Stereotypes and Scripts

Abstract This book identifies connections between language use and stereotyping, then draws on those insights to provide linguistic strategies for resisting harmful stereotypes. It analyzes two ways that people enact and express through language: social scripts and generics. The book draws out threads of these relations and connects them to individual action and social change. It outlines how stereotyping language can be used to denigrate, oppress, or otherwise harm, and then picks out features of that language that can be used to resist and undermine those harms. The hope is that these lessons can be applied to resist various kinds of harmful speech, as part of a broader project of identifying and cultivating language of resistance. The three phenomena investigated are stereotypes, social scripts, and generics.