Item Details

Women are bitchy but men are sarcastic? Investigating gender and sarcasm

Issue: Vol 11 No. 3 (2017)

Journal: Gender and Language

Subject Areas: Gender Studies Linguistics

DOI: 10.1558/genl.27906

Abstract:

In this paper I investigate one aspect of the relationship between gender and mock politeness, focussing in particular on sarcastic behaviours. Previous research into sarcasm as an academic concept has suggested that it is more likely to be performed by males. In the data analysed here, there was no correlation between mock politeness and gender. However, there was a preference for labelling male mock polite behaviour as sarcastic, suggesting that the correlation is not between the academic concept of sarcasm and the male behaviour, but the way that mock polite behaviour is evaluated and labelled. The analysis draws on both corpus linguistics and survey data to further describe the relationship between the metapragmatic labels sarcastic and bitchy and gender of the performer.

Author: Charlotte Taylor

View Original Web Page

References :

Adjei, L. N. and Bosiwah, L. (2015) The use of indirect strategies among university students in Ghana: A case study of University of Cape Coast. International Journal of Languages and Linguistics 3: 90–101. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20150302.17

Baker, P. (2008) Sexed Texts: Language, Gender and Sexuality. London: Equinox.

Baker, P. (2010) Sociolinguistics and Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Baker, P. (2014) Using Corpora to Analyze Gender. London: Bloomsbury.

Baker, P. and McEnery, T. (2015) Who benefits when discourse gets democratised? Analysing a Twitter corpus around the British Benefits Street debate. In P. Baker and T. Mcenery (eds) Corpora and Discourse Studies: Integrating Discourse and Corpora 244–65. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431738_12

Baroni, M. and Bernardini, S. (2004) BootCaT: bootstrapping corpora and terms from the web. Retrieved on 26 January 2016 from https://tinyurl.com/clic-lrec2004.

Bowes, A. and Katz, A. (2011) When sarcasm stings. Discourse Processes 48: 215–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2010.532757

Boxer, D. (2002) Applying Sociolinguistics: Domains and Face-to-Face Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.15

Brezina, V., McEnery, T. and Wattam, S. (2015) Collocations in context: a new perspective on collocation networks. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 20: 139–73. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.20.2.01bre

Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. (1987) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cashman, H. R. (2006) Impoliteness in children’s interactions in a Spanish/English bilingual community of practice. Journal of Politeness Research 2: 217–46.

Cashman, H. R. (2008) ‘You’re screwed either way’: an exploration of code-switching, impoliteness and power. In D. Bousfield and M. Locher (eds) Impoliteness in Language 225–79. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/PR.2006.012

Colston, H. L. (2005)Social and cultural influences on figurative and indirect language. In H. L. Colston and A. N. Katz (eds) Figurative Language Comprehension: Social and Cultural Influences 99–130. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Colston, H. L. and Lee, S. Y. (2004) Gender differences in verbal irony use. Metaphor and Symbol 19: 289–306. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327868ms1904_3

Creusere, M. A. (1999) Theories of adults’ understanding and use of irony and sarcasm: applications to and evidence from research with children. Developmental Review 19: 213–62. https://doi.org/10.1006/drev.1998.0474

Culpeper, J. (1996) Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics 25: 349–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(95)00014-3

Culpeper, J. (2005) Impoliteness and entertainment in the television quiz show The Weakest Link. Journal of Politeness Research 1: 35–72. https://doi.org/10.1515/jplr.2005.1.1.35

Culpeper, J. (2011) Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975752

Culpeper, J., Bousfield, D. and Wichmann, A. (2003) Impoliteness revisited: with special reference to dynamic and prosodic aspects. Journal of Pragmatics 35: 1545–79. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00118-2

Culpeper, J., Marti, L., Mei, M., Nevala, M. and Schauer, G. (2010) Cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness: a study of impoliteness events reported by students in England, China, Finland, Germany and Turkey. Intercultural Pragmatics 7: 597–624. https://doi.org/10.1515/iprg.2010.027

Dauphin, V. 2000. Sarcasm in relationships. Unpublished manuscript, University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved from: http://ccat.sas.upehn.edu/plc/communication/valerie.htm.

Dress, M. L., Kreuz, R. J., Link, K. E. and Caucci, G. M. (2008) Regional variation in the use of sarcasm. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 27: 71–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X07309512

Drucker, A., Fein, O., Bergerbest, D. and Giora, R. (2014) On sarcasm, social awareness, and gender. Humor 27: 551–73. https://doi.org/10.1515/humor-2014-0092

Eelen, G. (2001) A Critique of Politeness Theories. Manchester: St Jermome Publishing.

Firth, J. R. (1957) Papers in Linguistics, 1934–1951. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

García, C. (2010) ‘Cuente conmigo’: the expression of sympathy by Peruvian Spanish speakers. Journal of Pragmatics 42: 408–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2009.05.024

Gibbs, R. W. (2000) Irony in talk among friends. Metaphor and Symbol 15: 5–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2000.9678862

Goffman, E. (1967) Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour. New York: Pantheon Books.

Holtgraves, T. (1997) Styles of language use: Individual and cultural variability in conversational indirectness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73: 624–37. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.73.3.624

Ivanko, S. L., Pexman, P. M. and Olineck, K. M. (2004) How sarcastic are you? Individual differences and verbal irony. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 23: 244–71.

Jakubíček, M., Kilgarriff, A., Kovář,V., Rychlý, P. and Suchomel, V. (2013) The TenTen Corpus Family. Paper presented at Corpus Linguistics Conference 2013, Lancaster, July.

