Does saying he mean thinking he?
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Date
2011
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Publisher
UMT Lahore
Abstract
This study investigated the leading question, Does saying he mean thinking he?
The objectives of the study were to understand how language influences our perception, to examine the comprehension of generic pronouns and their relationship to language use, and to explore the relation between gender in language and thought within the context of English language. The research was conducted only in Lahore and the sample was selected from Department of English Language Teaching & Linguistics, IER Punjab University, UMT, NUML Lahore campus, English Department, Punjab University Lahore and Allama Iqbal Open University regional campus Lahore.
In this study, 50 male and 50 female participants were randomly selected. Two research instruments were used to collect the data,(1).closed ended questionnaire based on the paragraph. The questionnaire consisted of 20 statements and developed on Likert scale (2).Discourse Completion Test (DCT): The test contained 30 sentences and every sentence had a generic noun like musician, dancer, student, and teacher ect. The respondents were asked to fill in the blanks by using generic pronoun according to the noun given in the sentence. The purpose was to check whether the respondents had more male or female (he or she) image in their minds.
After collection of data, Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data on SPSS. The main research question Does saying he mean thinking he? was proved with majority of agreed responses of both the genders. It was proved that generic pronoun he affects their perception, generic he makes male referent in the mind of readers and only he should be used as generic pronoun not she. Both the genders stated that He is frequently used than She in generic context and he receives much attention from female. The word man includes women in generic context but both the genders disagreed that He includes both the genders Male & Female. The result supported the research questions like generic he excludes women in generic context, the pronoun He marginalizes Women, generic He only represents third person singular masculine Pronoun, Women are left out of the passage; there is masculine bias in the paragraph, and Language influences culture. Regarding Discourse Completion Test (DCT) there was no significant difference between the responses of both the genders .Generic he is interpreted as masculine regardless of context received support from female participants.