THEORIES *barf*

• Dominance theories


  Examine language use in respect to men being more dominant
• Schulz and Lakoff research


  • Looked at terms which are marked in a way to identify them as different
  • Examined semantic derogation - where words have gained negative connotations over time
• Semantic derogation (Schulz + Lakoff)


  • Actress vs actor
  • Master vs mistress
• Janet Holmes research


  • Looked into the way in which women are referred to in affectionate nominatives (names)
  • Noted that the nominates used for women were predominately from the semantic fields of food and animals
• Affectionate nominatives for women (Holmes)

  • Sugar
  • Honey
  • Bitch
  • Cow
• Stanley's research


  • Examined the number of insults for women against men
  • Found 220 insults to describe a promiscuous woman vs 20 for a promiscuous male
• Describing promiscuous people (Stanley)

  • Woman - slag, slut
  • Man - lad
• Dale Spender's beliefs


  • There is a culture of 'male as norm' in which men are the dominant models and women are add-ons
  • Men are almost always introduced first
  • Words like 'mankind' add to the idea that men are the norm
  • Backlash against the term 'history' (his story)
• Gender-neutral words (Spender)


  Headteacher instead of headmaster and headmistress
• Germaine Greer


  • Tried to linguistically reclaim the term 'c*nt' in an attempt to remove the negative connotations attached to the female genitals
• Zimmerman and West (1975): 'Men interrupted 96%-100% more of the time'
• Zimmerman and West (1975) study


  • Small number of subjects
  • All subjects were white, middle-class men under the age of 35
  • Not a representative sample
• Zimmerman and West's research may show traits typical of middle-class conversations, but this may be atypical of all other conversations
• Beattie's research: 'There was pretty much an equal number of interruptions by men and women alike'
• Beattie's research


  • Considered over ten times the corpus of Zimmerman and West (1975)
  • Based on a much larger and representative corpus
• Beattie's research is likely to be more accurate than Zimmerman and West's study
• Pamela Fishman's research: Conversations between men and women often fail because of how men act. Men used a third of the number of questions as women and gave minimal responses. Women do the‘conversational shitwork’.
• Deficit theory


  Essentially states that women's language is weak or contains weak traits
• The deficit theory originates from Otto Jespersen's book published in…


  1922
• Otto Jespersen


  • Investigated non-fluency features such as fillers and pauses
  • Research details that women speak without thinking and so use more non-fluency features (features which disrupt the fluency of speech)
  • Research relies on evidence from literature and travellers, which means it is speculative and is often dismissed as folk linguistics
• Onnela


  • Disputes Jespersen's research
  • Found that with masters students, there was a very similar MLU (mean length of utterance - the average time span of a piece of speech)
• Deficit model was popularised by…

  Robin Lakoff in 1975
• Features of spoken language that make women's language 'weak' according to Lakoff


  • Hypercorrect grammar
  • Overapologising
  • Empty adjectives
  • Tag questions
  • Overuse of intensifiers
  • Special lexicon
  • Less swearing
  • Lacking a sense of humor
• Lakoff's research is based purely on her own observations and not any linguistically rigorous testing
• Kira Hall


  • Found that phone sex workers often made use of Lakoff's features to appear more feminine
• O'Barr and Atkins


  • Looked at a courtroom and found that lower class men use Lakoff's language features in court
  • Research implies that it is potentially not to do with gender, but to do with power, denoted as 'powerless language'
• In 2017, research published by 'Economic and Social Research Council' discovered that there had been a 500% increase in the use of 'fuck' by women since the 1990s
• Difference model


  Concerned with the idea that men and women are simply inherently different
• Deborah Tannen's difference model


  • Defines six clear continuums of difference between the genders: Advice vs understanding, Orders vs proposals, Status vs Support, Information vs feelings, Independence vs intimacy, Conflict vs compromise
• High involvement speakers (Tannen)


  Men who tend to take a very active role in the conversation, be this by leading the conversation or backchanneling (not giving direct responses, but comments like 'yep', 'uh-huh' and 'ok')
• High considerateness speakers (Tannen)


  Women who tend to speak more slowly and avoid talking at the same time as someone else
• Report talk (Tannen)


  Used by men, which is direct (like reporting on something)
• Rapport talk (Tannen)


  Used by women, which is used to create and sustain relationships
• • Jennifer Coates researched all-male and all-female groups and states that they converse differently, although topics of conversation tend to be similar. techniques used by women to maintain conversation aren’t signs of inferiority, but signs of intelligence.
• Deborah Jones' 'house talk'


  • Scandal - women discuss the behaviour of others (usually women)
  • Bitching - expression of anger, not because they want something to change, but just as a relief
  • Chatting - an intimate form of gossiping where women mutually self-disclose and nurturing takes place
• Deborah Cameron says that girls bitch because covertly (secretive) dominant behaviour is more acceptable for women
• Kuiper's research details that men use more insults and expletives (swearing)
• Pilkington's research looks at the way a 'locker-room banter' is created within all-male groups, where insults were part of this culture and created bonds
• Kate Millett's research states that 'the tone and ethos of men's house culture is sadistic, power-oriented, and latently homosexual, frequently narcissistic in its energy and motives'
• Diversity model


  Claims that there are more differences within the genders than there are between them