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Language and discrimination - Coggle Diagram
Language and discrimination
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
An individual's thoughts and actions are influenced by the language that they speak
Linguistic determinism: people's thoughts and actions are determined by their language
Linguistic relativism: people's thoughts and actions are only somewhat shaped by their language; existing relative to language
Linguistic reflectionism
People's language reflects their way of thinking
e.g sexist language reflects sexist viewpoint
Lexical asymmetry - Muriel Shulz
Suggested there are more negative connotations on words for women
Words 'marked' for females go through pejoration while male gendered synonyms don't
e.g master vs. mistress, warlock vs. witch, bachelor vs. bachelorette
Concepts of sexist language
Personal titles - subconsciously invoke hierarchy ('mr', 'mrs', 'miss', 'dr')
Gendered derivational morphemes - create new words with sexist diminutive suffixes ('actress', 'goddess')
Marked terms - imply negativity and stands as different from an unmarked male expression ('female doctor', 'priestess')
Generic man - masculine word 'man' used to mean 'human' to include women as all men ('mankind', 'man-made')
Order of precedence - belief that males come first in natural order by placing male at forefront of phrases ('his and hers', 'sir or madam')
Semantic over-representation - Julia Stanley (1977)
Stanley conducted corpus research into terms to describe promiscuity and found 220 for women and 20 for men
Male: stud, player, animal, pimp
Female: slut, slag, husssey, slapper
Speech act theory
Considers language as an action
Austin (1962) - not all statements are constative but are instead performative (e.g 'I name this ship', 'I bequeath...')
Propositional meaning - literal meaning
Illocutionary meaning - social function (e.g request to open window by commenting on temperature)
Perlocutionary meaning - effect of what is said (e.g someone opens window)
Microaggressions - (e.g 'where are you from?' affected by ethnicity) rely on temporal context (age of speaker, different input, facial features, prosodics)
Cohen (1996) - 5 categories of speech acts
Directives (command, insist, request)
Representatives (affirm, conclude, report)
Expressives (apologise, congratulate, regret)
Comissives (swear, promise)
Declaratives (baptise, resign)
Racial slurs as speech acts - derogatory labels represent prejudice that elicit discrimination, assert power
The N-word
Origins in late 1500s
Once considered a neutral term but derogation during slavery abolition in the 19th century when white people felt threatened by Black people entering the job market
The term became more taboo during the Civil Rights movement
John McWhorter - the -a ending to the word has different connotations to the -er ending
Linguistic reframing (Galinsky et al.) - rejection of pejorative meaning by conceptualising in positive terms
Linguistic reclamation - members of stigmatized group consciously use derogative label to turn it into a badge of pride
Some Black people use the N-word to indicate brotherhood and commonality, but problematic when white people use it e.g Jennifer Lopez in 2001 song 'I'm Real'
Euphemism treadmill - Steven Pinker (1994)
Process of words introduced to replace an offensive word becoming offensive themselves over time
E.g: Imbecile -> R
**
d -> disabled/learning difficulties
E.g: Slapper -> prostitute -> sex worker
Criticisms: words come back into trend (more like Postal's theory of language change being cyclical like fashion), in the example of ableist language the middle is now more pejorative than the first
Functional theory
Language changes and adapts to the needs of its user
Reclaiming words to remove their power
Connotations change