Robin Lakoff

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robin Tolmach Lakoff [ leɪkɒf ] (born November 27, 1942 in Brooklyn , New York City , USA ) is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley . Her 1975 book Language and Woman's Place is often credited with establishing language and gender as research objects in linguistics and other disciplines.

Live and act

Lakoff was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1942.

Professional background

Lakoff earned a BA from Radcliffe College , an MA from Indiana University, and a PhD from Harvard University . She has taught at the University of California, Berkeley since 1972 .

As a student at Radcliffe College (in Cambridge, Massachusetts), Lakoff attended Noam Chomsky's courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a guest lecturer and established relationships with the MIT Linguistics Department. While Chomsky and his students were creating Generative Transformation Grammar at this time , Lakoff and other linguists investigated how external relationships influence the structure of language.

Others

Lakoff is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post . She received US-wide attention for a comment in TIME magazine entitled "Hillary Clinton's Emailgate Is an Attack on Women."

She was married to the linguist George Lakoff .

Language and Woman's Place

Lakoff's work Language and Woman's Place introduced many ideas about women's language into the field of sociolinguistics that are now often truisms. Her work has stimulated many different approaches to studying language and gender, including across national, class and ethnic boundaries. She helped establish the gender deficit model .

Lakoff proposes to distinguish women's language from men's language by a number of properties. The properties include:

  1. Heck expressions (hedges): phrases like "sort of", "kind of", "it seems like"
  2. Empty adjectives : "divine", "adorable", "gorgeous"
  3. Overpolite forms : "Would you mind ..." "... if it's not too much to ask" "Is it ok if ...?"
  4. More excuses : "I'm sorry, but I think that ..."
  5. Talk less often
  6. Avoid curses or strong expressions
  7. Refrain questions (Tag questions): “You don't mind eating this, do you?”.
  8. Hypercorrect grammar and pronunciation : Use of prestigious grammar and clear pronunciation
  9. Indirect requests : "Wow, I'm so thirsty." - actually a request for a drink
  10. Speak italics use tone to highlight certain words, such as "Sun", "very", "quite" (Speak in italics)

Lakoff's work is known for the fact that - in addition to gender - it also considers class, power relations and social justice. She developed the "Politeness Principle", in which she drafted three maxims, which are usually followed in interactions. These are: Don't push yourself, give the recipient a choice, and make the recipient feel good. She explained that these maxims are of paramount importance in a good interaction. If a speaker does not keep these maxims he is considered to be "knowingly disregarding the maxims".

The Language War

Lakoff's The Language War is a linguistic discourse analysis of current issues. It covers topics such as the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court Justice , the criminal case against OJ Simpson , the Lewinsky affair , and the phenomenon of political correctness . Lakoff discusses each topic against the background of the general thesis that language itself is a political battlefield.

Publications (selection)

  • The logic of politeness; or, minding your P's and Q's. In: C. Corum, T. Cedric Smith-Stark, A. Weiser (Eds.): Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society . Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago: Chicago 1973, pp. 292-305.
  • Language and Woman's Place . Harpercollins College Div 1975, ISBN 0-19-516757-0 .
  • What you can do with words: Politeness, pragmatics and performatives. In: R. Rogers, R. Wall, J. Murphy (Eds.) Proceedings of the Texas Conference on Performatives, Presuppositions and Implicatures. Center for Applied Linguistics: Arlington, Virginia 1977, pp. 79-106, accessed June 5, 2017.
  • When talk is not cheap . With Mandy Aftel. Warner 1985, ISBN 0-446-30070-5 .
  • Talking power . Basic Books 1990, ISBN 0-465-08358-7 .
  • Father knows best: the use and abuse of therapy in Freud's case of Dora. With J. Coyne. Teachers College Press 1993, ISBN 0-8077-6266-0 .
  • The Language War. University of California Press 2000, ISBN 0-520-22296-2 .
  • Identity à la carte: you are what you eat. In: Anna DeFina, Deborah Schiffrin, Michael Bamberg (Eds.): Discourse and Identity. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2006, ISBN 978-0521541916 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mary Bucholz: "Editor's Introduction." In: Mary Bucholz: Language and a Woman's Place: Text and Commentary. Oxford University Press: Oxford 2004, p. 3, ISBN 0-19-516-757-0 . “The publication of Robin Tolmach Lakoff's groundbreaking book Language and Women's Place (LWP) by Harper & Row in 1975 has long been heralded as the beginning of the linguistic subfield of language and gender studies, as well as ushering in the study of language and gender in related disciplines such as anthropology, communications studies, education, psychology, and sociology. "
  2. ↑ C. Todd White: On the pragmatics of an androgynous style of speaking (from a transsexual's perspective). In: World Englishes 17 (2), 1998, pp. 215-223, accessed June 5, 2017.
  3. ^ A b Sergio Bolaños Cuellar: Women's Language: A struggle to overcome inequality. Forma Y Función 19, 2006.
  4. ↑ Catherine Evans Davies: Interview with Robin Tolmach Lakoff. In: Journal of English Linguistics. 38, 2010, pp. 369-376, doi : 10.1177 / 0075424210384191 .
  5. ^ " Robin Lakoff, " In: Huffington Post , accessed June 3, 2017.
  6. ^ Robin Lakoff: Hillary Clinton's Emailgate Is an Attack on Women. TIME, October 31, 2016, accessed June 3, 2017.
  7. ↑ Biography - Lakoff, Robin Tolmach (1942-). In: Thompson Gale: Contemporary Authors. Gale Cengage, January 1, 2004.
  8. ^ Mary Bucholz: Editor's Introduction. In: Mary Bucholz (Ed.): Language and Woman's Place: Text and Commentary , Oxford University Press: Oxford 2004, pp. 11-13, ISBN 0-19-516-757-0 .
  9. ^ Virginia Vitzthum: "The Language War" by Robin Tolmach Lakoff. SALON, July 12, 2000, accessed June 3, 2017.
  10. ↑ Judith Rose House: Robin Tolmach Lakoff. 2000. "The Language War". Berkeley: University of California Press. In: California Linguistic Notes XXVI (1), Spring 2001.
personal data
SURNAME Lakoff, Robin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lakoff, Robin Tolmach
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American linguist
DATE OF BIRTH November 27, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn