4. Freedom, Dependency, and the Power of Women's Speech

2017 ◽  
pp. 89-116
Keyword(s):  
Women's Speech

scholarly journals METACOMMUNICATIVE PRAGMATIC MARKERS: GENDER ASPECT

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 40-50
Author(s):  
Tatiana I. Popova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Roles ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Age Group ◽  
Women's Speech ◽  
Discursive Analysis ◽  
Pragmatic Markers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dependent Position ◽  
Female Speech ◽  
Gender Aspect

The article deals with the use of metacommunicative pragmatic markers in the gender aspect, taking into account the social roles of the speaker. The research is carried out based on the data of the ORD corpus of Russian Everyday Speech, known as ‘One Speaker’s Day’, which contains transcripts of audio recordings obtained under natural conditions. The subsample includes about 200 thousand words. It features episodes of ‘speaker’s days’ of 15 women and 15 men belonging to three age groups. The informants act in various social roles, opposed by the principle of symmetry/asymmetry. Pragmatic annotation of the material and further discursive analysis have demonstrated that metacommunication is actively used in the speech of the informants, but it is much more common for the women’s speech. The men use markers of this type with specific speech tasks, for example, for a refusal (slushay / u menya net deneg <look / I have no money>); in the women’s speech, the variability of metacommunicative markers is wider but there is no functional diversity. This confirms the observations of linguists, obtained from the material of various languages, that women tend to cooperate and maintain dialogue to a greater extent than men. From the perspective of feminist linguistics, this feature of female speech is directly related to the issues of the women’s dependent position since it reflects their passivity and the habit of yielding. However, more than half of the detected uses belong to the speech of women of the older age group (from 55 years old) who communicate with relatives and friends, while in the younger age group the metacommunicative pragmatic markers become multifunctional and also act in speech as a start marker.

Silence, gender and metamorphosis in Joanna Walsh’s ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 91-109
Author(s):  
Paul Fagan
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Women's Agency ◽  
Women's Speech ◽  
Specific Focus ◽  
Story Writing ◽  
Women’S Agency ◽  
Philosophical Debates

This article explores paradoxical silence as a strategy of contemporary feminist short story writing in Joanna Walsh’s ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’ (2017). To draw out the story’s engagements with writing women’s agency beyond the binaries of embodiment and disembodiment, passivity and activity, inner and outer life, it reads Walsh’s text at the nexus of three interrelated traditions. First, it situates the story within a genealogy of women’s ‘non-writing’, which develops new aesthetic strategies through the short story form for both writing and reading the silences of women. Secondly, it explores the significance of women’s speech loss in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses to the transformative drive of Walsh’s poetics of silence, with a specific focus on the figure of Echo. Thirdly, it places Walsh’s epistolary short story into conversation with philosophical debates about the distinct silences of plenitude and vacuum, transcendence and immanence, the human and the nonhuman, by reading it comparatively with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ‘Ein Brief’. In conclusion, it is argued that ‘Worlds from the Word’s End’ ironizes the Ovidian topos of the silent figure who nevertheless speaks her desires in order to trouble the binaries that regulate strategies of voluntary silence in the feminist short story.

The history of the regulation and exploitation of women’s speech and writing in Japan

2020 ◽  
pp. 401-426
Author(s):  
Momoko Nakamura
Keyword(s):  
Oral Narrative ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Conduct Books ◽  
Women's Speech ◽  
Heian Period ◽  
Speech Styles ◽  
Language Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Japanese Translation

This chapter describes how women’s relationship to Japanese language has been defined, assessed, and exploited within the field of Japanese linguistics. After a brief history of language studies in Japan in the Introduction, the second section analyses the norms for women’s speech in conduct books (etiquette manuals) since the thirteenth century. The third section summarizes the arguments concerning women’s contribution to the development of kana script in the Heian period (794–1185). The fourth section examines the changing values assigned to two speech styles linguists have prominently attributed to women: jogakusei kotoba (‘schoolgirl speech’) of the late nineteenth century and nyōbō kotoba (‘court-women speech’) since the fourteenth century. The last section considers the shifting evaluations assigned to the works by two individual women, the Japanese translation of Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) by Wakamatsu Shizuko and the codification of Ainu oral narrative by Chiri Yukie. Conclusions outline three major findings of the chapter.

Speech and Silence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Hylen
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Social Rule ◽  
Women's Speech ◽  
The New Testament

The silence of women has often been seen as a rule of ancient culture. This chapter explores evidence from the Roman period of how this social rule was practiced. The assumption that women should defer to men was sometimes expressed through silence. However, other social norms supported women’s speech. Women often spoke with authority to women and men as they pursued their everyday tasks and responsibilities. They were praised for speaking on political and social matters as they acted as advocates for their families and communities. Prayer and prophecy were conventional forms of speech by women. Women in the New Testament also spoke in a variety of settings.

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