Robin Lakoff

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Linguistics

Donald J. Trump’s surprising victory in the 2016 American presidential election requires analysis: what brought it about, and what might it portend? This paper explores these and other questions: how have Trump’s victory and his communicative strategies compromised the culture’s notions of “truth” – via a continuum from “lie” through “post-truth,”...

Of all the aspects of language, discourse analysis is singularly interdisciplinary, a word with a somewhat speckled past. This chapter takes as an example of the interdisciplinary nature of discourse analysis a case that at first may seem overly simple, hardly a part of “discourse analysis” at all, more typically considered as an exercise in pragma...

Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1990), pp. 472-481

Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1984), pp. 481-492

Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1979), pp. 581-592

The study of language above the sentence level has taken a long time to be incorporated into linguistics proper. But more and more, we see all forms of linguistic expression as grist for our mills. Declaring that our work begins with phonetics and stops with syntax does not make much sense. Still, the study of connected discourse has been to recalc...

Introduction: Power GamesA Note on Method Schegloff: Academic Politics isn't Just AcademicOleanna: Much Ado About SomethingReal Politics, Realpolitik: Women as Political AnimalsConclusion References

There are two major theories of language learning: one, based on behavioral psychology, emphasizes pattern-practice and memorization; the other, the rationalist approach, attempts to give students the reasons for grammatical phenomena, relating facts about the second language to facts about the student's native language. Of these, the first has bee...

The relationship between language, discourse and identity has always been a major area of sociolinguistic investigation. In more recent times, the field has been revolutionized as previous models - which assumed our identities to be based on stable relationships between linguistic and social variables - have been challenged by pioneering new approa...

Philip Herbst, Talking terrorism: A dictionary of the loaded language of political violence. Westport, CT & London: Greenwood, 2003. Pp. xvii, 220. Hb $49.95. Talking terrorism (TT) is not the kind of book typically reviewed in this journal. It is not explicitly about the analysis of language; rather, it is an illustration of the way language can p...

Previous discussions of politeness have focused on its function in dyadic encounters. But this basically private and individual set of strategies has uses in public and group contexts, in the behavior of persons in the public eye and the interpretation of the utterances of these figures. Americans increasingly expect their politicians, especially p...

Abstract The speeches delivered by Al Gore and George W. Bush at the conclusion of the contested 2000 U.S. presidential campaign are of especial interest because they represent a type of political speech that is virtually unique and, because the speakers and their staffs had no previous models to fall back upon, as spontaneous as political utteranc...

Many fields participate in the analysis of connected text. Linguistics has only recently emerged as one of them. This paper provides an illustration of some of the ways in which the theories and methods of linguistics can be of use in the analysis of discourse. I use as a text reports in a selection of American print media, between June 1994 and Oc...

In "Father Knows Best: The Use and Abuse of Power in Freud's Case of Dora," Robin Tolmach Lakoff and James C. Coyne take a revolutionary look at one of the most famous of Sigmund Freud's cases and make significant connections from the conversations between Freud and his patient Dora to therapeutic relationships in the 1990s. In their careful examin...

In den letzten Jahren haben Frauen in den Vereinigten Staaten Anschläge auf viele einst undurchdringbare Bastionen männlicher Macht durchgeführt. Genauer gesagt, sie haben in großer Anzahl begonnen, einige Institutionen zu betreten, von denen sie bislang entweder völlig ausgeschlossen waren oder nur als besondere Ausnahmefälle in kleiner Anzahl ged...

Theories and descriptions of politeness have concentrated on its form and function in ordinary dyadic conversation. This is reasonable, since the purpose of politeness is to avoid conflict, and conflict is both most apt to occur, and most dangerous, in that discourse format. This paper extends the examination of politeness to two discourse types of...

This chapter focuses on grammaticality that implies an either/or distinction; assuming that one can divide all the sentences of a language according to such a criterion makes for a tolerably workable theory. A new theory can arise only out of an old theory; it was out of transformational grammar with all its faults that one has constructed present-...

In looking at the forms language takes, linguists sometimes forget to ask the obvious question about the relationship between the forms language uses (phonology and syntax) and the function language is expected to play as a vehicle of communication. Probably the bulk of our daily communication involves the allocation and use of power, the politics...

The question of artistic verisimilitude - the relationship between the representation and the reality - is one of the more intriguing issues in a theory of aesthetics. Until now, linguists have largely been isolated from this area of philosophical speculation because it seemed irrelevant to our interests and impervious to our methodology. But as we...

Transitivity in the English verb is examined from the perspectives of the linguistic theorist and the second language instructor. English verbs can be assigned to one of six categories: pure intransitives, causative-inchoative verbs, psych-movement verbs, cross-classification verbs, direct object deletions, and pure transitives. Both syntacticians...

Traditionally, applied linguists have looked to theoretical linguistics for help, and not vice versa, and they haven't found much enlightenment. Recent work by theoretical linguists on the interaction between language use and real world phenomena may begin to change this situation. Language teachers have realized that some aspects of language are h...

Our use of language embodies attitudes as well as referential meanings. ‘Woman's language’ has as foundation the attitude that women are marginal to the serious concerns of life, which are pre-empted by men. The marginality and powerlessness of women is reflected in both the ways women are expected to speak, and the ways in which women are spoken o...

Traditional transformational grammar attempts to define the conditions on the applicability of grammatical rules on the basis of superficial syntactic environment alone. This paper discusses a number of examples in several languages that show that such a goal is unattainable-that, in order to predict correctly the applicability of many rules, one m...

Numerous explanations have been put forth for the uses and derivations of tenses. This paper attempts to show that none of these explanations is satisfactory, since they cannot account for many ways in which tenses are used in English and other languages. While this paper does not try to present an adequate theory, it gives evidence that such a the...

Traducción de: Language and Woman's Place Análisis sobre la manera en que las mujeres se ven a sí mismas y sobre los presupuestos colectivos en torno a la "naturaleza" y la posición de la mujer, que tiene como punto de partida el lenguaje utilizado hoy día en el contexto anglohablante por y con referencia a las mujeres.

This paper presents evidence that semantic notions-such as presupposition, speaker's and hearer's beliefs about the world, and previous discourse-must be taken into account in a complete treatment of the distribution of some and any in conditional, negative, and interrogative sentences. Syntactic conditions alone will not account for the fact that,...