Senior Assist. Prof. Dr. Irena Dimova

Lectures: 30

ECTS credits: 3

 

 

This course focuses on the relationship between language and gender and explores it through the analysis of different sociolinguistic approaches, methodologies and findings from empirical studies. It traces the development of language and gender research from its earlier stages (e.g. the social dialect studies of the 60s and 70s, variationist sociolinguistics, deficit theory, dominance theory, difference theory) towards its more recent social constructionist shapes. Special emphasis is laid on how these perspectives approach and account for the existence of gender differences in communication, that is, differences in the way women and men use language. Evaluation is based on a presentation of assigned readings and a small-scale survey of spontaneous discourse.