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Gender Paradox
The gender paradox is a sociolinguistic phenomenon first observed by William Labov, in which "Women conform more closely than men to sociolinguistic norms that are overtly prescribed, but conform less than men when they are not." Specifically, the "paradox" arises from sociolinguistic data showing that women are more likely to use prestige forms and avoid stigmatized variants than men for a majority of linguistic variables, but that they are also more likely to lead language change by using innovative forms of variables. Overview William Labov identifies three main principles that, in combination, constitute the gender paradox. They illuminate the juxtaposing roles of women, who display both conformist and nonconformist behavior in the treatment of linguistic variables. Stable linguistic variables The first of the three principles states that "For stable sociolinguistic variables, women show a lower rate of stigmatized variants and a higher rate of prestige variants than men." Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on language. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology. Sociolinguistics' historical interrelation with anthropology can be observed in studies of how language varieties differ between groups separated by social variables (e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc.) and/or geographical barriers (a mountain range, a desert, a river, etc.). Such studies also examine how such differences in usage and differences in beliefs about usage produce and reflect social or socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place, language usage also varies among social classes, and it is t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Northern Cities Vowel Shift
Inland Northern (American) English, also known in American linguistics as the Inland North or Great Lakes dialect, is an American English dialect spoken primarily by White Americans in a geographic band reaching from the major urban areas of Upstate New York westward along the Erie Canal and through much of the U.S. Great Lakes region. The most distinctive Inland Northern accents are spoken in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. The dialect can be heard as far west as eastern Iowa and even among certain demographics in the Twin Cities, Minnesota.Chapman, Kaila (2017). "The Northern Cities Shift: Minnesota's Ever-Changing Vowel Space". Macalester College: "The satisfaction of the three NCS measures was found only in the 35-55 year old male speakers. The three male speakers fully participating in the NCS had high levels of education and strong ties to the city" (41). Some of its features have also infiltrated a geographic corridor from Chica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
List Of Paradoxes
This list includes well known paradoxes, grouped thematically. The grouping is approximate, as paradoxes may fit into more than one category. This list collects only scenarios that have been called a paradox by at least one source and have their own article in this encyclopedia. Although considered paradoxes, some of these are simply based on fallacious reasoning ( falsidical), or an unintuitive solution (veridical). Informally, the term ''paradox'' is often used to describe a counter-intuitive result. However, some of these paradoxes qualify to fit into the mainstream perception of a paradox, which is a self-contradictory result gained even while properly applying accepted ways of reasoning. These paradoxes, often called ''antinomy,'' point out genuine problems in our understanding of the ideas of truth and description. Logic * : The supposition that, 'if one of two simultaneous assumptions leads to a contradiction, the other assumption is also disproved' leads to paradoxical ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Japanese Settlement In Palau
There is a small Japanese community in the Pacific Island country of Palau, which mainly consists of Japanese expatriates residing in Palau over a long-term basis. A few Japanese expatriates started to reside in Palau after it gained independence in 1994, and established long-term businesses in the country. Japanese settlement in Palau dates back to the early 19th century, although large scale Japanese migration to Palau did not occur until the 1920s, when Palau came under Japanese rule and administered as part of the South Seas Mandate. Japanese settlers took on leading administrative roles in the Japanese colonial government, and developed Palau's economy. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, virtually all of the Japanese population was repatriated back to Japan, although people of mixed Japanese-Palauan descent were allowed to remain behind. People of Japanese-Palauan descent constitute a large minority of Palau's population as a result of substantial intermarriage between the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sex And Gender Distinction
Though the terms ''sex'' and ''gender'' have been used interchangeably since at least the fourteenth century, in contemporary academic literature they usually have distinct meanings. ''Sex'' generally refers to an organism's biological sex, while ''gender'' usually refers to either social roles based on the sex of a person (gender role) or personal identification of one's own gender based on an internal awareness (gender identity).Prince, Virginia. 2005. "Sex vs. Gender." ''International Journal of Transgenderism''. 8(4). While in ordinary speech, the terms ''sex'' and ''gender'' are often used interchangeably, most contemporary social scientists, behavioral scientists and biologists, many legal systems and government bodies, and intergovernmental agencies such as the WHO make a distinction between gender and sex. In most individuals, the various biological determinants of sex are congruent, and consistent with the individual's gender identity, but in some circumstances, an individ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Social Constructionism
