, consider that some languages dont have left and right and only use cardinal directionsthe teaspoon is north of the cup. The question is whether that changes their behavior in tasks about moving around in space. *Well, Borotidsky et al (2002) control for whether your language has apple as a feminine or a masculine (or a neuter). Youll get 24 objects with male/female names and then theyll quiz your memory. Do you remember the names better when they match the grammatical gender? (Yes.)

*Here, Michelangelo makes Dusk (on the left) a man and Dawn (on the right), a woman.

We often see representations in art go along with the languages gender.

Examples:Days of the week in different languagesSin (feminine in German, masculine in Russian)Death in fairytales (Russian vs. Brothers Grimm)

**What do these look like?

Tomatoes.

*Dangerous and tempting.

"Okay," he relents, "what else might it resemble? Notice it is red, like a woman's lipstick. It is soft and round. Get it? It reminds you of a woman's flesh."

*And what about these?

What do cucumbers look like?*Do I have to spell it out?

*How could you do this to Patrick?*You can use grammatical categories to understand the world around you. *When I originally encountered the idea that cucumbers and tomatoes shouldnt be put together (in a salad or anywhere else), I thought it was some ridiculous misunderstanding by Americans stationed in Iraq.

American commanders cite al-Qaida's severe brand of Islam, which is so extreme that in Baqouba, al-Qaida has warned street vendors not to place tomatoes beside cucumbers because the vegetables are different genders, Col. David Sutherland said.

http://www.blnz.com/news/2007/04/20/Iraqi_insurgents_fighting_each_other_ther.html

But it seems to be real. For example, http://muslimlawprof.org/2008/07/21/stupidity-and-the-sharia-in-our-times.aspx.

No cucumbers and tomatoes together. Even placing them side by side in these crates would have led at least to a whipping, maybe death. I was puzzled, my brother in law was not. He told me that in fact when he was in Kirkuk the graffiti forbade three things: salads (which in Iraq is basically cucumber and tomatoes), shorts and beauty products for men. This was hard to understand. "Look at this," the vegetable seller said to me, holding up a tomato. "What does it look like?" "A tomato," I said. "No, it is a tomato, but what does it look like." "It looks like a tomato, that's what leads me to conclude it is a tomato. If it looked like a horse, I'd say it was a horse. It does not. It looks like a tomato. It is a tomato." I think I am making a philosophical point, maybe Hume or something, but it's almost 120F outside and I don't want to be dilly dallying asking about Al Qaeda. If the terrorists don't get me, the police might. Hume can wait. "Okay," he relents, "what else might it resemble? Notice it is red, like a woman's lipstick. It is soft and round. Get it? It reminds you of a woman's flesh." "I see," I said. But I thought, man do you need a wife if you look at a tomato and think that. Then he picked up the cucumber andwas about to ask me what I thought it looked like, when I cut him off. That one I could follow better. If a tomato was a woman,I could well assume what a cucumber was. "So the idea is that it remindspeople of sex, it's the mixing of the man and the woman, the cucumber and the tomato, and unlawful sex at that, and so they forbade it."

*Here, find the Daghestan Highlands by looking for Lak.

**See Xajdakov 1963: 49-50 about the politeness strategy.

Within the family, older women such as ninu mother and amu grandmother are addressed and referred to using gender II forms. Thus gender II is semantically restricted and is left with extremely few nouns in it.

*Something comparable has happened in Konkani (Indo-European; westcoast of India; Miranda 1975: 208-13), where the word for girlwas neuter. Where human referents are concerned, the neuterhas become the gender for young females (or those relativelyyounger from the speakers standpoint), while the feminine isfor old, or relatively older, females. *A similar change in the core meaning of genders has occurred in some southern Polish dialects (ZarOba 1984-85).

The meaning of the feminine has changed in both dialect types, being restricted now to denote married women. (Feminine nouns which are not semantically motivated also remain feminine.) For further details on all these, and suggestions as to how they have arisen, see Corbett (1991: 24-26, 99-101).

*Heres a potential criticism Boroditsky et al will need to address. They want to show that something is going on in the brainthat cognition is different, not just behavior. **PsIf you use people who have different degrees of familiarity with Spanish/German, you can predict similarities based on which one they are better at.*From Lera Boroditsky

*From Lera Boroditsky*(Of course she allows that maybe our verbal suppression tasks are suppressive enough.)*Or just because they have the same category name (not feature similarity)? But Boroditsky et al (2002) rule that out by mixing up Gumbuzi genders. People do stuff randomly then, assigning no special meaning to the category. See Boroditsky et al (2007): 74 for a run-down.*http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005411.html*If youre studying how people learn French in college, you want to be able to compare them to native speakers (who will get everything pretty much right on your proficiency assessment tests).

Ayoun (2007) finds that native French speakers really dont agree on the gender of many nouns, though! Ayoun was looking at some anecdotally tricky nouns, but many of them were just plain old nouns.*These are all in the dictionary as femininealthough you might find some dictionaries allowing oasis to be masculine.

*Whats your folk explanation of why something is a particular grammatical gender? Its a quick road to saying that the object has some essential quality.

It seems fairly plausible that you need to create some story, even as a native language learner, to keep track of what object is what gender.

*Language and culture arent really things like hats that we can take on and off at our own leisure.

*Sometimes when you put on a hat youre stuck with it.

If this woman wears this hat everyday, what does it mean for her to say, Well, Im not really the sort of person who wears parsley on my head.

Habitus: Internalized structure (derived from pre-existing external structures) that determines how an individual acts in and reacts to the world (Throop and Murphy 2002). It functions below the level of consciousness. You can't control it or really be introspective about it. "They embedvalues in the most automatic gestures or the apparently most insignificant techniques of the body--ways of walking or blowing one's nose, ways of eating or talking--and engage the most fundamental principles of construction and evaluation of the social world" (Bourdieu 1984).Hexis: The way of experiencing and expressing one's own sense of social value. (Bourdieu 1984)Language is a body technique, and specifically linguistic, especially phonetic, competence is a dimension of bodily hexis in which ones whole relation to the social world, and ones wholly social informed relation to the world, are expressed. [] The most frequent articulatory position is an element in an overall way of using the mouth (in talking but also in eating, drinking, laughing etc.) [] in the case of the lower classes, articulatory style is quite clearly part of a relation to the body that is dominated by the refusal of airs and graces [] Bourgeois dispositions [esp. petit bourgeois] convey in their physical postures of tension and exertion the bodily indices of quite general dispositions towards the world and other people, such as haughtiness and disdain. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 149)*From Lauren:My feeling is that Lera's research is outside the hall of mirrors because she's exactly interested in questioning if language structures/reflects/reproduces gender, and furthermore, is analyzing the results across speakers of different genders, looking for a gender result shared by men and women by the virtue of the language they speak, and not their gender.... While most of the examples of the hall of mirrors are things like "men do this, women do that," bringing evidence to the table that perpetuates particular ideologies, Lera's task of having people rate adjectives as masculine or feminine is tapping into existing ideologies to test how they're reproduced in language. *I ask the question about hall of mirrors because I think theres some misunderstanding about it. Heres the sitch.*So one of the things we dont want you to walk away with is the sense that thinking of gender as a construction means that gender doesnt have a real impact.

That means that the question on this slide isnt quite worded right. What does it mean to be real?

*Here, imagine a Judeo-Christian-Islamic god (but any other will do, probably). If such a god exists, the effects are total and complete (eternal damnation, everlasting salvation).*But even if such a god DOESNT exist, the effects are HUGEin history as well as in individuals personal lives. Not infinite, but ENORMOUS and worthy of study. Certainly real.****