I try to connect my self-experimentation to other intellectual activity. One broader category is the stunning single case — the single example that makes you think new thoughts. Another is superhobbies (activities done with the freedom of hobbyists but the skills of professionals). Superhobbies lie between hobbies and skilled jobs. A third is my position as an insider/outsider. I was close enough to sleep research to understand it but far enough away to ignore all their rules about what you can and cannot do. I had the knowledge of an insider but the freedom of an outsider.
A fourth broader category is the science of everyday life — meaning science that involves everyday life and can be done by most of us. My experiments cost almost nothing, required no special equipment or circumstances. They involved common concerns (e.g., how to sleep better) and tested treatments available to everyone (e.g., standing more, eating more animal fat). A post by Mark Liberman at Language Log has a nice non-experimental example of this category. The question is about word order in gender pairs. Why do we say “boys and girls” more often than “girls and boys”? Or “husbands and wives” more often than “wives and husbands”? There are plenty of such pairs, not all with male first (e.g., “ladies and gentlemen”). The several possible explanations can be tested in lots of ways that require no fancy equipment or data. As Liberman says,
A smart high-school student could do a neat science-fair project along these general lines.
A great feature of what Liberman is proposing is that the answer isn’t obvious. There isn’t a “correct” answer as there is in so much of the way that science is taught (e.g., physics labs, demonstrations). If I searched for examples of “science of everyday life” i would merely find canned demos, which have little in common with the practice of science. Whereas Liberman’s idea gets to the heart of it, at least the hypothesis-testing part.
Thanks to Stephen Marsh.
Actually, there is a simple and coherent (and testable…in this way) theory that explains this. Long ago, Roman Jakobson, the Slavic linguist who worked for years at MIT, discussed the notion of markedness in both phonological but also semantic/lexical relations. Briefly, the first term in such a pair is generally the “unmarked” term, whereas the second is the marked one. If one of them can be used as the generic, it will be the unmarked one. In Romance languages, for example, if you ask “do you have brothers?” the word for “brother” can be either “brother (m) or sibling(m/f)”. The word for sister is restricted only to female siblings. The ways that noun-phrase marking languages do this(and transform over time) is at the boundary of culture and cognition–see the signal (and early) MA thesis by Deborah Spitulnik, a senior linguistic anthropologist at Emory, on the nominal class struggle in ChiBemba (nominal here relates to nouns, not to other senses of the word), and the now classic article by linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein (emeritus at Chicago) called “Language and the Culture of Gender…” as well as more recent work on language and gender in ling anth and sociolinguistics by scholars such as Penelope Eckert, Kira Hall, Mary Bucholtz and the like. For specific cites see Google Scholar but these are all worth reading.
‘In Romance languages, for example, if you ask “do you have brothers?” the word for “brother” can be either “brother (m) or sibling(m/f).”’
I don’t think that this is the case – certainly not in Romanian, almost certainly not in French or Italian.
I should have said “Western Romance,” i.e. Spanish and Portuguese where this holds true as far as I was certain. Note that the generic term for “sibling” in French, “la fratrie” is derived from the Latin for brother (and it is used in academic writing, if not as often in conversation), but here the derivation still reveals the unmarked class subsuming (or -erasing-) the marked class, which is more specific in reference (cf. the illustration at fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/freres_et_soeurs “Deux soeurs forment une fratrie.”) I wonder if the fashion of using “freres et soeurs” (sorry no accentuation on this keyboard) is a later development in French, such as the recent innovation of using “he/she” and “his or her” in English.
In Italian (according to the Italian wikipedia article on “fratello,” it can be used for either males or males and females (fratelli) but “sorelle” must be used if referring to a group of only females (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fratello), as in Spanish. Not sure about the other Romance languages.
Of course none of this impedes people from saying “brothers and sisters” (hermanos y hermanas) if they want to–but currently, that would be marked in discourse because you would be doing extra linguistic work to specify the females.
In any case, the main point is still there. We more commonly say “men and women” in English (at least the Englishes I grew up with,” but reverse this for the vocative “Ladies and Gentlemen,” and in other such phrases “Meine Damen und Herren” perhaps a marked form to mark special occasions through reversal of order?
Anyone who wishes might look up the work of Linda Waugh 1982 “Marked and Unmarked: A choice between unequals” and the interesting review and critique of the uses of markedness in Martin Haspelmath “Against Markedness.” In social anthropology, Bourdieu’s article on the Kabyle house brings in the notion of the inequality between marked and unmarked to understand the inequalities of norms of lived space.
I presume that one term of a m/f polar pair is used as a generic because the advantage gained from appealing to one gender more than makes up for the disadvantage of potentially alienating the other.
This then allows for terms that are unmarked in one context to be marked in another – for instance, I would expect the relevant pairs of terms to switch their markedness in a predominantly female setting (‘girls and boys’). I think that this also applies to marked/unmarked cultural signifiers and their reception.
