The routine achievement of gender in Greek interaction
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v9i1.18456Keywords:
conversation analysis, gender membership category, grammatical gender, indexing, person reference, sex/genderAbstract
This paper examines the obligatory use of grammatical gender in the composition of turns in Greek conversation and its implications for the routine achievement of sociocultural gender as part of the taken-for-granted world. By drawing on sociolinguistics, I study the role of grammatical gender in ascribing sex to referents and constructing gender identities. Moreover, I argue that this social dimension of grammatical gender is related to covert assumptions shared by participants about referents as women or men. I explore empirically the relation between grammatical gender and culture by employing conversation analysis, in addition to the notion of the gender membership category.
References
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Alvanoudi, A. (2013) ? ????????? ??? ???????? ???????? ??? ??????????? ??????. [The social and cognitive dimensions of grammatical gender.] PhD thesis, Department of Linguistics, School of Philology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.
Borba, R. and Ostermann, A. C. (2007) Do bodies matter? Travestis’ embodiment of (trans)gender identity through the manipulation of the Brazilian Portuguese grammatical system. Gender and Language 1(1): 131–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/genl.2007.1.1.131
Brown, P. (2007) Principles of person reference in Tzeltal conversation. In N. J. Enfield and T. Stivers (eds) Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural and Social Perspectives 172–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Butler, J. ([1990]1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge.
Corbett, G. (1991) Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139166119
Eckert, P. and McConnell-Ginet, S. (2003) Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791147
Enfield, N. J. (2007) Meanings of the unmarked: how default person reference does more than just refer. In N. J. Enfield and T. Stivers (eds) Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural and Social Perspectives 97–120. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Hall, K. and O’Donovan, V. (1996) Shifting gender positions among Hindi-speaking hijras. In V. Bergvall, J. Bing and A. Freed (eds) Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice 228–66. London: Longman.
Hanks, W. (2007) Person reference in Yucatec Maya conversation. In N. J. Enfield and T. Stivers (eds) Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural and Social Perspectives 149–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haviland, J. B. (2007) Person reference in Tzotzil gossip: referring dupliciter. In N. J. Enfield and T. Stivers (eds) Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural and Social Perspectives 226–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heritage, J. (1988) Explanations as accounts: a conversation analytic perspective. In C. Antaki (ed.) Analyzing Everyday Explanation: A Casebook of Methods 127–44. London: Sage.
Jefferson, G. (1978) Sequential aspects of storytelling in conversation. In J. Schenkein (ed.) Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction 219–48. New York: Academic Press.
Kitzinger, C. (2005) Speaking as a heterosexual: (how) does sexuality matter for talk-in-interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction 38(3): 221–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327973rlsi3803_2
Kitzinger, C. (2007) Is ‘woman’ always relevantly gendered? Gender and Language 1(1): 39–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/genl.2007.1.1.39
Kulick, D. (1998) Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226461014.001.0001
Lerner, G. and Kitzinger, C. (2007) Extraction and aggregation in the repair of individual and collective self-reference. Discourse Studies 9(4): 526–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461445607079165
Lindström, A. and Sorjonen, M.-L. (2013) Affiliation in conversation. In J. Sidnell and T. Stivers (eds) The Handbook of Conversation Analysis 350–69. Boston, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Livia, A. (1997) Disloyal to masculinity: linguistic gender and liminal identity in French. In A. Livia and K. Hall (eds) Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender and Sexuality 349–68. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McConnell-Ginet, S. (2003) ‘What’s in a name?’ Social labeling and gender practices. In J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff (eds) The Handbook of Language and Gender 69–97. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ochs, E. (1992) Indexing gender. In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon 335–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pavlidou, T.-S. (2003) Women, gender and Modern Greek. In M. Hellinger and H. Bussmann (eds) Gender across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men 175–99. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/impact.11.11pav
Pavlidou, T.-S. (2008) ????? ??? ? ?????????? (???????) ??????????????. [We and the construction of (gendered) collectivities.] In M. Theodoropoulou (ed.) ????? ??? ???: ????????????? ????? ??? ????? ??? ?.-?. ???????? [Light and Warmth: In Memory of A.-P. Christidis] 437–53. Thessaloniki: Center for the Greek Language.
Pavlidou, ?.-S. (2011) Gender and interaction. ?n R. Wodak, B. Johnstone and P. Kerswill (eds) The Sage ?andbook of Sociolinguistics 412–27. London: Sage.
Pavlidou, ?.-S. (2012a) Collective aspects of subjectivity: the subject pronoun ????? (‘we’) in Modern Greek. In N. Baumgarten, I. Du Bois and J. House (eds) Subjectivity in Discourse 33–65. Bingley: Emerald.
Pavlidou, ?.-S. (2012b) The corpus of spoken Greek: goals, challenges, perspectives. In LREC Proceedings, Workshop 18 (Best Practices for Speech Corpora in Linguistic Research) 23–8. Retrieved on 27 January 2015 from www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/workshops/03.Speech%20Corpora%20Proceedings.pdf.
