Linguistics Research: Language, Gender, and You

[UVaLNGS1]

I think 2 may be correct, though I think you could do with elaborating a bit on what "gendered style" means here. Is this as in conforming to the way women would actually want to dress and present their words? Because while I get this with respect to both spoken word and visual appearence, is it apparent that there's a distinct feminine syntactical style still adhering to grammatical standards?

Hypothesis 1, on the other hand, seems a bit off. I would want to think you're overestimating the influence that the gender aspect of conversational normativity has over online interaction. Mind you, I could yet be surprised.

Hope your paper goes well!

Thanks very much for the criticism. As far as Hypothesis 1 goes, this is something that I'm still researching and it may well prove to be incorrect. We'll see.

For Hypothesis 2, I didn't want to get into gendered style too much here because I didn't want to scare people away with a huge wall of text. Language and gender is a really new field, and there's still a huge amount of debate on the subject: whether there are actual differences between men's talk and women's or whether we just project perceived/stereotyped differences onto language; what those differences might be in terms of grammar, syntax, or content; etc. For this paper I'm partly trying to find out if there are assumed differences between gender styles--that is, if people believe there are differences in the way men talk/write and the way women talk/write.

If anyone is interested in the subject, there's a lot of interesting (well, I think it's interesting) reading out there on the subject. You can try the work of Robin Lakoff, Mary Bucholtz, Susan Ehrlich, and Susan Herring to get started. I'd really recommend Susan Herring for language use in so-called Computer-Mediated Discourse, basically language and gender on the internet.