Examines the effects of speaker sex, socioeconomic status, ability, communication apprehension, ridigity, and question type on the incidence of 16 style markers and on verbosity in simulated job interviews. (EKN)

Investigates current generic referent usage among 1529 public school children in grades 3-12. Indicates that there was an overall relationship between referent usage and gender role orientation, with more use of nontraditional referents among students who projected themselves in nontraditional occupational roles. (JK)

This paper describes the preliminary results of research currently underway concerning sex-based differences in written composition. Sixty themes written by college-age native speakers of English were chosen for study. The themes were typed exactly as they had been written. No corrections were made. They were numbered alphabetically by the names…

The research of W. O'Barr and B. K. Atkins found that the use of "women's language" features--the use of tag questions, interrogative intonation, sex-specific vocabulary, hedges and fillers, empty adjectives, and hypercorrect grammar; the inability to tell jokes; and the tendency to use fewer expletives than men--was associated more with…

From the beginnings of English grammar in the early sixteenth century, our language has been described by men, and the usage promulgated as the "standard" has been that of men. Because men have been able to effectively control English through their control of the communications media and educational institutions, they have made our language an…

This paper is an overview of the introduction of "Ms." into language usage as part of the process of changing sexist language. Included are: (1) history of the term, (2) a discussion of the rationale for its introduction, (3) a report on the other suggested forms of address that do or do not specify sex and marital status, (4) a discussion of the…

Proposals for changing sexist language, while having an increasing impact on patterns of language usage in America, have also continuously been argued against in the media and in academia during the 1970's. The proposals for eliminatinq the usage of masculine terms as "generics" have received the most criticism. In this paper, the various…

Parallels between processes in society and in language are drawn in this analysis of problems involved in eliminating sexism in language. The paper is organized as follows: varieties of sexism in language are outlined; the linguistic notion of marking is applied to the sexist structures; psychological aspects of such marking are considered;…

The first section of this paper focuses on misunderstandings surrounding two of the proposals for changing sexist aspects of the English language, namely, avoiding the use of masculine pronouns (he, his, him, himself) with alleged sex-indefinite reference, and replacing the word and morpheme "man" with "person" in sex-indefinite usage. Several…

Drawing on recent research on sexism in English and the ways in which social forces affect language structure, this paper shows how prescriptive statements about English have been incorporated into linguistic grammars as descriptions of language. It is claimed that Chomsky's "universal grammar" is masculinist and that it is contradicted…

Reports on an experiment in which adults were asked to identify the gender of prepubertal children by listening to a tape recording of their voices. Findings link social class and sex stereotypes. (AM)

The twelve papers in this volume, which concerns the interrelationship of language and sex, include: (1) "Difference and Dominance: An Overview of Language, Gender, and Society," by Barrie Thorne and Nancy Henley; (2) "Women's Speech: Separate But Unequal?" by Cheris Kramer; (3) "The Making of a Nonsexist Dictionary," by Alma Graham; (4) "The…

This paper examines the proposition that languages may differ in their potential for non-sexist usage, and that the structure of a language, in particular the gender system, affects the nature of the linguistic response to changing social attitudes regarding sex roles. A brief historical survey of gender and sex-marking is followed by a review of…