28.3804, Review: English; Sociolinguistics: Kaplan (2016)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-3804. Fri Sep 15 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.3804, Review: English; Sociolinguistics: Kaplan (2016)

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Helen Aristar-Dry, Robert Coté,
                                   Michael Czerniakowski)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Clare Harshey <clare at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2017 14:27:50
From: Maria Assunta Ciardullo [ciardullomarie at gmail.com]
Subject: Women Talk More Than Men

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36289837


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-2171.html

AUTHOR: Abby  Kaplan
TITLE: Women Talk More Than Men
SUBTITLE: ... And Other Myths about Language Explained
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Maria Assunta Ciardullo, University of Calabria

SUMMARY

“Women talk more than men… and other myths about language explained” is a book
written by Abby Kaplan and published in 2016. The book is made up of ten
chapters grouped in three macro sections, tackling language from different
perspectives.   

The paratextual apparatus of the work is made up of a list of figures, a list
of tables, the acknowledgements, an introduction written by the author and ten
different essays grouped in three thematic sections followed by an exhaustive
appendix concerning some fundamental notions of statistics. At the very end of
the book, we find three different indexes, two of them regard the languages
and the people mentioned throughout the text and finally there is a general
alphabetical list.

The introduction presents the scientific reasons that lead the author to write
this book and that are smartly summed up in the title, “Women talk more than
men… and other myths about language explained”. In fact, in the introduction
Kaplan states that the book was written to face and explain some popular
beliefs about language, from the aprioristic assumption of linguistic sex
differences to the effects of text messaging. Sometimes, these common beliefs
about language are responsible for imprecise news shared by the media and the
author’s main aim is to illustrate their ascientific basis. Kaplan’s second
intention coincides with the composition of a book concerning linguistic
methodologies in order to provide a general overview of the techniques of
elicitation and analysis used by linguists.  

Each chapter of the book deals with a specific language-related topic and
starts with a brief summary of the area explored, describing common beliefs
about language and confronting them with what linguists know to be sure and
experimentally proved. The very end of each chapter deals with a specific case
study that responds to the specific question put at the core of the section. 

As mentioned above, the book is made up of three thematic sections: the first
one deals with some non-standard and non-human languages such as sign language
and non-standard dialects; the second section explores the acquisition of
language and the consequences of bi-/pluri-linguism and the last thematic
group brings together four essays that examine the relationship between how
language is used and some social aspects of daily life. 

The first essay, “A dialect is a collection of mistakes”, explores the
concepts of standard language and non-standard varieties and specifically
investigates the common belief that considers some dialects better than
others. The chapter focuses on the dichotomy composed of Standard English and
African American English (AAE): the first language commonly represents the
proper embodiment of linguistic and grammatical rules whereas AAE is conceived
as a non-standard dialect that does not conform to grammar. This assumption is
contradicted by the author who shows that all varieties, whether standard or
not, obey grammatical rules that are clearly different for the standard and
non-standard forms. At the end of this first essay, a case study concerning
education is presented: in fact, Kaplan examines the best didactic ways to
teach the standard dialect of a language to students who speak a non-standard
dialect. As the author states, this question was addressed by the Oakland
Board of Education in 1996 and the resolution adopted on the issue became then
a topic of national debate in the United States of America: in December of
1996, in fact the Oakland Board of Education came to the conclusion that the
best way to teach the standard dialect to students who spoke a non-standard
dialect was to acknowledge the presence of non-standard varieties – explicitly
instructed - within the classroom.

“Sign language is skilled charades” is the second essay of the book. It deals
with sign language and specifically with two wrong beliefs diffused among
people: first of all, it is believed that signing is a visual representation
of the surrounding spoken language and that it doesn’t have its own
grammatical structure. Secondly, sign language is often perceived as something
less than a language, just a universal “skilled charade”. These two beliefs
are evidently incompatible because if we assume that sign language is
universal, it is illogical to believe that it is a direct representation of so
many different spoken languages. Sign language is a vivid form of non-verbal
communication and its use is not reserved to deaf people only but is also used
in communities who have had significant experiences with deaf subjects
(Perlmutter 1986). One example mentioned by the author concerns the population
of Martha’s Vineyard – whose speakers were already used for William Labov’s
sociolinguistic work - where a considerable amount of people were deaf until
the twentieth century. Here the community communicated using their own sign
language which was known by deaf and hearing people alike. Moreover, the
assumption summed up in the title is further denied towards the end of the
section: in fact, the author gives attention to some researches that suggest
that both signed and spoken languages use iconic symbols in order to refer
more directly to the meanings they’re connected to and it appears that it’s
definitely easier to create an iconic symbol using gestures rather than
sounds.

