G

Gender Scholarship on gender and on pragmatics overlaps in two ways. On the one hand, conceptual tools developed within pragmatics have traditionally informed two key trajectories of gender and language research: that which asks how males and females use and interpret linguistic resources, and that which asks how males and females are represented through linguistic resources. On the other hand, if we take the central question that pragmatics asks to be ‘[w]hy has this utterance been produced?’ (Haberland and Mey 2002: 1672), then gender and language scholarship has, in turn, informed pragmatics: it has consistently provided evidence of the many different ways in which any explanation of an utterance requires a systematic engagement with socio-cultural phenomena. As Crawford (2003: 1417) argues, gender in current research is seen as ‘a salient social and cognitive category through which information is filtered, [and] selectively processed’. The following account traces some of the key ways in which pragmatics has informed and has been informed by the two trajectories of gender and language research. It also charts developments in the theorization of gender. These developments have led to a blurring of these two trajectories as they have both moved away from a conceptualization of gender as a stable set of qualities that distinguish males and females in a given culture and towards the view that gendering is a dynamic process that is achieved through the repeated use of patterns of discourse. The systematic study of differences in male

and female uses of linguistic resources can be

dated back to Lakoff’s (1975) publication Language and Woman’s Place. Although much of the research that was generated as a response to Lakoff’s paper tended towards the sociolinguistic, in that it focused primarily on exploring her claims about gender-based differences in language use, for Lakoff herself it is the effect of the different linguistic choices made by men and women that give those choices significance, not the fact of the differences per se. Key to her argument that men and women use linguistic resources differently is an engagement with the function and context of utterances, and in this she draws on and develops pragmatics scholarship. In particular, she draws on Grice’s maxims (Grice 1968a), and her own account of politeness (Lakoff 1973). This account argues that if politeness norms are conceptualized as a set of culture-specific rules which differentially inform the choices made by men and women, then it is possible to explain what makes the use of a speech act acceptable in one context but not in another. Her aim is to show that, by conforming to these rules and learning to ‘speak like a lady’, women are, in effect, learning to use speech styles that lead them to be perceived by others, and by themselves, as powerless. Although there are notable exceptions, studies

of gender and language during the 1970s and 1980s tended to essentialize gender and, particularly in sociolinguistic studies, gender at this time is usually conceptualized as the cultural extension of biological sex. Seen as a set of qualities that are inculcated in individuals via various socialization practices, such qualities were assumed to remain a fixed aspect of an individual’s identity after that process was complete.