Social constructionism is a theory in sociology, social ontology, and communication theory which proposes that certain ideas about physical reality arise from collaborative consensus, instead of pure observation of said reality. The theory centers on the notion that meanings are developed in coordination with others rather than separately by each individual. It has often been characterised as neo- Marxian or also as a neo-Kantian theory, in that social constructionism replaces the transcendental subject with a concept of society that is at the same time descriptive and normative. While some social constructs are obvious, for instance money or the concept of currency, in that people have agreed to give it importance/value, others are controversial and hotly debated, such as the concept of self/self-identity. This articulates the view that people in society construct ideas or concepts that may not exist without the existence of people or language to validate those concepts. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indexicality
In semiotics, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy of language, indexicality is the phenomenon of a ''sign'' pointing to (or ''indexing'') some object in the context in which it occurs. A sign that signifies indexically is called an index or, in philosophy, an indexical. The modern concept originates in the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce, in which indexicality is one of the three fundamental sign modalities by which a sign relates to its referent (the others being iconicity and symbolism). Peirce, C.S., "Division of Signs" in ''Collected Papers'', 1932 897 Peirce's concept has been adopted and extended by several twentieth-century academic traditions, including those of linguistic pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and Anglo-American philosophy of language. Words and expressions in language often derive some part of their referential meaning from indexicality. For example, ''I'' indexically refers to the entity that is speaking; ''now'' indexically refers to a ti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Penelope Eckert
Penelope "Penny" Eckert (born 1942) is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University. She specializes in variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018. Biography Eckert received her PhD in linguistics in 1978 from Columbia University, where she was a student of William Labov. She is the author or co-author of three books on sociolinguistics, the co-editor of three collections, and author of numerous scholarly papers in the field. She attended Oberlin College in 1963 as an undergraduate. Eckert served as the president of the International Gender and Language Association from 2000–2003. She was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. In 2012, she was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, where she had previously served on a number of committees, including the ethics, ethnic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Malagasy Language
Malagasy (; ) is an Austronesian language and the national language of Madagascar. Malagasy is the westernmost Malayo-Polynesian language, brought to Madagascar by the settlement of Austronesian peoples from the Sunda islands around the 5th century AD. The Malagasy language is one of the Barito languages and is most closely related to the Ma'anyan language, still spoken on Borneo to this day. Malagasy also includes numerous Malay loanwords, from the time of the early Austronesian settlement and trading between Madagascar and the Sunda Islands. After c. 1000 AD, Malagasy incorporated numerous Bantu and Arabic loanwords, brought over by traders and new settlers. Malagasy is spoken by around 25 million people in Madagascar and the Comoros. Most people in Madagascar speak it as a first language, as do some people of Malagasy descent elsewhere. Malagasy is divided between two main dialect groups; Eastern and Western. The central plateau of the island, where the capital Antananarivo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indo-European Languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish, have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; and another nine subdivisions that are now extinct. Today, the individual Indo-European languages with the most native speakers are English, Hindi–Urdu, Spanish, Bengali, French, Russian, Portuguese, German, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million native speakers; many others are small and in danger of extinction. In total, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion people) speaks an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Social Network (sociolinguistics)
In the field of sociolinguistics, social network describes the structure of a particular speech community. Social networks are composed of a "web of ties" (Lesley Milroy) between individuals, and the structure of a network will vary depending on the types of connections it is composed of. Social network theory (as used by sociolinguists) posits that social networks, and the interactions between members within the networks, are a driving force behind language change. Structure Participants The key participant in a social network is the ''anchor'', or center individual. From this anchor, ties of varying strengths radiate outwards to other people with whom the anchor is directly linked. These people are represented by ''points''. Participants in a network, regardless of their position, can also be referred to as ''actors ''or ''members''. Relationships There are multiple ways to describe the structure of a social network. Among them are ''density, member closeness centrality, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Change From Below
Change from below is linguistic change that occurs from below the level of consciousness. It is language change that occurs from social, cognitive, or physiological pressures from within the system. This is in opposition to change from above, wherein language change is a result of elements imported from other systems.Labov, William. "Transmission and Diffusion". ''Language''. Volume 83, Number 2, June 2007, 344–387. Linguistic Society of America.Ash, Sharon. "Social Class". ''The Handbook of Language Variation and Change'', 402–422. Malden, Mass: Blackwell. Change from below first enters the language from below the level of consciousness; that is, speakers are generally unaware of the linguistic change. These linguistic changes enter language primarily through the vernacular and spread throughout the community without speakers' conscious awareness. Since change from below is initially non-salient, the changing features are not marked characteristics and are difficult for speaker ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
