Non una donna in politica, ma una donna politica: Women’s Political Language in an Italian Context

This chapter focuses on the metaphorical content of Italian women politicians’ speech to investigate if particularly ‘feminine’ language traits (see Jesperson 1922: 237–54) can be identified, or whether, as the driving hypothesis of this study posits, it is ministerial remit that conditions the use of a politician’s language more than any other single factor. This hypothesis is tested by examining a corpus of speeches, press interviews and press releases of five women ministers in the Prodi-led administration in Italy, covering the period June 2006 to May 2007

Gender differences in conversation topics, 1922–1990

Gender differences in conversation topics were first systematically studied in 1922 by Henry Moore, who theorized that the gender differences in topic choice he observed in a field observation study would persist over time, as they were manifestations of men's and women's “original natures.” In this paper, I report a 1990 replication of Moore's study, in which similar but smaller gender differences in topic choice are found. In order to explore further the apparent trend toward smaller gender differences, reports of quantitative observation studies conducted between 1922 and 1990 are examined. Other explanations besides change over time—such as variations in conversation setting and audience, target populations, and researcher's intentions—may account for the decline in gender differences in topic choice. Social influences are seen more clearly in the discourse about gender differences in conversation than in gender differences in conversation topics themselves.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45599/1/11199_2004_Article_BF00289744.pd

Graphic loans: East Asia and beyond

The national languages of East Asia (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) have made extensive use of a type of linguistic borrowing sometimes referred to as a 'graphic loan'. Such loans have no place in the conventional classification of loans based on Haugen (1950) or Weinreich (1953), and research on loan word theory and phonology generally overlooks them. The classic East Asian phenomenon is discussed and a framework is proposed to describe its mechanism. It is argued that graphic loans are more than just 'spelling pronunciations', because they are a systematic and widespread process, independent of but not inferior to phonological borrowing. The framework is then expanded to cover a range of other cases of borrowing between languages to show that graphic loans are not a uniquely East Asian phenomenon, and therefore need to be considered as a major category of loan