Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-fx4k7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-18T07:54:45.778Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Gender indexicality in the Native Americas: Contributions to the typology of social indexicality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2012

Luke Fleming
Luke Fleming
Affiliation:
Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University, 1 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003lf785@nyu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article provides a global survey of categorical gender indexicality that reveals the near exclusive presence of the phenomenon in the languages of the Native Americas, a fact for which a historical rationale is offered. The survey is helpful in contributing to our understanding of social indexicality in three ways. First, while two-place (or relational) social indexicals, like honorifics, have been well studied, one-place (or absolute) social indexicals have not. Systems of gender indexicality, overwhelmingly of the absolute type, thus help flesh out the typology of social indexicality. Second, the survey illustrates the remarkable complementarity of semantic gender, as a category of denotation, and social gender, as an aspect of identity indexed in discourse, in particular as these overlap in cases of gender deixis. Finally, the study of gender indexicality in the Native Americas reveals that not all gender indexicality is equally gender performative. A number of diagnostics of a categorical type—from ubiquitous rule-governed regularity of patterning to quotability—illustrate that in the cases discussed, forms are highly presupposing, not performative, of the social gender of the speech participants they index. (Gender, indexicality, deixis, Native Americas)*

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , June 2012 , pp. 295 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Adam, Lucien, & Henry, V. (1880). Arte y vocabulario de la Lengua Chiquita. Paris: Maisonneuve.Google Scholar
Agha, Asif (1993). Grammatical and indexical convention in honorific discourse. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 3(2):131–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Agha, Asif (1996). Schema and superposition in spatial deixis. Anthropological Linguistics 38(4):643–82.Google Scholar
Agha, Asif (1998). Stereotypes and registers of honorific language. Language in Society 27:151–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aikhenvald, Alexandra (2000). Classifiers: A typology of noun categorization devices. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Arruda, Rinaldo S. V. (1998). Rikbaktsa. Online: http://pib.socioambiental.org/en/povo/rikbaktsa/print.Google Scholar
Balmori, Clemente H. (1967). Habla mujeril y varonil en lenguas diferenciadas de Suramérica. Estudios de Área Lingüística Indígena 3:61–75.Google Scholar
Bodine, Ann (1975). Sex differentiation in language. In Thorne, Barrie & Henley, Nancy (eds.), Language and sex: Difference and dominance, 130–51. Rowley, MA: Newbury.Google Scholar
Bogoras, Waldemar (1922). Chuckchee. In Boas, Franz (ed.), Handbook of American Indian languages, vol. 2, 631–903. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Bradley, John (1988). Yanyuwa: ‘Men speak one way, women speak another.’ Aboriginal Linguistics 1:126–34.Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope (1980). How and why women are more polite: Some evidence from a Mayan community. In McConnell-Ginet, Sally, Borker, Ruth, & Furman, Nelly (eds.), Women and language in literature and society, 111–36. New York: Prager.Google Scholar
Brown, Roger, & Gilman, Albert (1960). The pronouns of power and solidarity. In Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.), Style in language, 253–76. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chamberlain, Alexander F. (1912). Women's languages. American Anthropologist 14(3):579–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coates, Jennifer (1986). Women, men, and language: A sociolinguistic account of sex differences in language. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard (1976). Linguistic politeness axes: Speaker-addressee, speaker-referent, speaker-bystander. Pragmatics Microfiche 1(7):1–12.Google Scholar
Corbett, Greville (1991). Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corbett, Greville (2005). Systems of gender assignment. In Haspelmath, Martin, Dryer, Matthew S., Gil, David, & Comrie, Bernard (eds.), The world atlas of language structures, 134–37. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dobson, Rose (1997). Gramática prática com exercícios da língua Kayabi. Cuiabá, Mato Grosso: Sociedade Internacional de Lingüística.Google Scholar
Dunn, Michael (2000). Chukchi women's language: A historical-comparative perspective. Anthropological Linguistics 42(3):305–28.Google Scholar
Dziebel, German V. (2007). The genius of kinship: The phenomenon of human kinship and the global diversity of kinship terminology. Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press.Google Scholar
Einaudi, Paula F. (1976). A grammar of Biloxi. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Ekka, Francis (1972). Men's and women's speech in Kurux. Linguistics 81:25–31.Google Scholar
Errington, Joseph (1988). Structure and style in Javanese: A semiotic view of linguistic etiquette. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Faust, Norma (1963). El lenguaje de los hombres y mujeres en Cocama. Perú Indígena 10 (22/23):115–17.Google Scholar
Flannery, Regina (1946). Men's and women's speech in Gros Ventre. IJAL 12:133–35.Google Scholar
Fortune, David L., & Fortune, Gretchen (1975). Karajá men's-women's speech differences with social correlates. Arquivos de Anatomia e Antropologia 1:109–24.Google Scholar
Frazer, James G. (1900). A suggestion as to the origin of gender in language. The Fortnightly Review 73:79–90.Google Scholar
