Speech strategy sequencing in personal ads
social variation in personal ad structure in Mexico City and London
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.18800Keywords:
Variation, Indexicality, Sexuality, Identity, SociolinguisticsAbstract
Traditional personal advertisements often follow an ‘X seeks Y for Z’ format. The current study analyses the presence of these different components of personal ads (referred to as speech strategies) and their sequencing across four socio-sexual groups (women seeking women, women seeking men, men seeking women and men seeking men) and distinct types of relationships desired (romantic, sexual and other) in two regions, Mexico City and London. Results indicate that the structure of personal ads varied by both factors across regions. Posters who expressed desire for romantic relationships in London diverged less from the traditional format than those who portrayed themselves as seeking sex or other types of relationships. Additionally, socio-sexual groups differed in the type and frequency of several components within their personal ads. The indexicality of the XYZ structure as well as differences in portrayed relationship desired between regions are discussed as factors contributing to regional differences.
References
Abramova, Olga, Baumann, Annika, Krasnova, Hanna and Buxmann, Peter (2016) Gender differences in online dating: what do we know so far? a systematic literature review. HICSS Proceedings of the 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2016: 3858–3867. https://doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2016.481
Baker, Paul (2003) No effeminates please: a corpus-based analysis of masculinity via personal adverts in Gay News/Times 1973–2000. In Bethan Benwell (ed) Masculinity and Men’s Lifestyle Magazines 243–260. Oxford: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2003.tb03614.x
Baker, Paul (2017) Sexuality. In Eric Friginal (ed) Studies in Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics 159–177. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315527819-6
Bogetic, Ksenija (2013) Normal straight gays: lexical collocations and ideologies of masculinity in personal ads of Serbian gay teenagers. Gender and Language 7(3): 333–367. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v7i3.333
Bucholtz, Mary and Hall, Kira (2004) Language and identity. In Alessandro Duranti (ed) A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology 369–394. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470996522.ch16
Coupland, Justine (1996) Dating advertisements: discourses of the commodified self. Discourse and Society 7(2): 187–207. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926596007002003
Deaux, Kay and Hanna, Randel (1984) Courtship in the personals column: the influence of gender and sexual orientation. Sex Roles: A Journal of Research 11(5–6): 363–375. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00287465
del Teso-Craviotto, Marisol (2008) Gender and sexual identity authentication in language use: The case of chat rooms. Discourse Studies 10(2): 251–270. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445607087011
Elliot, Lindsay (2010) Predicting someone’s true identity: linguistic norms and cues in online personal advertisements. Master’s thesis, The Rochester Institute of Technology. Retrieved on 13 April 2019 from https://scholarworks.rit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=4069&context=theses.
Gonzales, Marti and Meyers, Sarah (1993) ‘Your mother would like me’: self-presentation in the personal ads of heterosexual and homosexual men and women. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19(2): 131–142. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167293192001
Groom, Carla J. and Pennebaker, James W. (2005) The language of love: sex, sexual orientation, and language use in online personal advertisements. Sex Roles 52(7–8): 447–461. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-005-3711-0
Johnson, Daniel E. (2009) Getting off the GoldVarb standard: introducing Rbrul for mixed effects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass 3(1): 359–383. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00108.x
Livia, Anna (2002) Camionneuses s’abstenir: lesbian community creation through the personals. In Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Robert J. Podesva, Sarah J. Roberts and Andrew Wong (eds) Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice 191–206. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Marley, Carol (2002) Popping the question: questions and modality in written dating advertisements. Discourse Studies 4(1): 75–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456020040010401
Milani, Tommaso M. (2013) Are ‘queers’ really ‘queer’? language, identity and same-sex desire in a South African online community. Discourse & Society 24(5): 615–633. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926513486168
Phua, Voon Chin (2002) Sex and sexuality in men’s personal advertisements. Men and Masculinities 5(2): 178–191. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X02005002004
Reid, Scott A. and Giles, Howard (2005) Intergroup relations: its linguistic and communicative parameters. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 8(3): 211–214. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430205053938
Shalom, Celia (1997) That great supermarket of desire: attributes of the desired other in personal advertisements. In Keith Harvey and Celia Shalom (eds) Language and Desire: Encoding Sex, Romance and Intimacy 186–203. New York: Routledge.
Silverstein, Michael (1976) Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In Keith H. Basso and Henry A. Selby (eds) Meaning in Anthropology 11–55. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Thorne, Adrian and Coupland, Justine (1998) Articulations of same sex desire: lesbian and gay male dating advertisements. Journal of Sociolinguistics 2(2): 233–257. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9481.00042
van Compernolle, Rémi (2008a) Sociopragmatic norms in Québécois online personal advertisements. In Marie-Christine Koop (ed) Le Québec à l’Aube du Nouveau Millénaire: Entre Tradition et Modernité 1–8. Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec.
van Compernolle, Rémi (2008b) Second-person pronoun use and address strategies in online personal advertisements from Quebec. Journal of Pragmatics 40(12): 2062–2076. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2008.04.008
Winn, Laura W. and Rubin, Donald L. (2001) Enacting gender identity in written discourse: Responding to gender role bidding in personal ads. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 29(4): 393–418. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X01020004001
Zahler, Sara L. (2015) Pragmalinguistic variation in electronic personal ads from Mexico City and London. Indiana University Linguistics Club Working Papers 15(1): 208–230.
Zelenkauskaite, Asta and Herring, Susan C. (2008) Gender differences in personal advertisements in Lithuanian iTV SMS. In Fay Sudweeks, Herbert Hrachovec and Marie-Christine Ess (eds) Proceedings of Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication 2008 (CATaC’08) 462–476. Murdoch, Australia: School of Information Technology, Murdoch University.