The third essay, “Chimpanzees can talk to us”, deals with human linguistic
interaction with animals. Most of the time, people use language with animals
for commands, for requests of attention, etc. Animals do respond but in
different ways depending on the species; especially mammals and dolphins can
be trained in order to obey orders given in human language. Human voice sound
has specific acoustic features because of the particular articulatory shape of
the phonatory system that differs from the one owned by animals. Even
anthropomorphic apes, anatomically close to humans, do not possess the
physiological apparatus necessary to produce human sounds. In the history of
language experiments with animals, there was just one case with the chimpanzee
Viki that has shown that she had actually learnt four words, i.e. mama, papa,
cup, and up. After that experiment, researchers have suggested two different
types of systems that might ease apes’ learning to use human language: the
first one is made up of word-like symbols represented in physical way that
apes can manipulate, and the second is constituted by sign. The last type of
system mentioned has aroused a lot of interest over the years and has created
a widespread belief that monkeys can learn sign language. Throughout the
chapter, Kaplan illustrates the most important studies conducted upon apes and
shows that animals involved in these researches were very intelligent and that
they used language in a different way than humans. The author clearly states
that animals are not inferior to men but that what we call language comes to
be very specific to humans. 

The second section’s name is “Language Learning” and is made up of three
articles. “Children have to be taught language” is the first article and
explores many common opinions about first-language acquisition. It is widely
believed that language is explicitly taught to children by their parents and
great importance is given to their role. This belief is especially spread in
the Western world where parents-as-language-teachers are highly valued and
where they are expected to train their children on words for elements
belonging to their reality (Brown and Hanlon 1970). The author of the book
cleverly shows that parents are not always responsible for language teaching
and that this practice is very culture-specific. Therefore, societies have
dissimilar ideas about how children are supposed to learn language. What’s
more is that the quality of parents’ teaching affects children’s language
acquisition and recently many programs have been founded in order to fill this
linguistic gap by changing instructors’ behaviour.  

The second article of the second section is called “Adults can’t learn a new
language”. It examines adults’ acquisition of a second language. If learning a
first language is normally uniform across individuals who become fluent and
competent speakers of their native language at the end of the process,
learning a second language does not happen in the same way. In fact, second
languages are not expected to be learnt in all societies; in many countries,
speaking a second language is a very rare skill whereas speakers belonging to
other communities continue to learn multiple languages until adulthood.
Moreover, the results of this process can vary a lot, in fact speakers of a
second language can reach a proficiency level or can be characterized by their
native accent even after years of practice. The author supports her point of
view with the analysis of a case study focused on whether there is a ‘critical
period’ for second-language learning, i.e. a specific age range outside of
which it’s more difficult to learn a new language with a native-like fluency.
At the end of the essay, the author mentions different factors, apart from
age, that affect how well a person will be able to learn a second language.
These elements explain several age-related differences in second-language
acquisition.

“Being bilingual makes you smarter (or dumber)” is the following article and
focuses the attention on bilingualism and multilingualism. This essay
specifically examines the advantages or disadvantages intrinsic to
bilingualism by presenting the different typologies of the bilingual
phenomenon: Kaplan points out that it is impossible to give an univocal
definition of this linguistic condition and that is better to talk about
different ways of being bilingual. Even though a consistent literature
research has tried to answer the question of whether bilingualism is good or
bad, a definitive response has not been formulated yet. In fact, even if
several studies conducted at the beginning of the twentieth century recognized
a vast range of cognitive benefits, more recent studies have proved that
bilinguals have a smaller vocabulary in each language than a child monolingual
in that language. It has been also shown that bilinguals are slightly slower
at retrieving words than monolinguals. Kaplan concludes the study by affirming
that bilingualism has positive effects on different domains such as
metalinguistic ability and executive control but, at the same time, she
observes that its beneficial influence can be affected by social and cultural
circumstances.

