Language and gender: An introduction By Mary M. Talbot (review)

BOOK NOTICES 201 idical operator and restriction as one explanation of the long-distance licensing of strong intensional predicates, possibly dispensing with the coindexation , and agreeing best with the original sentence. This is a useful book, but an introduction would have clarified the current state of knowledge about the relation between NC and NP, which, in this book, are studied from many sometimes unrelated perspectives . [Ahti Pietarinen University of Sussex.] Communicating gender. By Suzanne Romaine. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum , 1999. Pp. xiv, 406. According to the author, this book is concerned with 'how [to] communicate gender and why language and discourse play such important roles in the process' (xi). It covers not only the linguistic aspects ofthe language-and-gender relationship but also such topics as sexual harassment, transsexualism, when sex is rape, and advertising gender (one can easily argue that all such topics are relatable to communicative behavior, speech in particular). The book is divided into eleven chapters averaging over 30 pages and has both an extensive bibliography (357-82) and author and subject indexes. To facilitate its use as a textbook, Romaine concludes each chapter with exercises and discussion questions as well as an annotated bibliography and suggestions for further reading. R's book covers so much that a short book notice can only sample the riches ofits content. Afteridentifying the three so-called gender lenses that conspire to make the inequality between males and females seem natural (the male-female polarization, malecenteredness , and the belief that biology overrides culture), R proceeds to examine how the male identity has been constructed as the subject of discourse and how it is reflected in certain disciplines. For example , in Language, its nature, development, and origin (1922), Otto Jespersen asserted that women were quicker to answer than men; nonetheless, he valued men's slowness. And Simone de Beauvoir viewed femininity as inverted masculinity ([-male]). R then shows how some of the negative cultural beliefs concerning women are reflected in language. In Ch. 7 (189-220), R discusses to what extent and how language influences a child's socialization, e.g. 'how girls are brought up to talk and act like ladies', and looks at evidence showing that women and men conceive differently of terms having to do with sexual activity. If male and female identities are not only constructed but also transmitted through language, then how can one reform English and other languages to avoid the downgrading of women? Some of the arguments and strategies are discussed in Ch. 10, 'Language reform: A Msguided [sic] attempt to change herstory?' (291-321). Would replacing sexist forms with gender-neutral or genderequal forms, or respelling the words history and women as herstory and wimmin change the position of women in society? According to R, arguments about usage are nothing but arguments 'about who has the right to prescribe to whom' (293). The work concludes with Ch. 11, 'Writing feminist futures' (323-55), in which R offers an interesting survey of how women's world fares in different fictional genres and what sort of feminist criticism has been leveled against such scholarly disciplines as linguistics, anthropology, history, and psychology. To dojustice to the many observations R has made and to the discussion her work is bound to stimulate, one semester would not be enough. [Zdenek Salzmann , Northern Arizona University.] Language and gender: An introduction. By Mary M. Talbot. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Pp. xi, 257. The author of this textbook is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University ofSunderland. The style of the book is matter-of-fact but accessible to students who may not have had previous exposure to sociolinguistics or linguistic anthropology, and the text is liberally illustrated with examples. Instructors should find both these features a distinct advantage. The book consists of three parts. In the three chapters of Part 1, 'Preliminaries: Airing stereotypes and early models' (1-51), Talbot surveys some of the early work on language and gender and lays the foundation for the chapters to follow. She emphasizes the following points: (1) Her book is about gender as a social category, not a grammatical one. (2) How linguistic features function depends on the context of any given interaction...