Conversation and Gender
edited by Susan Speer & Elizabeth Stokoe
P120 .S48 C66 2011
New Book Island, 2nd floor
I remember when I first starting taking Spanish in high school and learning that the words for inanimate objects possess a gender (Really? Why should it matter that the table is feminine and the knife is masculine?). Well, this week’s featured title goes much deeper, examining gendered language and its context in conversation.
Speer and Stokoe, professors at UK universities, have collected the work of eighteen scholars (including their own) on the intersection of conversation analysis and gender. The compilation features cutting-edge research and utilizes unscripted interactions from all sorts of scenarios to investigate the relationship of the two themes. Sections include how people use language to describe themselves, engendered linguistics between children, and much more. This text is valuable not only for the mind-expanding content, but also the detailed methods performed assist the reader in understanding the process.
