Creating Gender in Texts. A study in Polish women talk
Dorota Brzozowska
Opole University
The objective of this paper is to show how it is possible to search for the traces of utterances determined by the sender's gender, to study the main features of the feminine world created in a talk, and to what extent the obtained picture is congruent with linguistic behaviours stereotypically associated with women.
The object of the analysis is a tape containing a twelve-minute fragment of a longer casual conversation among three Polish women (in their thirties, well educated, colleagues).
The applied research method combines the critical discourse analysis and the profiling provided by the practitioners of cognitivism. The critical discourse analysis is based, among other things, on the ideological assumptions about the importance of the relations of power in a discourse. One of the methods of identifying such relations is paying attention to the functional character of an utterance and to the ways in which the authors of texts talk about themselves and the surrounding world. For this purpose, the text was studied with respect to the vocabulary, pronouns as well as the use of the passive voice and impersonal forms.
The concept of profiling has been used in the linguistic analysis of the world represented in utterances. Profiling is defined as ‘a way of perceiving things from different points of view, the shaping of a notion depending on how a specified subject refers to it’. Profiles are ‘subjectively relativised variants of meaning; they result from the subjective conceptualization of the same object’. The paper focuses on subjecting the key notions appearing in the texts to profiling, the way in which the women talk about matters important to them, such as: themselves, the spouse, children, friends and work.
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