Friday, 30 September 2016
MY LANGUAGE INVESTIGATION IDEA
For my 2,000 word investigation, I am planning on testing an aspect of Robin Lakoff's deficit theory into language and gender. I'm going to look at her idea that women to not use as much taboo language or as many expletives as men. I will be testing this by conducting a survey with both male and female participants and will ask them how many times a day they think they swear and then I'll record some conversations to see if there are any noticeable differences in female language use that contradicts Lakoff's theory.
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When Trudgill did his NORMS research in Norwich, he found that people's ideas about how much standard or non-standard language they used were not borne out by the data but you would have to do a great many recordings in a variety of circumstances to ascertain how far that might be the case. If you used a questionnaire on a subject after you had recorded them multiple times(with permission first) and then compared their responses to their real language use, it would provide an interesting exploration of their idiolect as represented in the data vs their perception of it. Interesting. Taboo/expletives might be limiting if you didn't really find any but more deficit features or dialect features might be more fruitful.
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