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 dynamnics 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 scholary career.

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 dynamnics 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 scholary career.

This text gets to the heart of a pressing issue in American society: who holds power and how they use it, keep it, or lose it. In a discussion of the news events that have occupied an enormous amount of media space in the late-20th century - political correctness, the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, Hillary Rodham Clinton as First Lady, O.J. Simpson's murder trial, the Ebonics controversy, and the Clinton sex scandal - author Robin Lakoff shows that the struggle for power and status at the end of the century is being played out as a war over language. Controlling language is a basis for all power, she says, and therefore it is worth fighting for. As a result, newly emergent groups, especially blacks and women, are contending with middle- to upper-class white men for a share in "language rights".

The 1975 publication of Robin Tolmach Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place, is widely recognized as having inaugurated feminist research on the relationship between language and gender, touching off a remarkable response among language scholars, feminists, and general readers. For the past thirty years, scholars of language and gender have been debating and developing Lakoff's initial observations.
Arguing that language is fundamental to gender inequality, Lakoff pointed to two areas in which inequalities can be found: Language used about women, such as the asymmetries between seemingly parallel terms like master and mistress, and language used by women, which places women in a double bind between being appropriately feminine and being fully human. Lakoff's central argument that "women's language" expresses powerlessness triggered a controversy that continues to this day.
The revised and expanded edition presents the full text of the original first edition, along with an introduction and annotations by Lakoff in which she reflects on the text a quarter century later and expands on some of the most widely discussed issues it raises. The volume also brings together commentaries from twenty-six leading scholars of language, gender, and sexuality, within linguistics, anthropology, modern languages, education, information sciences, and other disciplines. The commentaries discuss the book's contribution to feminist research on language and explore its ongoing relevance for scholarship in the field.
This new edition of Language and Woman's Place not only makes available once again the pioneering text of feminist linguistics; just as important, it places the text in the context of contemporary feminist and gender theory for a new generation of readers.