Pavlidou, ?.-S. (2015) Gendering selves, gendering others – in (Greek) interaction. Gender and Language 9(1): 105–31.
Pavlidou, T.-S., Alvanoudi, A. and Karafoti, E. (2004) ?????????? ????? ??? ????????? ???????????: ?????????????? ???????????? ??? ?? ?????????? ???????????? ??? ?????. [Grammatical gender and semantic content: preliminary remarks on the lexical representation of social gender.] Studies in Greek Linguistics 24: 543–53.
Ruusuvuori, J. (2013) Emotion, affect and conversation. In J. Sidnell and T. Stivers (eds) The Handbook of Conversation Analysis 330–49. Boston, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Sacks, H. (1972a) An initial investigation of the usability of conversational data for doing sociology. In D. N. Sudnow (ed.) Studies in Social Interaction 31–74. New York: Free Press.
Sacks, H. (1972b) On the analyzability of stories by children. In J. J. Gumperz and D. Hymes (eds) Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication 325–45. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Sacks, H. (1984) On doing ‘being ordinary’. In J. Heritage and J. M. Atkinson (eds) Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis 413–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sacks, H. (1995) Lectures on Conversation, vols 1 and 2 (ed. G. Jefferson). Oxford: Blackwell. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781444328301
Schegloff, E. A. (1996a) Issues of relevance for discourse analysis: contingency in action, interaction and co-participant context. In E. H. Hovy and D. Scott (eds) Computational and Conversational Discourse: Burning Issues – An Interdisciplinary Account 3–38. Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.
Schegloff, E. A. (1996b) Some practices for referring to persons in talk-in-interaction: a partial sketch of a systematics. In B. Fox (ed.) Studies in Anaphora 437–85. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/tsl.33.14sch
Schegloff, E. A. (1997) Whose text? Whose context? Discourse and Society 8(2): 165–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0957926597008002002
Schegloff, E. A. (2006) Interaction: the infrastructure for social institutions, the natural ecological niche for language, and the arena in which culture is enacted. In N. J. Enfield and S. C. Levinson (eds) Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction 70–96. Oxford: Berg.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007a) Sequence Organization in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791208
Schegloff, E. A. (2007b) A tutorial on membership categorization. Journal of Pragmatics 39: 462–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2006.07.007
Schegloff, E. A. (2007c) Conveying who you are: the presentation of self, strictly speaking. In N. J. Enfield and T. Stivers (eds) Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural and Social Perspectives 123–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Silverstein, M. (1976) Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In K. H. Basso and H. A. Selby (eds) Meaning in Anthropology 11–55. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico.
Stockill, C. and ?itzinger, C. (2007) Gendered ‘people’: how linguistically non-gendered terms can have gendered interactional relevance. Feminism Psychology 17(2): 224–36.
Alvanoudi, A. (2013) ? ????????? ??? ???????? ???????? ??? ??????????? ??????. [The social and cognitive dimensions of grammatical gender.] PhD thesis, Department of Linguistics, School of Philology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.
Borba, R. and Ostermann, A. C. (2007) Do bodies matter? Travestis’ embodiment of (trans)gender identity through the manipulation of the Brazilian Portuguese grammatical system. Gender and Language 1(1): 131–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/genl.2007.1.1.131
Brown, P. (2007) Principles of person reference in Tzeltal conversation. In N. J. Enfield and T. Stivers (eds) Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural and Social Perspectives 172–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Butler, J. ([1990]1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge.
Corbett, G. (1991) Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139166119
Eckert, P. and McConnell-Ginet, S. (2003) Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791147
Enfield, N. J. (2007) Meanings of the unmarked: how default person reference does more than just refer. In N. J. Enfield and T. Stivers (eds) Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural and Social Perspectives 97–120. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Hall, K. and O’Donovan, V. (1996) Shifting gender positions among Hindi-speaking hijras. In V. Bergvall, J. Bing and A. Freed (eds) Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice 228–66. London: Longman.
Hanks, W. (2007) Person reference in Yucatec Maya conversation. In N. J. Enfield and T. Stivers (eds) Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural and Social Perspectives 149–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haviland, J. B. (2007) Person reference in Tzotzil gossip: referring dupliciter. In N. J. Enfield and T. Stivers (eds) Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural and Social Perspectives 226–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heritage, J. (1988) Explanations as accounts: a conversation analytic perspective. In C. Antaki (ed.) Analyzing Everyday Explanation: A Casebook of Methods 127–44. London: Sage.
Jefferson, G. (1978) Sequential aspects of storytelling in conversation. In J. Schenkein (ed.) Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction 219–48. New York: Academic Press.