Jorgensen, J. (1996) The functions of sarcastic irony in speech. Journal of Pragmatics 26: 613–34. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(95)00067-4

Katz, A., Piasecka, I. and Toplak, M. (2001) Comprehending the sarcastic comments of males and females. Poster presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Orlando, FL.

Katz, A. N., Blasko, D. G. and Kazmerski, V. A. (2004) Saying what you don’t mean: social influences on sarcastic language processing. Current Directions in Psychological Science 13: 186–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.00304.x

Kreuz, R. and Glucksberg, S. (1989) How to be sarcastic: the echoic reminder theory of verbal irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology 8: 374–86. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.118.4.374

Lampert, M. D. and Ervin-Tripp, S. M. (2006) Risky laughter: teasing and self-directed joking among male and female friends. Journal of Pragmatics 38: 51–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2005.06.004

Leech, G. (1983) The Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.

Leech, G. (1997) Introducing corpus annotation. In R. Garside, G. Leech and A. McEnery (eds) Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora 1–18. London: Longman.

Leech, G. (2014) The Pragmatics of Politeness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195341386.001.0001

Locher, M. A. and Watts, R. J. (2005) Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research 1: 9–33. https://doi.org/10.1515/jplr.2005.1.1.9

Milanowicz, A. (2013) Irony as a means of perception through communication channels: emotions, attitude and IQ related to irony across gender. Psychology of Language and Communication 17: 115–32. https://doi.org/10.2478/plc-2013-0008

Mills, S. (2009) Impoliteness in a cultural context. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 1047–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2008.10.014

Mumsnet (2015) About us. Retrieved on 12 May 2015 from www.mumsnet.com/info/aboutus.

Nelms, J. (2002) Responding to sarcasm and irony. Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the International Society of Humor Studies, Forli, Italy, 7 July.

Partington, A. (2004) Corpora and discourse: a most congruous beast. In A. Partington, J. Morley L. and Haarman (eds) Corpora and Discourse 11–20. Bern: Peter Lang.

Partington, A., Duguid, A. and Taylor, C. (2013) Patterns and Meanings in Discourse: Corpus-Assisted Case Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.55

Partington, A. (2014) Mind the gaps: the role of corpus linguistics in researching absences. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 19: 118–46. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.19.1.05par

Phillips, M. (1985) Aspects of Text Structure: An Investigation of the Lexical Organisation of Text. Oxford: Elsevier Science Publishers.

Richardson, D. S. and Green, L. R. (2003) Defining direct and indirect aggression: the Richardson Conflict Response Questionnaire. International Review of Social Psychology 16: 11–30.

Rockwell, P. A. (2006) Sarcasm and other Mixed Messages: The Ambiguous Ways People Use Language. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

Rockwell, P. and Theriot, E. M. (2001) Culture, gender, and gender mix in encoders of sarcasm: a self-assessment analysis. Communication Research Reports 18: 44–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/08824090109384781

Romero-Trillo, J. (2008) Introduction: pragmatics and corpus linguistics: a mutualistic entente. In J. Romero-Trillo (ed.) Pragmatics and Corpus Linguistics: A Mutualistic Entente 1–10. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110199024.1

Rychlý, P. and Kilgarriff, A. (2007) An efficient algorithm for building a distributional thesaurus. Retrieved on 12 May 2015 from www.kilgarriff.co.uk/Publications/2007-RychlyKilg-ACL-thesauruses.pdf.

Scott, M. (2008) WordSmith Tools, Version 5, Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.

Scott, M. and Tribble, C. (2006) Textual Patterns: Key Words and Corpus Analysis in Language Education. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.22

Spencer-Oatey, H. (2000) Rapport management: a framework for analysis. In H. Spencer-Oatey (ed.) Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures 11–46. London: Continuum.

Spencer-Oatey, H. (2002) Managing rapport in talk: using rapport sensitive incidents to explore the motivational concerns underlying the management of relations. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 529–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(01)00039-X

Spencer-Oatey, H. (2008) Face,(im) politeness and rapport. In H. Spencer-Oatey (ed.) Culturally Speaking: Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory 11–47. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Subtirelu, N. (2014) Beyond bossy: more on our gendered characterizations of leadership and authority. Blog post, 19 May. Retrieved on 2 August 2017 from https://linguisticpulse.com/2014/05/19/beyond-bossy-more-on-our-gendered-characterizations-of-leadership-and-authority.

Taylor, C. (2011) Negative politeness features and impoliteness: a corpus-assisted approach. In B. Davies, A. Merrison and M. Haugh (eds) Situated Politeness 209–31. London: Continuum.

Taylor, C. (2012) And there it isn’t: (how) can we access the absent using CADS? Paper presented at Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies International Conference, Bologna, September.

Taylor, C. (2013) Searching for similarity using corpus-assisted discourse studies. Corpora 8: 81–113. https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2013.0035

Taylor, C. (2015a) Mock politeness in English and Italian: a corpus-assisted study of the metalanguage of sarcasm and irony. Unpublished PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

Taylor, C. (2015b) Beyond sarcasm: the metalanguage and structures of mock politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 87: 127–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.08.005

Taylor, C. (2015c) Why are women so bitchy? Mock politeness & gender. Paper presented at Corpus Linguistics 2015, Lancaster University, 20–24 July.

Watts, R., Ide, S. and Ehrlich, K. (1992) Introduction. In R. Watts, S. Ide and K. Ehrlich (eds) Politeness in Language: Study in its History, Theory and Practice 1–17. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Widdowson, H. (2004) Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470758427

Wilson, D. (2013) Irony comprehension: a developmental perspective. Journal of Pragmatics 59: 40–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.09.016