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Gendered Speech: A Sociolinguistic Study of Conversations between Men and Women in Biblical Narrative

What it is about

A variationist (Labovian) study of whether biblical narrative encodes gender in speech. Every mixed-gender conversation in the narrative books is coded for forms of address, self-reference, overt subjects, the first element of the clause, verb conjugations, subordinate clauses and vocabulary, and the counts are compared by gender, then by relationship (family, male authority and female subject, female authority, strangers) and against single-gender conversations. Women address men with titles ("my lord", "the king") and deferential third person ("your maidservant") 66 times; a man does so to a woman once. Women use first- and second-person forms equally (about 15.5% of words each), men twice as many second- as first-person forms. Men put questions to women twice as often (12.1% vs 5.6% of clauses), mostly real questions, while women's are mostly rhetorical or indirect. Women speaking to men use more past-oriented verbs (qatal, wayyiqtol: background and justification), men more future-oriented ones (yiqtol, imperative, jussive); status shifts these rates, and female authority figures speak in the "male" pattern.

Ideas

For Mova

I1–I3 are columns and rules for tools/macula/src/prag.rs (it already splits frame and quote and carries speech), written up in Discourse: narrative, speech and the shape of a text (direct speech, politeness). I2 also gives the Torah dictionary sense notes for עֶבֶד and אָדוֹן (10-lexicon.md). I4 refines the off-by-default rhetorical rule.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{hare2018gendered,
  title = {{Gendered Speech: A Sociolinguistic Study of Conversations between Men and Women in Biblical Narrative}},
  author = {Hare, Laura},
  booktitle = {TSpace (University of Toronto)},
  year = {2018},
  url = {http://hdl.handle.net/1807/92117}
}

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