1. Section the first (4/2) Some intro stuff
Questions?
Tyler Schnoebelen
tylers at stanford dot edu

2. Agenda Howdy’s and how aaaaare you’s Your thoughts and questions
Some key terms in E&Mc-G
Some metaphors, too
Generic he (Gaskill 1990)
Consumerism (Talbot 1992)

3. Detour: setting goals Specific Measurable Actionable Realistic
Time-bound

4. Some basic things to get
Competence
Speech community
Community of practice
Lexicon
Subdisciplines in linguistics
Phonology
Morphology
Syntax
Discourse
Semantics
Pragmatics
We distinguish two types of competence:
The original concept—if you’re competent in English you just know that you can’t say: *were have plums that icebox the I in the eaten
Communicative competence says that when you first meet someone you probably don’t say: #Hello, you look like a puffy-eyed female Stalin
Speech community is defined on E&Mc-G 56; community of practice is on the next two pages.

5. Lots of movement Social moves “Discourse turn” “Performance turn”
Every contribution you make to an interaction carries out your intentions with respect to the others. We have goals.
“Discourse turn”
Language is interactive, dynamic
It changes over time (and over the course of a conversation)
“Performance turn”
Categories are socially constructed
You “do” gender”
“Continually produced, reproduced, and indeed changed through people’s performance of gendered acts, ast they project their own claimed gendered identities, ratify or challenge others’ identities, and in various ways support or challenge systems of gender relations and privilege” (E&Mc-G: 4).

6. Market How does the linguistic market metaphor work?
E&Mc-G: 55 for a first intro paragraph

7. Gaskill (1990)

8. Twitter break “After a patient eats, he needs to rest.”
“A person is only as old as he feels.”

9. He/she/they Why do we care?
Gaskiil (1990: 631) reports Martyna (1978):
the natural process of imagining oneself to be the subject of a neutral human reference has somehow been short-circuited [for women]. Ninety percent of the women in my study reported no imagery at all in response to a sentence about a general human being, and the 10 percent who did reported seening pictures of males
The closest Gaskill seems to come is that a male-bias for generic he “could reinforce itself in sexist thought and behavior seems eminently plausible, as previous feminist scholarship has shown” (639).
Gaskill also says that “generic he interferes with effective communication” (640).

10. Talbot (1992)

11. Talbot’s goals “A linguistic model of discourse
that integrates linguistic and social theoretical perspectives
so that discourse can be analyzed both as
interaction between individuals
and as socially reproductive and constitutive of subjectivity”

12. Deconstruction The author is dead Or rather, the author is legion
Multiple
Fragmented

13. Ideal subject Sort of like the representation we saw in generic he
Mass-media producers get to imagine the addressee
They control “commonsense”
Conclusion:
“The audience is being offered sisterhood in consumption. Synthetic personalization and the need for adult femininity catch readers up in a bogus community in which the subject position of consumer is presented as an integral part of being feminine” (Talbot 1992: 579)
Cosmetics and naturalness

14. Appendix

15. Style My use of language tells you something about me
I can also use language consciously to try to tell you something about me
We’ll look more at “style” later on in the course, but keep in mind that we’ve got to account for conscious and unconscious attitudes/behaviors

16. It adds up
To build a model of what’s happening in this course, consider:
Small verbal acts accumulate to have a large effect
So how do individual situations produce and reproduce abstract social structures?
More on this as the course continues