As Milroy (1980: 79-80) notes, the converse of dense networks having well-defined gender roles Also holds: loose-knit network structures as found in the MC go together with the blurring of gender roles. MC women and men, under ordinary circumstances, have the same range of acquaintances and contacts. Either one might plausibly take the car to the garage for repairs, or arrange the delivery of a pizza, or attend a benefit ball for the opera society. Women, that is to say, do not lead lives more or less protected than men. Yet we consistently find the same linguistic difference between men and women as Cicero found.
Evidence of this absolute linguistic difference, not correlated with any obvious social fact such as sharply circumscribed gender-role differences, has the caused Considerable Speculation and some controversy. Labov (1966: 312) suggested that the women's wider range of variants in New York was the result of "hypercorrection," without further explanation. Later, when other sociolinguists had added Similar eviidence for male-female differences from other surveys, Labov (1972: 301-4) Returned to the point, Stating that "our answers at the moment are not better than speculations," and suggesting that the crucial influence of women on children in the first stages of language acquisition, equipped them with a "special sensitivity." "Women," he says (1972: 243), "are more sensitive than men to overt sociolinguistic values."
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