Gender and Language, Vol 14, No 2 (2020)

Language, indexicality and gender ideologies: contextual effects on the perceived credibility of women

Erez Levon, Yang Ye
Issued Date: 18 Jun 2020

Abstract


It is well established that listeners’ attitudes to variability in language are affected by context. One speaker’s use of a particular form will not necessarily be evaluated in the same way as another’s use of that same form, and the pragmatic meanings listeners associate with speech depend on the specific social setting in which that speech occurs. In this article, we explore how this contextual sensitivity of sociolinguistic perception interacts with broader ideologies about gender. Specifically, we examine how the use of ‘uptalk’, or rising final intonation on declarative utterances, impacts the perceived credibility of women versus men in different legal contexts, including those characterized by strong ideologies of gender (e.g. a rape trial) and those in which that ideological framing is less pronounced (e.g. a medical malpractice trial). Our goal is to identify how social ideologies about gender affect listeners’ perceptions of uptalk, and to explore the ramifications that these perceptions have on women’s ability to be believed in a courtroom.

Download Media

PDF (Price: £18.00 )

DOI: 10.1558/genl.39235

References


Agha, Asif (2007) Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ainsworth, Janet (2012) The performance of gender as reflected in American evidence rules: language, power, and the legal construction of liability. Gender and Language 6(1): 181–95. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v6i1.181

Arvaniti, Amalia and Atkins, Madeleine (2016) Uptalk in Southern British English. In Jon Barnes, Alejna Brugos and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel (eds) Proceedings of Speech Prosody 8 153–57. Boston: Boston University. https://doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2016-32

Barry, Angela (2008) The Form, Function and Distribution of High Rising Intonation in Southern California and Southern British English. Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag Dr Muller.

Bradac, James and Mulac, Anthony (1984) A molecular view of powerful and powerless speech styles: attributional consequences of specific language features and communicator intentions. Communication Monographs 51(4): 307–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637758409390204

Bradford, Barabara (1997) Upspeak in British English. English Today 13(3): 29–36. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400009810

Britain, David (1992) Linguistic change in intonation: the use of High Rising Terminals in New Zealand English. Language Variation and Change 4(1): 77–104. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394500000661

Brodsky, Stanley, Griffin, Michael and Cramer, Robert (2010) The Witness Credibility Scale: an outcome measure for expert witness research. Behavioral Sciences & the Law 28(6):892–907. https://doi.org/10.1002/bsl.917

Brodsky, Stanley, Neal, Tess, Cramer, Robert and Ziemke, Mitchell (2009) Credibility in the courtroom: how likeable should an expert witness be? Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 37(4): 525–32.

Brownmiller, Susan (1975) Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Burt, Martha (1980) Cultural myths and supports for rape. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38(2): 217–30. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.38.2.217

Cameron, Deborah (2015a) A response to Naomi Wolf. Language: a feminist guide. Online: https://debuk.wordpress.com/2015/07/26/a-response-to-naomi-wolf/; accessed 17 December 2018.

Cameron, Deborah (2015b) Just don’t do it. Language: a feminist guide. Onlile: https://debuk.wordpress.com/2015/07/05/just-dont-do-it/; accessed 17 December 2018.

Caringella, Susan (2009) Addressing Rape Reform in Law and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/cari13424

Ching, Marvin (1982) The question intonation in assertions. American Speech 57(2): 95–107. https://doi.org/10.2307/454443

Conley, John and O’Barr, William (2005) Just Words: Language and Power, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Conley, John, O’Barr, William and Lind, E. Allan (1978) The power of language: presentational style in the courtroom. Duke Law Journal 6: 1375–1400. https://doi.org/10.2307/1372218

Cruttenden, Alan (1986) Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cruttenden, Alan (1994) Rises in English. In Jack Lewis (ed) Studies in General English Phonetics: Essays in Honour of Professor J. D. O’Connor 155–73. London: Routledge.

Dixon, John, Mahoney, Berenice and Cocks, Roger (2002) Accents of guilt? Effects of regional accent, race and crime type on attributions of guilt. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 21(2): 162–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/02627X02021002004

Eades, Diana (2010) Sociolinguistics and the Legal Process. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781847692559

Eckert, Penelope (2008) Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4): 453–76. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2008.00374.x

Ehrlich, Susan (1998) The discursive reconstruction of sexual consent. Discourse & Society 9(2): 149–71. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926598009002002

Ehrlich, Susan (1999) Communities of practice, gender, and the representation of sexual assault. Language in Society 28(2): 239–56. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404599002067

Ehrlich, Susan (2001) Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent. New York: Routledge.