The third section “Language in use” is made up of four essays. The first is
called “Women talk more than men” and gives the title to the entire book. It
focuses on the common belief that women and men speak differently and, more
precisely, that women talk more than men and that feminine speech is more
polite, more correct and less confident than the masculine one. Obviously,
these assumptions must be verified and even then, their results must be
tackled considering several social and contextual factors. At first, Kaplan
takes into consideration some of the crucial studies on women’s language
(Jespersen 1922, Lakoff 1975, Tannen 1990, Trudgill 1983) and explores some of
the typical, yet not empirical, differences between women’s and men’s
language. After this brief overview of gender-related studies, the author
demonstrates that sex is an important sociolinguistic variable as far as
concerns speech and that the social context in which language is used is very
important. Two case studies are presented: the first one deals with
quantitative aspects of women’s speech and the second one focuses on the use
of question tags by women and men. The first case study mentions the results 
achieved by Frances 1979 that, surprisingly, shows that men talk more than
women and that sex is just one of many variables, such as social expectations
and power relationships, that affect how, and how much, people talk. The
second case study examines the use of question tags within women’s and men’s
speech starting from Lakoff 1975’s findings. Lakoff found out that women
tended to use more question tags and other devices that indicated uncertainty
than men; more recent researches have shown that the use of those linguistic
elements highly depends on contextual factors. At the end of the essay, Kaplan
does state that linguists need to be very careful when linking linguistic
production with social meanings.

The following essay, “Texting makes you illiterate”, analyses some
technological means of communication. Over the last fifty years, many
technological improvements and developments have been made as far as concerns
communication and, more specifically, language transmission. When people use
technology to transmit language, they’re aware that its form is not neutral;
in fact, this medium influences how a message is formulated and conveyed due
to the fact that writing is a permanent – and editable - act. Also in the
past, telegrams influenced the way in which messages were produced because
they were priced on word; so, senders used as few words as possible giving the
birth to the so-called telegraphic style. Over the last years, it has been
believed that technology could influence people’s language even when they’re
not using it. Kaplan tries to deconstruct this myth by analysing some of the
major worries related to the use of old and new technologies. After that, she
focuses on text messaging because it’s a widely investigated topic and because
it represents one of the most used means of technological communication. At
the end, the essay considers some studies that investigate whether texting
affects a person’s literacy skills.  

The tenth essay’s name is “The most beautiful language is French”. It tackles
the common belief that specific languages are particularly fit to certain
uses, mainly inscribed within artistic or scientific domains. So, the main
focus of this chapter is represented by the aesthetic evaluation of languages
and dialects of a language. These judgements do not have linguistic basis so
it’s impossible to give a proper (socio-)linguistic definition of a good or a
bad language. Despite some accounts, such as that of Hales 2009, that consider
specific languages more euphonic than others, it’s important to keep in mind
that these opinions do not have a scientific foundation and that there are not
linguistic justifications for condemning particular languages or dialects to
extinction.

“My language limits my thoughts” is the last chapter of the third thematic
section and constitutes also the last investigation of the book. It is based
on the examination of the relationship between human language and the
organisation of thoughts and investigates the common opinion that linguistic
forms shape the way we think. The relation between language and thought has
been massively studied from different perspectives (i.e. linguistically,
philosophically and psychologically) and, especially in recent times, has led
the public to think that politicians, advertisers and others use language in
persuasive and misleading ways. It has also been claimed that certain
languages are well suited to certain purposes because of the types of thought
they inspire. If true, this idea is very alarming and can condemn some
languages to oblivion. Kaplan cleverly shows that the nature of the
relationship between language and thought is very difficult to study but the
positive aspect is represented by a noteworthy number of experimental studies
that show whether, and to what degree, language shapes thoughts.     

At the end of the book the reader finds a thematic appendix that contains
useful information about the quantitative methods used in the social sciences.
The first part of the chapter lists the most used quantitative methodologies,
whereas the second part gives an overview of statistical testing. The third
and last part of the appendix focuses instead on the most important issues in
conducting social research, i.e. the experimental design of a study, the
choice and the construction of an empirical corpus, etc. 

EVALUATION

“Women talk more than men… and other myths about language explained”
constitutes a brilliant and a very well-written book about various linguistic
topics. Kaplan uses a clear style to illustrate some of the most widespread
beliefs about language.

