Gender and Pragmatics

Abstract

In the field of language and gender, there is a widely accepted origin narrative in which Robin Lakoff's seminal article is identified as the inaugural publication that launched investigations of a relationship between men, women, and language. Following its publication, there was a veritable explosion in language and gender research, with pragmatic issues attracting a good deal of attention. In the earliest decades, researchers examined features which could be interpreted as interactional dominance or power strategies, such as the distribution of turns of talk, the number of interruptions, and the amount of feedback contributed by women and men in different contexts, as well as features which expressed politeness, such as linguistic hedges and intensifiers.