Linguistic history is made in Islamabad (and New York)

[q_pheevr]

The world has come a long way in the past third of a century or so. In 1975, Robin Lakoff's book Language and Women's Place had the following to say about widows and widowers:

Surely a bereaved husband and a bereaved wife are equivalent: they have both undergone the loss of a mate. But in fact, linguistically at any rate, this is not true. It is

Comments

[thnidu]

Yes, I noticed that, and the connection. (Robin was my doctoral committee chair.)

[thnidu]

PS: may I post your commentary, or a pointer to it, to the American Dialect Soc'y discussion list?

[q_pheevr]

Sure!

[merle_]

Odd. I had subconsciously conflated Robin and George Lakoff into the same person. Apologies to both of them, should one see this.

It is interesting, though, that the converse of Sapir-Whorf (our thoughts define the language we speak) seems quite evident and easy to accept for me. I shall have to track down a copy of that book, because it sounds like such a belief was not always commonplace.

[q_pheevr]

There's a new edition that includes the original text plus commentary about some of the things that have changed since it was first published.

[isolt]

Yes, the new edition was on my prelims list, and it's utterly fantastic, both in that the original text is fantastic, Robin Lakoff's fascinating commentary is, well, fascinating, and the other contributions from language-and-gender-studies people are totally fantastic.

[polyhymnia]

The sentence 24b 'becoming grammatical' is also an interesting example of semantics having a lot to do with grammaticality judgements. Syntactically it seems like 24b was probably always grammatical -- there are lots of constructions X is Y's Z. It was the lack of people's conception of someone as someone else's widower that blocked it from sounding grammatical, not the construction itself. Or so I would argue -- maybe I'm wrong, maybe widower changed syntactic status, but it doesn't seem like it.

[w1ldc47]

I think the change may have happened less recently than you think. I know that (to the extent that I have had the opportunity to use the construction) I have used, (and, I believe, seen) "$girlsname's widower" for as long as I can remember. It would certainly have never occurred to me that I *couldn't* use it.

[q_pheevr]

Well, I did hedge with that parenthetical "at the latest." I expect that ADS-L will probably come up with some earlier examples, too.

What I find remarkable, though, is that I remember agreeing that "John is Mary's widower" sounded weird when I first read Lakoff, but that the headline in the Times (and the similar one in the Toronto Star) seemed perfectly natural.