Kitzinger, C. (2005) Speaking as a heterosexual: (how) does sexuality matter for talk-in-interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction 38(3): 221–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327973rlsi3803_2
Kitzinger, C. (2007) Is ‘woman’ always relevantly gendered? Gender and Language 1(1): 39–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/genl.2007.1.1.39
Kulick, D. (1998) Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226461014.001.0001
Lerner, G. and Kitzinger, C. (2007) Extraction and aggregation in the repair of individual and collective self-reference. Discourse Studies 9(4): 526–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461445607079165
Lindström, A. and Sorjonen, M.-L. (2013) Affiliation in conversation. In J. Sidnell and T. Stivers (eds) The Handbook of Conversation Analysis 350–69. Boston, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Livia, A. (1997) Disloyal to masculinity: linguistic gender and liminal identity in French. In A. Livia and K. Hall (eds) Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender and Sexuality 349–68. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McConnell-Ginet, S. (2003) ‘What’s in a name?’ Social labeling and gender practices. In J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff (eds) The Handbook of Language and Gender 69–97. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ochs, E. (1992) Indexing gender. In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon 335–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pavlidou, T.-S. (2003) Women, gender and Modern Greek. In M. Hellinger and H. Bussmann (eds) Gender across Languages: The Linguistic Representation of Women and Men 175–99. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/impact.11.11pav
Pavlidou, T.-S. (2008) ????? ??? ? ?????????? (???????) ??????????????. [We and the construction of (gendered) collectivities.] In M. Theodoropoulou (ed.) ????? ??? ???: ????????????? ????? ??? ????? ??? ?.-?. ???????? [Light and Warmth: In Memory of A.-P. Christidis] 437–53. Thessaloniki: Center for the Greek Language.
Pavlidou, ?.-S. (2011) Gender and interaction. ?n R. Wodak, B. Johnstone and P. Kerswill (eds) The Sage ?andbook of Sociolinguistics 412–27. London: Sage.
Pavlidou, ?.-S. (2012a) Collective aspects of subjectivity: the subject pronoun ????? (‘we’) in Modern Greek. In N. Baumgarten, I. Du Bois and J. House (eds) Subjectivity in Discourse 33–65. Bingley: Emerald.
Pavlidou, ?.-S. (2012b) The corpus of spoken Greek: goals, challenges, perspectives. In LREC Proceedings, Workshop 18 (Best Practices for Speech Corpora in Linguistic Research) 23–8. Retrieved on 27 January 2015 from www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/workshops/03.Speech%20Corpora%20Proceedings.pdf.
Pavlidou, ?.-S. (2015) Gendering selves, gendering others – in (Greek) interaction. Gender and Language 9(1): 105–31.
Pavlidou, T.-S., Alvanoudi, A. and Karafoti, E. (2004) ?????????? ????? ??? ????????? ???????????: ?????????????? ???????????? ??? ?? ?????????? ???????????? ??? ?????. [Grammatical gender and semantic content: preliminary remarks on the lexical representation of social gender.] Studies in Greek Linguistics 24: 543–53.
Ruusuvuori, J. (2013) Emotion, affect and conversation. In J. Sidnell and T. Stivers (eds) The Handbook of Conversation Analysis 330–49. Boston, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Sacks, H. (1972a) An initial investigation of the usability of conversational data for doing sociology. In D. N. Sudnow (ed.) Studies in Social Interaction 31–74. New York: Free Press.
Sacks, H. (1972b) On the analyzability of stories by children. In J. J. Gumperz and D. Hymes (eds) Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication 325–45. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Sacks, H. (1984) On doing ‘being ordinary’. In J. Heritage and J. M. Atkinson (eds) Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis 413–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sacks, H. (1995) Lectures on Conversation, vols 1 and 2 (ed. G. Jefferson). Oxford: Blackwell. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781444328301
Schegloff, E. A. (1996a) Issues of relevance for discourse analysis: contingency in action, interaction and co-participant context. In E. H. Hovy and D. Scott (eds) Computational and Conversational Discourse: Burning Issues – An Interdisciplinary Account 3–38. Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.
Schegloff, E. A. (1996b) Some practices for referring to persons in talk-in-interaction: a partial sketch of a systematics. In B. Fox (ed.) Studies in Anaphora 437–85. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/tsl.33.14sch
Schegloff, E. A. (1997) Whose text? Whose context? Discourse and Society 8(2): 165–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0957926597008002002
Schegloff, E. A. (2006) Interaction: the infrastructure for social institutions, the natural ecological niche for language, and the arena in which culture is enacted. In N. J. Enfield and S. C. Levinson (eds) Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction 70–96. Oxford: Berg.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007a) Sequence Organization in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791208
Schegloff, E. A. (2007b) A tutorial on membership categorization. Journal of Pragmatics 39: 462–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2006.07.007
Schegloff, E. A. (2007c) Conveying who you are: the presentation of self, strictly speaking. In N. J. Enfield and T. Stivers (eds) Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural and Social Perspectives 123–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Silverstein, M. (1976) Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In K. H. Basso and H. A. Selby (eds) Meaning in Anthropology 11–55. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico.
Stockill, C. and ?itzinger, C. (2007) Gendered ‘people’: how linguistically non-gendered terms can have gendered interactional relevance. Feminism Psychology 17(2): 224–36.
Published
2015-03-19
Issue
Section
Special Issue Articles
How to Cite
Alvanoudi, A. (2015). The routine achievement of gender in Greek interaction. Gender and Language, 9(1), 11-31. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v9i1.18456