Furfey, Paul H. (1944). Men's and women's language. The American Catholic Sociological Review 5(4):218–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galeote Tormo, Jesús (1993). Manityana auki besïro: Gramática moderna de la Lengua Chiquitana y vocabulario básico. Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Los Huérfanos.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Joseph H. (1963). Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In Greenberg, Joseph H. (ed.), Universals of language, 73–113. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Haas, Mary (1944). Men's and women's speech in Koasati. Language 20(3):142–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, Kira (2003). Exceptional speakers: Contested and problematized gender identities. In Holmes, Janet & Meyerhoff, Miriam (eds.), The handbook of language and gender, 353–80. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heath, Jeffrey; Merlan;, Francesca & Rumsey, Alan (eds.) (1982). Languages of kinship in aboriginal Australia. Sydney: University of Sydney.Google Scholar
Hoff, Berend (1994). Island Carib, an Arawakan language which incorporated a lexical register of Cariban origin, used to address men. In Bakker, Peter & Mous, Maarten (eds.), Mixed languages: 15 case studies in language intertwining, 161–68. Amsterdam: IFOTT.Google Scholar
Huckett, Joyce (1974). Notes on Iduna grammar. In Healey, Alan (ed.), Three studies in languages of Eastern Papua, 63–133. (Workpapers in Papua New Guinea languages 3.) Ukarumpa: Summer Institute of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Hunt, Richard J. (1940). Mataco grammar. Tucuman: Instituto de Antropologia.Google Scholar
Kibort, Anna, & Corbett, Greville G. (2008). Gender. Grammatical features. Online: http://www.grammaticalfeatures.net/features/gender.html.Google Scholar
Kimball, Geoffrey (1987). Men's and women's speech in Koasati: A reappraisal. IJAL 53(1):30–38.Google Scholar
Kirton, Jean F. (1988). Men's and women's dialects. Aboriginal Linguistics 1:111–25.Google Scholar
Kuiper, Albertha, & Pickett, Velma B. (1974). Personal pronouns in Diuxi Mixtec. SIL Mexico Workpapers 1:53–58.Google Scholar
Lakoff, Robin T. (2004). Language and woman's place. In Mary Bucholtz (ed.), Language and woman's place: Text and commentaries, 39–102. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. (1978). Pragmatics and social deixis: Reclaiming the notion of conventional implicature. In Chiarello, Christine et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 206–23. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society.Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manning, Paul (2001). On social deixis. Anthropological Linguistics 43(1):54–100.Google Scholar
Marlett, Stephen A. (1993). Zapotec pronoun classification. IJAL 59(1):82–101.Google Scholar
McConnell-Ginet, Sally (1988). Language and gender. In Newmeyer, Frederick J. (ed.), Linguistics: The Cambridge survey, vol. 4: Language: The socio-cultural context, 75–99. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mithun, Marianne (1999). The languages of native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mühlhäusler, Peter, & Harré, Rom (1990). Pronouns and people: The linguistic construction of social and personal identity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Munro, Pamela (1998). The Garifuna gender system. In , Jane H.MistryHill, P.J. Hill, P.J., & Campbell, Lyle (eds.), The life of language: Papers in linguistics in honor of William Bright, 443–62. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murdock, George Peter (1968). Patterns of sibling terminology. Ethnology 7(1):1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ochs [Keenan], Elinor (1974). Norm-makers, norm-breakers: Uses of speech by men and women in a Malagasy community. In Bauman, Richard & Sherzer, Joel (eds.), Explorations in the ethnography of speaking, 125–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Plank, Frans, & Schellinger, Wolfgang (1997). The uneven distribution of genders over numbers: Greenberg nos. 37 and 45. Linguistic Typology 1(1):53–101.Google Scholar
Ribeiro, Eduardo Rivail (2006). Subordinate clauses in Karajá. Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi Ciências Humanas 1(1):17–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sandalo, Filomena (1996). Gender and social class in Kadiwéu phonology. In Warner, Natasha, Ahlers, Jocelyn, Bilmes, Leela, Oliver, Monica, Wertheim, Suzanne, & Chen, Melinda (eds.), Proceedings of the 4th Berkeley Women and Language Conference, 645–57. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Women and Language Group.Google Scholar
Sapir, Edward (1915). Abnormal types of speech in Nootka. Ottawa: Canada Department of Mines.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sapir, Edward (1918). Yana terms of relationship. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 13(4):153–73.Google Scholar
Sapir, Edward (1929/1963). Male and female forms of speech in Yana. In Mandelbaum, David G. (ed.), Selected writings of Edward Sapir in language, culture and personality. Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Saville-Troike, Muriel (1988). A note on men's and women's speech in Koasati. IJAL 54(2):241–42.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (1976). Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In Basso, Keith & Selby, Henry (eds.), Meaning in anthropology, 11–55. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (1985). Language and the culture of gender: At the intersection of structure, usage, and ideology. In Mertz, Elizabeth & Parmentier, Richard (eds.), Semiotic mediation: Sociocultural and psychological perspectives, 219–59. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Allan R. (1982). “Male” and “female” speech in Gros Ventre. Anthropological Linguistics 24(3):301–7.Google Scholar
Trechter, Sara (1995). Categorical gender myths in Native America: Gender deictics in Lakhota. Issues in Applied Linguistics 6(1):5–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trechter, Sara (1999). Contextualizing the exotic few: Gender dichotomies in Lakhota. In Bucholtz, Mary, Liang, A. C., & Sutton, Laurel A. (eds.), Reinventing identities: The gendered self in discourse, 101–19. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolff, Hans (1948). Yuchi phonemes and morphemes, with special reference to person markers. IJAL 14(4):240–43.Google Scholar