Ehrlich, Susan (2014) Language, gender and sexual violence: legal perspectives. In Susan Ehrlich, Miriam Meyerhoff and Janet Holmes (eds) Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality 452–70. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118584248.ch23

Ehrlich, Susan (2016) Post penetration rape: coercion or freely given consent. In Susan Ehrlich, Diana Eades and Janet Ainsworth (eds) Discursive Constructions of Consent in the Legal Process 47–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199945351.003.0003

Ehrlich, Susan (2019) ‘Well, I saw the picture’: semiotic ideologies and the unsettling of normative conceptions of female sexuality in the Steubenville rape trial. Gender and Language 13(2): 251–69. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.35019

Ellison, Louise and Munro, Vanessa (2008) Reacting to rape: exploring mock jurors’ assessments of complainant credibility. British Journal of Criminology 49(2): 202–19. Online: https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/bjc/azn077; accessed 2 July 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azn077

Ellison, Louise and Munro, Vanessa (2009) Of ‘normal sex’ and ‘real rape’: exploring the use of socio-sexual scripts in (mock) jury deliberation. Social & Legal Studies 18(3): 291–312. https://doi.org/10.1177/0964663909339083

Ellison, Louise and Munro, Vanessa (2010) A stranger in the bushes, or an elephant in the room? Critical reflections upon received rape myth wisdom in the context of a mock jury study. New Criminal Law Review 13(4): 781–801. https://doi.org/10.1525/nclr.2010.13.4.781

Ellison, Louise and Munro, Vanessa (2013) Better the devil you know? ‘Real rape’ stereotypes and the relevance of a previous relationship in (mock) juror deliberations. The International Journal of Evidence & Proof 17(4): 299–322. https://doi.org/10.1350/ijep.2013.17.4.433

Erickson, Bonnie, Lind, E. Allan, Johnson, Bruce C. and O’Barr, William M. (1978) Speech style and impression formation in a court setting: the effects of ‘powerful’ and ‘powerless’ speech. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 14(3): 266–79. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(78)90015-X

Farkas, Donka and Bruce, Kim (2010) On reacting to assertions and polar questions. Journal of Semantics 27(1): 81–118. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffp010

Finch, Emily and Munro, Vanessa (2004) Juror stereotypes and blame attribution in rape cases involving intoxicants: the findings of a pilot study. British Journal of Criminology 45(1): 25–38. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azh055

Giles, Howard, Wilson, Pamela and Conway, Anthony (1981) Accents and lexical diversity as determinants of impression formation and perceived employment suitability. Language Sciences 3(1): 91–103. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0388-0001(81)80015-0

Gilmore, Leigh (2018) Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives. New York: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/gilm17714

Glick, Peter and Fiske, Susan (1996) The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70(3): 491–512. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.70.3.491

Guy, Gregory, Horvath, Barbara, Vonwiller, Julia, Daisley, Elaine and Rogers, Inge (1986) An intonational change in progress in Australian English. Language in Society 15(1): 23–52. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500011635

Hart, Claire, Ritchie, Timothy, Hepper, Erica and Gebauer, Jochen (2015) The Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding Short Form (BIDR-16). SAGE Open 5(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244015621113

Hildebrand-Edgar, Nicole and Ehrlich, Susan (2017) ‘She was quite capable of asserting herself’: powerful speech styles and assessments of credibility in a sexual assault trial. Language and Law 4(2): 89–107.

