In this chapter we will look more closely at the content of what people communicate as they engage with one another, the substance of the positions they take, especially those that connect directly to gender. Where and how does gender figure in linguistic representations of beliefs, fears, wishes, desires, and plans?

The content of an utterance, its literal meaning, is often thought of as simply what the semantics of the linguistic system being used assigns as the meaning of the linguistic expression that has been uttered, what is directly encoded by the text the speaker has produced. Of course it is important to know what the linguistic expressions used encode, but what is meant and what is communicated seldom end there. For one thing, there are many expressions that need to be interpreted with respect to a particular utterance. To understand, for example, just what is being claimed by an utterance of she's tall, we need to know both to whom she refers and the approximate standards of tallness that might be at stake in the context in which the utterance is produced. In general, we use stuff beyond the linguistic code like pointing or our assumptions about the height of teenage girls, to help us actually say contentful things.