In a formal social occasion, there is more power to be gained for a man by overt appeal to the women in company than to his fellow men (he is more likely to be courting the former). Perhaps women are less prone to say ‘ladies and gentlemen’, or do so with less enthusiasm.
It’s not that anyone designated these linguistic patterns (i.e. “appeal to one gender”) in order to bring in or alienate anyone. It’s difficult not to read this in terms of discursive power but it’s not a simple relationship (grammatical marking != social power)–for example, some languages such as Turkish, have no grammatical gender. Does that imply that there is less sexism in Turkey? Some languages (such as English) have very little overt morphological gender marking on nouns (ex: “doctor” and “nurse” are -not- gendered in their form as nouns (actor/actress are). But many people understand “doctor” as male and “nurse” as female despite real-world evidence to the contrary.
And generally, the markedness relation is generally part of the understanding of the noun, not the momentary social situation in which it is used. Grammar is -not- about appealing or courting or other social functions, although of course it is the matrix through which we perform these actions. AnBut intentional praxis can change language, albeit often in unexpected directions. The general loss of “thou/thee” in English was hastened by the Quakers, who continued to use thou as singular and you as plural, refusing the shift where thou was understood as familiar and you as a term of distance. They seemed rude to the majority of English at the time, who then started moving en masse to use only you, reserving thou/thee for religious purposes.
Well, people generally understand ‘doctor’ as male as doctors are more likely to be male. I dare say that the opposite would be true in a society in which the majority of doctors are female. In a society in which there are equal numbers of male and female doctors, then I would expect the understanding of the term to be sexed following the sex of he who is doing the understanding.
‘Mom and dad’ is so ordered as women generally have more of a say in their children’s upbringing, ‘men and women’ as men tend to be the power brokers outside of the home. Merely looking at ‘who’ is talking and ‘to whom’ they are talking provides satisfactory explanations for orderings of polar pairs. This also allows for reversals of markedness according to the context of the ‘momentary social situation’ (re what I mentioned about predominantly female workplaces).
I suppose that the general grammatical make-up of a language provides certain hard-to-change parameters within which patterns of use develop, so Turkish sex generalisations would still exist, but be expressed within such parameters implicitly cf. “Gender in a genderless language: The case of Turkish”, by Friederike Braun
What might disconfirm my thesis would be to find a language which presents three possibilities: m/f or neuter, with its users choosing neuter forms (or the form that normally signifies the minority part of the group) to address unevenly mixed dual sex groups (ie. with one sex constituting a clear minority).
I propose that this would only be the case if either a) there is something especially intractable about the language’s grammar that prevents a direct-appeal-to-one-sex being expressed or b) the general social context has little or no sex differentiation, so appeal to one sex or another would go against habit or could backfire (change in social context might explain the rise in use of ‘they’ for he/she and would be the test of invented pronouns, such as ze/zir).
The only problem I have with your argument is the intentionalist fallacy–grammatical categories and noun class systems in themselves were not “designed” to appeal or not to anyone. It is really a historical accident that Romance noun classes are called “genders,” as the way nouns are assigned to them is arbitrary–there is no real gender in the sun or moon although speakers may feel that the noun class assignment is not arbitrary, it is. Case in point–while sun is marked as masculine and moon marked as feminine in Romance langs. generally and many people feel this is natural and obvious, in German it is the other way around, and those speakers also feel it is natural and obvious. These are truly arbitrary assignments in the linguistic system (in German “girl” (das Maedchen) is neuter!), and go well beyond gender (do “leaf” or “root” or “ceiling” have any innate gender?).
Where I think we really agree is that there are potentially reciprocal conditioning effects between cultural notions and “feelings” about the naturalness of the assignment of gender to noun classes and the subsuming of the mixed gender case into the masculine plural. But as these are explicitly marked surface level forms, they are easier to rise into consciousness and oppose through practice (unlike, say, count and non-count classes in English, which are not clearly morphologically distinct). However, this doesn’t appear to happen outside of an ideological program (change in the social context, as you point out)–which may have unintended effects. For example, it is surprisingly common for female US English speakers whether feminist or not to use “Hey guys” to address an all-female group instead of the all-female “Hey gals” (as reported by my female and feminist roommate). Again, “guys” while originally a term of address for men, becomes the preferred generic informal term of address, even in an all-female group. Why? While I also agree with you that the generic should not be masculine (vs. instead of la fratrie (combo of feminine noun class with masuline (frater) root, German uses “das Geschwisterteil,” neuter all the way through), the pattern of such noun class use is resistant, but not immutable–I think you would really like reading Spitulnik on ChiBemba and Bantu langs. more generally, as they have what is sometimes called “supergender” with many, many noun classes that do get reinterpreted and reassigned through practice–what she calls “nominal class struggle.”