A comprehensive summary of over 100 theorists that are needed for paper 2 of the AQA A-Level English Language course. Theorists are grouped by area of study including gender, ethnicity, and technological change amongst many other categories. The explanations for each theorist are accessible for all...
The Dominance Model:
- Spender: introduced the idea of ‘male as norm’, women are extensions of men. For
example, men are always shown first e.g. Mr and Mrs
- Schulz and Lakoff: terms are marked (called ‘marked terms’) to female equivalent,
usually using the suffix -ess and -ette e.g. ‘hostess’ and ‘bachelorette’
- Stanley: there are 220 negative terms to describe a promiscuous woman, but only 20
to describe and equivalent male
- Perrson: animal insults are used to allude to a woman’s sexual behaviour, usually to
imply prostitution
- Parker et al: commenting on a woman’s sexual behaviour is designed to damage her
social status and cause negative psychological effects
- Holmes: women are often referred to as food and animals e.g. ‘cow’ and ‘sugar’
- Zimmerman and West: men interrupt women 96-100% of the time in mixed sex
conversations
- Beattie: Zimmerman and West’s study wasn’t accurate because their sample was far
too small. Beattie’s study uses 10 times as many participants and states that men
and women interrupt with equal frequency
- Greif: parents interrupt daughters more than sons and male parents interrupt more
overall
- Fishman: women are left to do the ‘conversational shitwork’ as otherwise the
conversation would fail
- Coates: men control the topic of conversation and usually keep the topic to male
orientated subjects
- The Bechdel test: this judges whether a piece of work (book, film, theatre, TV etc.)
has: two women; who talk to each other; about something other than men, and many
pieces of work fail this test
The Deficit Model:
- Lakoff: believes that women’s language contains many features that make it weak
e.g. intensifiers, hedging, weak adjectives and back-channelling
- O’Barr and Atkins: men use deficit language features in the courtroom and lawyers
who are women vice versa. More about powerless han gendered language
- Jesperson: women’s language is littered with non-fluency features because they
think before speaking, not a linguistics report but based on public perception
- ESRC: women use ‘fuck’ 50 times more often than before 1990
The Difference Model:
- Tannen: six ways women and men communicate differently e.g. advice vs
understanding, conflict vs compromise, independence vs intimacy, information vs
feelings, orders vs proposals, status vs support
- Coates: all-male conversations are competitive whereas all-female are cooperative
- Tannen: male talk is report-oriented whereas female is rapport-orientated
- Cameron: bitching is part of female talk, but not male, because covertly dominant
behaviour is more acceptable
- Pilkington: rugby study, male house talk is characterised by insults
, - Howe: men and women play different roles in conversation, men are active
participants keen to respond and provide their opinion, women are active listeners
responding through back channelling
- Hyde: the gender similarities hypothesis, more similarities than differences occur
REGIONAL VARIETIES OF ENGLISH
- Giles: matched guise experiment found RP speakers were judged as intelligent,
trustworthy, unfriendly and unsociable
- Kerswill: Through a process called dialect levelling, accents and dialects are
becoming more and more similar
- Mugglestone: the number of RP speakers is decreasing
- Harrington: over a period of 50 years, the Queen’s speeches have been diverging
from RP
- Giles and Powesland: psychology lecturer experiment, the same lecture delivered to
two groups using RP and the Birmingham accent, found brummie viewed less
intelligent and overall less favourably
- Montgomery: RP is used in adverts for technical descriptions, regional for food etc.
- Harbridge: joke study, 4000 surveyed, brummie and liverpudlian funniest, RP least
- Trudgill: the archaic forms of the second person pronouns ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ are still
used in yorkshire
- Mahoney et al: guilt experiment, students were played recordings of fake police
interviews of suspects with different accents, brummie most guilty
- Giles: capital punishment study, five groups of students were given information about
capital punishment in four different ways (4 interviews with different accents, 1
written), RP and written most impressive and likely to change minds , brummie least
impressive
- Rosewarne: coined the term ‘estuary english’ for Thames, glottal stop, th fronting, h
dropping, yod coalescence, no notable lexical or grammatical differences
- Coggle: estuary english acts as a bridge between cockney and RP
- Dent: accents are like spoken birthmarks
INTERNATIONAL VARIETIES OF ENGLISH (GLOBAL ENGLISH)
- American: contains a number of different features e.g. lexical ‘fall’ and ‘candy’,
grammatical t instead of ed for some past tense ‘lernt’, phonological rhotic accent,
orthographical ‘er’ and ‘or’
- Webster: american, blue back speller, codifying the American spelling system,
orthography simpler and easier, greater grapheme-phoneme correspondence
- Engel: american, hates americanisms, ruining English, identity issue
- Murphy: american, big difference still, americanisms enter Britain just how British
features enter America
- Pyles and Algeo: american, essentially no difference, differences meaningless
- Algeo: american, expanding British English, good thing
- Kim and Elder: many americanisms and culturally dependent
- Australian: lexical ‘digger’ for ‘soldier’, phonologically declaratives end like
interrogatives, unstressed vowels schwas, grammatically collective nouns singular
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