The introduction works very well as a preliminary presentation of the contents
developed in the volume: the author starts this section by mentioning some of
the studies that inspired her to write the book and progressively arrives at
the description of the structure of every single essay included in the work.
All of the ten articles deal with specific language-related topics and all
begin with a broad overview of the area followed by the explicit mention of
some of the common beliefs that concern language. Afterwards the author
presents scientific evidence provided by the most recent linguistic studies in
order to deconstruct epistemologically those beliefs. Towards the end of each
study, a case study is presented: here Kaplan analyses several published
studies in order to give the reader a critical investigation of the
methodologies adopted and of the results achieved. Each chapter is concluded
by two sections, namely “For further reflections” and “For further reading”,
that contain bibliographic suggestions for the reader who wants to deepen the
themes tackled in the essays. As shown, the introduction is very functional to
the understanding of the general contents examined throughout the book.

Another remarkable aspect of “Women talk more than men… and other myths about
language explained” is represented by the internal structure given to all the
ten essays. As described above, each chapter develops a specific
language-related topic in a deductive way in order to offer a progressive
analysis and a cogent deconstruction of diffused and incorrect beliefs about
language. 

Moreover, the organisation of the contents in three ad hoc macro-sections is
efficacious because it facilitates the comprehension of the topics that are
gradually presented and examined.  

Another valuable point is represented by the coverage of a broad range of
linguistic topics and by the mention of several case studies: these two
aspects qualify the volume as an ideal reading for students in Linguistics and
for whoever wants to reflect on language myths and on their ascientific basis.

The statistical appendix constitutes the last notable feature of Kaplan’s
work: the section does not examine in depth the quantitative methodologies
used in social sciences but describes the fundamental concepts through which
linguistic evidences come to be considered significant. 

Over all, “Women talk more than men… and other myths about language explained”
represents a noteworthy book about language and related popular beliefs that
are smartly analysed and scientifically explained by the author with the aid
of cogent bibliography and case studies.

REFERENCES

Baron, Dennis. A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution.
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009. 

Boroditsky, Lera. Does language shape thought?: Mandarin and English speakers’
conceptions of time. Cognitive Psychology, 43(1): 1-22, 2001.

Brown, Roger, and Camille Hanlon. Derivational complexity and order of
acquisition in child speech. In J.R. Hayes, editor, Cognition and the
Development of Language, chapter 1, pages. 11-53. Wiley, New York, NY, 1971.

Flege, James Emil, Grace H. Yeni-Komshian, and Serena Liu. Age constraints on
second-language acquisition. Journal of Memory and Language, 41(1): 78-104,
1999.

Frances, Susan J. Sex differences in nonverbal behaviour. Sex roles, 5(4):
519-535, 1979.

Hales, Dianne. La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most
Enchanting Language. Broadway Books, New York, NY, 2009.

Jespersen, Otto. Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin, chapter XII:
The Woman, pages 237-254. George Allen & Unwin, London, 1922.

Kavé, Gitit, Nitza Eyal, Aviva Shorek, and Jiska Cohen-Mansfield.
Multilingualism and cognitive state in the oldest old. Psychology and Aging,
23(1): 70-78, 2008.

Lakoff, Robin. Language and Woman’s Place. Harper & Row, New York, NY, 1975.

Oakland Board of Education. No. $597-0063, December 1996. Original resolution
available at http://linguistlist.org/topics/ebonics/ebonics-res1.html.

Perlmutter, David M. No nearer to the soul. Natural Language and Linguistic
Theory, 4(4): 515-523, 1986.

Premark, Ann James, and David Premark. Teaching language to an ape. Scientific
American, 227: 92-99, October 1972.

Tannen, Deborah. You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation.
HarperCollins, New York, NY, 1990.

Trudgill, Peter. On dialect: Social and Geographical Perspectives, chapter 10:
Sex and covert prestige: Linguistic change in the urban dialect of Norwich,
pages 169-185. Blackwell, Oxford, 1983.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Maria Assunta Ciardullo is a Ph.D. student in Linguistics at the University of
Calabria and has been a Visiting Ph.D. student at the University of York (UK).
Her Ph.D. project is inscribed within the fields of Forensic Sociolinguistics
and Women's Studies and deals with the socio-pragmatic analysis of criminal
women's wiretapped voices. Her research interests include Forensic
Linguistics, Forensic Phonetics, Gender Studies and Sociolinguistics.





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
            http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-28-3804	
----------------------------------------------------------