The individual experience of culture

The individual experience of culture is so much a part of basic consciousness that it may seem beyond analysis in general, let alone linguistic analysis in particular. Yet there is compelling evidence that language usage is a product of cultural assumptions and norms and that linguistic practice reinforces traditionally engendered social roles, as well as relative power relationships, that constitute the content of culture. By reference to linguistic and social theory and analysis, including the discourse of the modern feminist social critique, this research examines ways in which unequal social roles and relationships of males and females receive their sanction in the language and are continually reinforced by linguistic custom and practice, with a view toward identifying possibilities for change.

The purpose of this research is to examine the interplay of language, gender, and culture as core determinants of social roles. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which these elements of human experience have entered modern social and cultural discourse and then to discuss evidence of cultural foundations for linguistic formation, prevailing modes of usage, and change, with a view toward forecasting possible lines of development.

It is both a fundamental principle of psychosocial development and a commonplace of ordinary human experience that language plays a decisive role in the shape that such experience takes. Language is a commonplace

n that any feminine word that is elevated in meaning will eventually be degraded. It is as if women who achieve high status in our society must somehow be brought down (Chaika, 1994, p. 366). It is difficult not to conclude that language is culpable in privileging male social prerogative, to name in general and to name women in particular, and to reinforce the rightness of option-laden social experience for men but not for women. This is a recurrent theme in feminist historiography. Greer describes the evolution of contemporary language as an attribute of historical tension between the sexes on one hand, and as evidence of sex inequality as a fundamental of social organization on the other. She describes sex bias of the language as symptomatic not merely of a socially sanctioned but rather of scarcely concealed hatred of and contempt for women: "Unfortunately the enfeeblement of abuse by hysterical overstatement is not the commonest phenomenon in the language of woman-hatred." Greer continues: Many more terms which originally applied to both men and women gained virulence by sexual discrimination. The word harlot did not become exclusively feminine until the seventeenth century. There is no male analogue for it in the era of the

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