A cognitive sociolinguistic analysis of gender stereotypes in pakistani media language
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Date
2018
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UMT Lahore
Abstract
Marginalized status of an individual or group is associated with oppression (Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008), which leads to more ingroup bias (Dasgupta, 2004). However, it is observed that it is not true of Pakistani women who are also considered to be a marginalized group. Pakistani women as an oppressed group are supposed to practice more intra-gender bias, on the contrary according to our hypothesis they deviated from such established norm by practicing less intra-gender bias through their linguistic choices. This study was designed in line of cognitive sociolinguistics to explore the inter/intra-gender bias visible in contemporary mass and social media languages. The study was further informed by the feminist theory of intersectionality in course of investigating the social as well as linguistic deviance practiced by Pakistani women, to outline the possible influence of the patriarchal set up they live in, on their perceptions; which might have caused their intersecting identities (Crenshaw, 1989) to be in a state of flux. It was an attempt towards analysing the lexical variation among men and women and discovering the factors that might cause mechanism of such variation. To explore the correlation of marginalized intersecting identities to lexical choices, a mixed method research had been designed in line of cognitive sociolinguistics. According to this research paradigm lexical variation could be analysed by measuring the speaker’s contextual or sociolinguistic variables in terms of entrenched values as onomasiological salience (Grondelaers, Speelman, & Geeraerts, 2007). The data were collected from opposite editorial sections of three English dailies and Twitter against a case of female social victim, which were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively by employing the technique of content analysis. The process of data collection was impeded by the dearth of female columnists and less visibility of male social victims in mass media. The results suggested that Pakistani women practiced less intra-gender bias by using more biased lexical items for the female victim; which was reflective of their reduced sense of self as marginalized gender with various intersecting identities in a patriarchal social set up which distorted their primary identities. The analysis was a contributory step to study gender stereotypes and intersectional identities and their link to lexical variation from cognitive sociolinguistic perspective.