Dominance Approach

• Dominance approach was theory that believed language spoken amongst people were to maintain and reinforce men's power
• Dale Splender - 1980

  • Drew further attention to verbal dominance by interpreting women's silence as a form of oppression.
  • Any reference of a person were assumed to be a man (e.g. author of book assumed to be a man if gender unknown) - saw this as language asserting dominance through use of male pronoun
  • Males believed they were all powerful due to fact God was
• Pamela Fisherman - 1980

  • Studied conversation between 3 American couples, drew similar conclusion to Lakoff (hedging, tag questions, hypercorrect grammar, etc.)
  • Viewed hardwork women do in convo as a result of inferior social status
  • called this "Interactional shitwork" as something she already studied in 1977
  • Study lead to next approach in studying gender
• Don Zimmerman and Candace West 1975

  From a study in a small sample, found that 96% of interruption in conversation is caused by men, taking more turns and having longer turns