"sort of" is elitist?

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:50 PM -0500 9/26/04, Gordon, Matthew J. wrote:
>I'm probably giving them too much credit but it's possible someone
>is familar with the literature on hedges and similar conversational
>indicators of "weak" language - the kinds of things that R. Lakoff
>originally identified with women's language. There are, I believe,
>studies showing that these features are class-marked.
>
>Someone on the list is no doubt familiar with this literature and
>could flesh out these points.
>
I'm pretty familiar with the literature on sex differences and
hesitation markers, and I see a few different issues here:

1)  Robin Lakoff's claims about women's vs. men's language, many of
them anticipated decades earlier by Jespersen, have been hard to
verify empirically.

2)  There is some indication (from an early paper by O'Barr and
Atkins to more recent work) that hesitancy phenomena correlate with
power asymmetry more than with sex differences.

3)  I don't see how it makes sense to say that using "powerless"
language, to the extent that we can sensibly classify hedges like
"sort of" as an instance of this, marks the speaker as elitist.  I
guess I'm not familiar with any research that shows that hedges
generally correlate with class in the way indicated.

4) Maybe the Post pulled their knee-jerk Kerry insult from the wrong
hat; they meant that waht Kerry's use of "sort of" illustrates are
his tendency to flip-flop and his non-macho and "nuanced" (not to
mention French-looking) property:  a *real* man doesn't just *sort
of* do anything, like ask the U.N. for permission to begin a
calamitous, unaffordable, and destabilizing war just because he don't
have evidence for his claims...   Not that there's anything wrong
with that.

Larry