ABSTRACT
In the past, there has been a sharp division between studying the way women and men use language and studying their representation in language (i.e. sexist language). However, the two areas are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In a review of the gender and language literature, Cameron (1998a) described the inter-relationships between language use by and language about women and men, in the following way:
When a researcher studies women and men speaking she is looking, as it were, at the linguistic construction of gender in the ®rst-and second-person forms (the construction of I and you); when she turns to the representation of gender in, say, advertisements or literary texts she is looking at the same thing in the third person (`she' and `he'). In many cases it is neither possible nor useful to keep these aspects apart, since the `I-you-she/he' is relevant to the analysis of every linguistic act or text.