Hiramoto, Mie (2010) Utterance final position and projection of femininity in Japanese. Gender and Language 4(1): 99–124. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v4i1.99

Hosman, Lawrence A. and Wright, John W. (1987) The effects of hedges and hesitations on impression formation in a simulated courtroom context. Western Journal of Speech Communication 51(2): 173–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570318709374263

Jeong, Sunwoo (2018) Intonation and sentence type conventions: two types of rising declaratives. Journal of Semantics 35(2): 305–56. https://doi.org/10.1093/semant/ffy001

Lakoff, Robin (1975) Language and Woman’s Place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lambert, Wallace E., Hodgson, Richard C., Gardner, Robert C. and Fillenbaum, Stanley (1960) Evaluational reactions to spoken languages. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 60(1): 44–51. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0044430

Levon, Erez (2016) Gender, interaction and intonational variation: the discourse functions of High Rising Terminals in London. Journal of Sociolinguistics 20(2): 133–63. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12182

Levon, Erez (2018) Same difference: the phonetic shape of High Rising Terminals in London. English Language and Linguistics 24(1): 49–73. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674318000205

Matoesian, Gregory (2001) Law and the Language of Identity: Discourse in the Kennedy Smith Rape Trial. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McMahon, Sarah and Farmer, G. Lawrence (2011) An updated measure for assessing subtle rape myths. Social Work Research 35(2): 71–81. https://doi.org/10.1093/swr/35.2.71

Neal, Tess, Guadagno, Rosanna, Eno, Cassie and Brodsky, Stanley (2012) Warmth and competence on the witness stand: implications for the credibility of male and female expert witnesses. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 40(4): 488–97.

O’Barr, William (1982) Linguistic Evidence: Power and Strategy in the Courtroom. New York: Academic Press.

O’Barr, William and Atkins, Bowman (1980) ‘Women’s language’ or ‘powerless language’. In Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker and Nelly Furman (eds) Women in Language and Society 93–109. New York: Praeger.

Ochs, Elinor (1992) Indexing gender. In Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin (eds) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon 335–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Payne, Diana, Lonsway, Kimberly and Fitzgerald, Louise (1999) Rape myth acceptance: exploration of its structure and its measurement using the Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale. Journal of Research in Personality 33(1): 27–68. https://doi.org/10.1006/jrpe.1998.2238

Schwendinger, Julia and Schwendinger, Herman (1974) Rape myths: in legal, theoretical, and everyday practice. Crime and Social Justice 1(1): 18–26.

Silverstein, Michael (2003) Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23(3–4): 193–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00013-2

Spencer-Oatey, Helen (2000) Rapport management: a framework for analysis. In Helen Spencer-Oatey (ed) Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures, 11–46. London: Continuum.

Stivers, Tanya (2008). Stance, alignment and affiliation during storytelling: when nodding is a token of affiliation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 41(1): 31–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351810701691123

Tanford, J. Alexander (2010) The Trial Process: Law, Tactics & Ethics. Durham: Carolina Academic Press.

Temkin, Jennifer and Krahé, Barbara (2008) Sexual Assault and the Justice Gap : A Question of Attitude. Oxford: Hart Publishing.

Tiersma, Peter (2007) The language on consent in rape law. In Janet Cotterill (ed) The Language of Sexual Crime 83–103. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230592780_5

Tranchese, Alessia (2019) Covering rape: how the media determine how we understand sexualised violence. Gender and Language 13(2): 174–201. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.34445

Trinch, Shonna (2013) Recalling rape: moving beyond what we know. In Chris Heffer, Frances Rock and John Conley (eds) Legal-Lay Communication: Textual Travels in the Law 288–306. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199746842.003.0014

Tsoudis, Olga & Smith-Lovin, Lynn (1998) How bad was it? The effects of victim and perpetrator emotion on responses to criminal court vignettes. Social Forces 77(2): 695. https://doi.org/10.2307/3005544

Warren, Paul (2016) Uptalk: The Phenomenon of Rising Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316403570

Wessel, Ellen, Drevland, Guri C. B., Eilertsen, Dag Erik and Magnussen, Svein (2006) Credibility of the emotional witness: a study of ratings by court judges. Law and Human Behavior 30(2): 221–30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9024-1

Westera, Matthijs (2013) Attention, I’m violating a maxim! A unifying account of the final rise. In Raquel Fernandez and Amy Isard (eds) Proceedings of the 17th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial) 1–10. Amsterdam: SemDial.

Wolf, Naomi (2015) Young women, give up on the vocal fry and reclaim your strong female voice. The Guardian. Online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/24/vocal-fry-strong-female-voice; accessed 17 December 2018.


Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.





Equinox Publishing Ltd - 415 The Workstation 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BX United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 (0)114 221-0285 - Email: [email protected]

Privacy Policy