|| Language and Gender ||

A couple more Linguist theories:

|| SEMANTIC PROGRESSION ||

It has been claimed that some terms in English that are reserved for use when referring to women have a strong negative connotation attatched to them when compared to the corresponding term used to refer to men.
Sarah Mills (1990) and Muriel Schultz (1995), highlights the following examples  of Lexical pairswhere the male term suggsts a positive attribute, whilst the female suggests a negative one.


MALE                         FEMALE

Courtier                      Courtesan
Master                         Mistress


Schultz points out that many of the female equivilents are marked as an indicative of sexual promiscuity, whilst male terms represent a free, independent, positive lifestyle.

Two important pieces of research were undertaken by Peter Trudgill (1974) and Jenny Cheshire (1982), who both use large samples of data in the form of recorded talk, which were analysed to show diffrernces in Male and Female Language.

• Trudgill discovered that accross social classes, men tended to use a more non-standart pronounciation, whilst women did the polar opposite, using standard froms and over reporting.
• Cheshire also found this when she analysed the talk of teenagers, finding Males used much more non-standard forms than girls did. She explains this by drawing on the type of social network to which the Males and Females belonged to.