langauge and gender linguists

Deborah Cameron- Theory of verbal hygiene

Both men and women believe that they have certain expectations about the conduct and mode in which they verbally represent themselves. It is believed that women tend to follow stereotype and follow the instructions of which they are taught on how to speak, which translate into other areas of their gender such as the way in which they are instructed to dress.  However she investigated the learning of grammar and research shown that basic grammar orientated methods used to teach children, regardless of sex, contained verbal hygiene. This is where the content which is used during the cognitive stage of learning is gender neutral and gender holds no influence of the use or content of the information learnt, ie punctuation pyramid. From her findings it is apparent that the context of the situation and is dependent on the environment and topic which is being discussed. For example, a group of girls are likely to use girlification if they are discussing and gender stereotyped topic, such as makeup. She also discovered that we should use non sexes lexis as they can cause offence or segregation.

Muriel Schulz- semantic derogation

Schulz contrasted an essay which explains the semantic derogation of sexes. During her investigation she discovered that there was more negative connotations attached to the lexis associated with women than men. Her study was followed up Julie Stanley who recorded negative connotations which were made towards sexes and expanded her investigation by proving how these lexis shifted between positive and negative connotations via discovering their collocations. She stated that women are unable to shift out of the negative semantic space.

Sara mills

 Mills investigated the various lexical pairs and how they are lexical asymmetric to one another. She also did further research in the correlation between femininity and politeness and masculinity and impoliteness. She also considered whether the politeness used was hereditary. Essentially she focused on the way in which certain genders speak and the hereditary traits in which they entail.