ENGL276
McEnery himself points
out the issues with this
methodology when trying to
analyse particular parts of
his research into swearing
and gender; it cannot be
confirmed what the gender of
the hearer is, and therefore
one
cannot
analyse
accurately if this affects the
speaker’s language use.
He talks of how this would
be something of interest
to look into, however “the
inability to annotate hearer
information in the corpus
precludes the exploration of
this’ (2006, p.38). Hence a
corpus-based approach to
bad language use has its
advantages and limitations.
What we can discover from
McEnery’s work, however,
is the scale of offensiveness
of both men and women’s
bad language. In his study
he includes a table in
which various expletives
are categorised into the
following: very mild, mild,
moderate, strong, very
strong (McEnery, 2006,
p.36). This will be discussed
later in more detail relating
to my own research, but for
McEnery’s work this is ideal
in exploring the general use
of swearing of females and
males. By using a scale of
offence to measure their
bad language use, one
can identify if one gender
in general uses more
offensive BLWs than the
other, and the implication of
this in the wider context of
sociolinguistics.
McEnery’s work covers a
range of different factors
as noted previously, and
therefore other works on
gender
and
language
use need to be taken into
account. Two sociolinguists
in the field of language and
gender are Jennifer Coates
and Robin Lakoff - both with
opposing views. One of the
instigators in large studies
on language and gender
is Lakoff, who talks in her
work of the oppression of
women and the dominance
of men not just in society,
but in their language use
as well (Lakoff 1975/2004).
Lakoff’s work on gender
and language would be an
approach associated with
either deficit or dominance.
This deficit approach claims
that there is a certain deficit
within female or ‘feminine’
language, as Lakoff talks of,
that reinforces their social
standing. Dominance is
slightly different, claiming
that in a mixed-sex setting,
males are expected to
interrupt or dominate, more
than females. This can
relate back to McEnery,
when he claims that women
use weaker word forms than
men; a similar stance to
Lakoff in her talk of female’s
31
‘meaningless
particles’.
With approaches such as
these, swearing becomes
not just a feature of everyday
interaction, but emphasises
the different societal roles of
males and females. Lakoff
goes one step further in
her work to claim that the
‘stronger’ exp letives are
‘reserved’ for men, and the
weaker ones for women
(1975/2004, p.44). Again,
referring to the females’
language use as a weaker
lexical choice suggests
there is some sort of deficit
or subordination within the
female vocabulary. The
problem with analysing data
exclusively through the lens
of the dominance approach
is that it can have a tendency
to take on a folk-like view on
language and can become
more prescriptive than
descriptive when there is
not sufficient evidence, a
common criticism of Lakoff’s
work (Coates 2004).
It is at this point that
the difference approach
(Zimmerman and West
1975) has a crucial role.
Coates uses this theory as
a means to analyse her own
data in her works Women,
Men and Language (2004)
and Women, Men, and
Everyday Talk (2013). The
difference approach does
not claim that one gender’s
language is subordinate
to the other, but identifies
that there are differences
between the language used
by males and females. We
can see this most clearly
in Coates’s work on allfemale interaction (1989)
and all-male interaction
(2013); female interaction is