Word order denotes relevance differences: The case of conjoined phrases with lexical gender.

Abstract

This work explores the order of linguistic references to the two genders (e.g., men and women vs. women and men). It argues that a gender is more likely to be mentioned first when it is perceived to have higher relevance in a context rather than lower relevance, and audiences assign stronger relevance to a party when the party is mentioned first rather than second.Studies 1-3 document the current prevalence of male-first conjoined phrases in the public (but not family) domain and link the pattern to historical changes in women's public presence over the 20 th century. Study 4 shows that contextual relevance cues affect the odds of first mention, such that people are more likely to refer to a woman before a man, when the two are in a primary school classroom rather than a corporate office. At the same time, Studies 4 and 5 find that people often choose to reproduce collectively preferred word order patterns (e.g., men and women). Studies 6 and 7 show that these choices matter because people assign more relevance to a party when it comes first rather than second in a conjoined phrase. Overall, this work offers theoretical grounding and empirical evidence for word order as a means of expressing and perpetuating gender stereotypes.Running Head: GENDER AND WORD ORDER 3 Word Order Denotes Relevance Differences: The Case of Conjoined Phrases with Lexical GenderWhen do people say "women and men" and when do they instead say "men and women"? And what does this choice communicate to audiences? This paper argues that word order choices are a function of the two genders' relative relevance in a context, and in turn, they are used by audiences as relevance cues. If this is true, word order choices can be a means of conveying and reinforcing gender beliefs about the two genders' relevance in a given context such as work or home. Communicating Gender Stereotypes through LanguageStereotypes are generalized beliefs about members of a social category. Language plays a critical role in forming, disseminating, and maintaining stereotypes (Kashima, Fiedler, & Freytag, 2008;Maass & Arcuri, 1996;Van Dijk, 1987;Wigboldus & Douglas, 2007). Stereotypes are sometimes transmitted blatantly via language, such as through racist or sexist language, derogatory labels, or jokes featuring certain groups (Carnaghi & Maass, 2007;Simon & Greenberg, 1996). Stereotypes can also be transmitted subtly and covertly.For example, people tend to describe positive actions of their ingroup members with personality adjectives ("she is charitable"), and their negative actions with concrete action verbs ("she yelled at the driver"). This pattern is reversed for outgroup members, such that people describe outgroup members' positive acts with concreate action verbs that isolate them as solo incidents ("she donated to a charity") and their negative actions with personality adjectives that imply global and stable qualities ("she is aggressive") (Maass, Salvi, Arcuri, & Semin, 1989;Maass, 1999 unspecified, or unknown (Silveira, 1980). Examples include wor...

A Language Index of Grammatical Gender Dimensions to Study the Impact of Grammatical Gender on the Way We Perceive Women and Men

“…There are different ways that this can happen. For example, at a syntactic level, word order may signal to readers or listeners specific semantic and societal hierarchies (e.g., Hegarty et al, 2016; Kesebir, 2017). Referring to a woman and a man or to a man and a woman is not perceived as being the same, and the resulting biased representations – toward the first person mentioned – have been well documented (Hegarty et al, 2016).…”

Grammar, Gender and Demonstratives in Lateralized Imagery for Sentences

“…Direct studies of this tendency (Carnaghi, Piccoli, Brambilla, & Bianchi, 2014;Hegarty, Watson, Fletcher, & McQueen, 2011;Kesebir, 2017) found that when participants were presented with a printed list of pairs of gender stereotyped occupations (e.g. "hairwasher-welder" or "welderhairwasher") and had to indicate whether they preferred the male-female order or the female-male mirror order, most participants preferred the male-female order, regardless of whether the occupations differed in status.…”

“…"hairwasher-welder" or "welderhairwasher") and had to indicate whether they preferred the male-female order or the female-male mirror order, most participants preferred the male-female order, regardless of whether the occupations differed in status. Such findings have been used to argue that word order is a means of expressing and perpetuating gender stereotypes (Kesebir, 2017).…”

Facilitation of the Understanding of Novels by Senior Pupils as a Problem of Psycholinguistics

“…In such a way aesthetic images are simulated, which can be called generalized (or typed, synthetic) due to the nature of their creation. Their development and interaction form the structure of a novel (Kesebir, 2017). The aesthetic images are formed on the basis of verbal (pronounced by speech forms, models or patterns) images which are localized within a context of the novel (Kalmykova & Kalmykov, 2015).…”

“…Psycholinguists pay considerable attention to a form of a novel, that, in their opinion, signifi cantly infl uences the reader's understanding of the text. A deep analysis of the views of scientists on the features of adequate understanding of novels we fi nd in a lot of scientifi c articles (Kesebir, 2017;Rubskyi, 2019).…”