Words, Gender and Power

Abstract

The selection of certain linguistic expressions accounts, to a great extent, for the impression readers get from a text, although the working of ideology will not necessarily be the result of a conscious choice on the part of the writer. The smallest unit, in this sense, is the word, the concern of the present chapter. As members of the same cultural world, in fact, we share a great deal in terms of expectations about which words are likely to occur together: the predictability of these links can be exploited to ideological ends, implicitly or explicitly, to control readers’ reactions, call up certain connotations or trigger ideologically loaded associations. Some of these links between words, and it is not so much the case of single items as of patterns or repeated words, can be responsible for ways of thinking that are prejudicial to groups of people; quantitative analysis brings out and highlights any repeated and therefore potentially significant pattern, and it is in this respect that it represents an invaluable instrument in a study concerned with the relationship between language and ideology.