Treacherous Words: Gender and Power in Academic Assessment

Abstract

Interactional sociolinguistic research of the past decades has been successful in developing empirical methods documenting the role of indexical signs in signaling the constantly changing contextual presuppositions on which situated interpretations in every-day talk exchanges rest. But it has also been argued that the interactional sociolinguists' focus on turn-by-turn inferencing often leads them to neglect the ideologies and other broader societal forces that motivate individuals' verbal actions. This paper attempts to deal with these issues by means of an in-depth analysis of the tape recorded transcripts of a dissertation defense. In part one, turn-by-turn analysis of contextualization processes is used to reveal the hidden complexities of the group assessment process. The analysis shows how the examiners as a group, relying largely on prosody and related contextualization cues, are able to jointly discuss the quality of the dissertation, while at the same time avoiding explicit evaluative scaling that might risk disagreement. In part two the paper turns to a somewhat more wide ranging content based examination of interactive activities, to show that there is a subtext of gender ideology that surfaces in many parts of the proceedings, yet is never discussed in its entirety. Although this subtext does not affect the examination's official outcome, it may nevertheless influence individual examiners' evaluations of the work's significance