Grammar and identity: Prestige, gender, and sexual orientation
Posted: February 2, 2014 Filed under: Research-and-comment, Teaching | Tags: english 2810, gender, grammar, labov, new york city, non-rhotic dialects, prestige, sexual orientiation, sociolinguistics Leave a comment »A number of student in my grammar class have written essays about relative prestige in terms of grammar.
The Wikipedia has a very good entry on linguistic prestige (their linguistic entries are generally very good).
Particularly interesting for many, might be the section on gender and prestige. This section discusses what has become a rule of thumb in socio-linguistics, that men tend to speak a variety that is lower than their actual social class (i.e. is perceived by the speech community as being characteristic of a lower class) whereas women either speak at their social class level or above it.
The usual view is that men are the marked group in this (i. Read the rest of this entry »
A is for Aardvark and author. The economic implications of having a last name with an early letter in the alphabet
Posted: July 26, 2014 | Author: dpod | Filed under: Research-and-comment, Universities | Tags: authorship, ivy league, prestige, universities | Leave a comment » In many disciplines, when more than one researcher contributes to a paper, the authors are listed in terms of the relative contribution: the first author is assumed to have done the most work, the second the second most, and so on until the last position, which is often as prestigious as first. In other disciplines, however, the tradition is to order author names alphabetically. This can be unfair to authors whose names come later in the alphabet, because citation conventions for multiple author contributions usually spell out the names of only the first two or three authors. But it turns out it can also have career and financial implications. As Marusic, Bosnjak, et al. (see?) report: Read the rest of this entry »