"X's widower"

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:53 AM -0400 9/8/08, David Bowie wrote:
>From:    Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
>
>>The world has come a long way in the past third of a century or so. In
>>1975, Robin Lakoff's book Language and Women's Place had the following
>>to say about widows and widowers:
>
>Whenever i assign this article for one of my classes, i make it a point
>to discuss afterward that this article reflected (as Lakoff herself
>points out) the norms of a very narrow slice of the US populace, and it
>was also subject (as Lakoff doesn't point out) to issues of confirmation
>bias as she collected the examples.
>
>I think she was largely right in this observation

Largely right, if (i) we assume that the current asymmetry in use
obtained by googling "X's widower"/"a widower" vs. "X's widow"/"a
widow" would have been at least as strong in the mid-1970s *and* (ii)
if we assume that what Lakoff really meant in starring "John is
Mary's widower" was that it was considerably less likely than "Mary
is John's widow".  The latter (the confusion of what's relatively
hard to contextualize vs. what's actually ill-formed) was a general
problem with purported ungrammaticality judgments in most linguistic
work of that era, of whatever theoretical persuasion.

LH

>(though i wasn't
>really observing social norms like this at the time), FWIW, but it
>worries me when people refer to "Language and Woman's Place" as if it
>were an exhaustive study of USmerican sexism in language in the early 70s.
>
><snip>
>
>--
>David Bowie                               University of Central Florida
>     Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
>     house, there is too little; some must be purchased. If there is
>     chocolate in the house, there is too much; it must be consumed.
>
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org