Context Counts: Papers on Language, Gender, and Power

by Robin Tolmach Lakoff, Laurel Sutton (Editor)

Context Counts assembles, for the first time, the work of pre-eminent linguist Robin Tolmach Lakoff. A career that spans some forty years, Lakoff remains one of the most influential linguists of the 20th-century. The early papers show the genesis of Lakoff's inquiry into the relationship of language and social power, ideas later codified in the groundbreaking Language and Woman's Place and Talking Power . The late papers reflect her continued exposition of power dynamics beyond gender that are established and represented in language.

This volume offers a retrospective analysis of Lakoff's work, with each paper preceded by an introduction from a prominent linguist in the field, including both contemporaries and students of Lakoff's work, and further, Lakoff's own conversation with these responses. This engaging and, at times, moving reevaluation pays homage to Lakoff's far-reaching influence upon linguistics, while also serving as an unusual form of autobiography revealing the decades' long evolution of a scholarly career.

422 pages, Hardcover

Published March 24, 2017

Reviews

[javor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Given its time, an incredibly insightful book on sociolinguistics. Lakoff is a remarkable observer of very minute aspects of language and how it may encode power differentials, group identifications, etc., as well as language's role in various institutions such as psychotherapy, courts, and the advertising industry. At the same time, Lakoff often shifts between very radical, transdisciplinary views of language as constitutively inseparable from psychosocial and political factors, on the one hand, and rather conservative, identity politics-esque views of language that simply shift the base of normativity from the Chomskyan ideal speaker-hearer to the Hymesian "speech community", which is still an idealization that creates an us/them bifurcation. She also has very little consideration for race and colonialism, and her version of feminism often only accounts for white, middle-class, abled women (though her chapter on women and disability makes important contributions to this). Her focus on grey zones, especially in politics and the law, seem very useful though; her paper on pragmatic impairment and confession admissibility was very interesting. I feel that her implicit (though at times very explicit) maintenance of the rational Cartesian subject, with a bi-monological account of communication instead of a truly dialogical one, leads to very similar problems that generative linguistics itself often ran into, especially in terms of seeing nonstandard forms of language (e.g. AAE, women's language) as legitimate only insofar as they were logical, organized linguistic systems, seems rather problematic. In certain parts of her book she critiques the exclusion of poetry, literature, and other forms of performance from the linguistic view of language, yet at other points she seems to uphold this competence/performance distinction by simply displacing the boundary and expanding competence to encompass a broader range (such as social, cultural, or communicative competence). She goes back and forth a lot in her views. Nonetheless, still a really great book which is very easy to read for those not familiar with linguistic jargon, as well as really funny at times. Would be interested in seeing updates to her writings since the rise of intersectional politics, critical race studies, decolonial theory, and embodiment models of communication such as in the paradigm of Crip Linguistics.