language and gender

• Dominance - Robin Lakoff

  • 1975
  • America
  • published a set of assumptions that put forward her ideas about 'women's language'
  • explained the ways in which women's language varied by a reference to their subordinate role in society, and the dominance of men
  • said women's register served to maintain their inferior role in society - use language forms to represent subordinate role
  • said if women consciously avoided these they would be seen as 'unfeminine'
• Lakoff's assumptions examples

  • hedges (sort of, kind of, etc)
  • super polite forms
  • tag questions
  • empty adjectives
  • speak less
  • apologise more
  • lack a sense of humour
  • avoid expletives
• Dominance - Janet Holmes - Tag questions

  • early 1980s
  • broke the distinction of tag questions into two main kinds
  • 1 - Referential - signals uncertainty or lack of info (eg. the films on Netflix, isn't it)
  • 2 - Affective
  • facilitative - expresses solidarity or intimacy (eg. we like musicals, don't we)
  • softening - tweaking the tone of a criticism or command (eg. give me that would you)
• findings of Janet Holmes - tage questions

  • referential - female = 18 (35%), Male = 24 (61%)
  • Affective (facilitative) - female = 30 (59%), Male = 10 (25%)
  • Affective (softening) - female = 3 (6%), Male 5 (13%)
• Pamela Fishman - 1983 - conversational shitwork

  • said women used tag questions to seek to continue conversations
  • looked into men and women conversations - found that women work harder
  • she analysed several hours of the conversation of 3 white, American, middle-class heterosexual couples
• Pamela Fishman - findings

  • questions - women asked 3 times the number of men
  • minimal responses - women used supportive minimal responses - men didn't give any
  • attention getters - women used phrases to grab men's attention - men gave none
  • topic initiation - topics initiated by women weren't taken up - topics initiated by men were always successful
• William O'Barr and Atkins

  • 1980
  • looked at courtroom cases and witness' speech for 30 months
  • examined the witnesses for 10 basic speech differences between men and women
  • findings challenged Lakoff
  • showed that language differences are based on situation-specific authority or power, not gender
  • women who used the lower frequency of women's language trait had a high status - were well educated professionals
• Don Zimmerman and Candace West - interruptions

  • 1975
  • santa barbara campus of uni of California
  • theory that in mixed-sex conversations, men are more likely to interrupt than women because they dominate
  • subjects of the reading were white, middle class and under 35
  • produced as evidence 31 segments of conversation - reported that in 11 of them, men used 46 interruptions, women only 2
• Evaluation of Zimmerman and West

  • limited study (people asked wasn't broad)
  • limited data set
• Geoffrey Beattie - against interruptions and Zimmerman and West

  • 1982
  • said the problem was that you may just have one very dominant man study which has a disproportionate effect on the total
  • question whether interruptions reflect dominance
  • recorded 10 hours of tutorial discussions and 557 interruptions
  • found that women and men interrupted with more or less equal frequency - men 34.1 - women 33.8
• Swacker - men talk more

  • 1975-77
  • a painting was shown separately to men and women and they were asked to describe it - they could talk for as long as they wanted
  • men talked on average for 13 mins, women for 3.17 mins
  • also recorded question-and-answer sessions at academic conferences
  • in regard to volunteering - women contributed 27.4% and they took less than half the time compared to men
• Spender

  • offered explanation about Swacker's findings
  • in research women were being measured against men so were quieter as men prefer them this way
  • suggests people feel that women should be seen and not heard so the amount the talk is too much
• Difference - Tannen - difference between men and women is cultural

  • 1991
  • the difference between men and women is cultural - they are socialised in childhood to have different ideas about themselves and their place in the world - so they talk differently
  • men - concerned with status and independence, give direct orders, don't mind conflict, factual information, solutions to problems
  • women - interested in forming bonds, talk less, agree more, give orders indirect, show understanding, offer support
• Tennan's contrasts

  • she summarised her ideas about male and female language in 6 contrasts
  • status vs independence
  • independence vs intimacy
  • advice vs understanding
  • information vs feelings
  • orders vs proposals
  • conflict vs compromise
• Difference - Coates

  • builds on Lakoff's and Tannens ideas
  • suggests all female talk is both simultaneous and co-operative based on negotiation and support
  • seen through use of epistemic modal forms (perhaps, sort of, probably) to avoid face-threatening acts
• Koenraad Kuiper - 1991

  • found that men use insults to express solidarity and are less likely to pay attention to the need to save face
• Deborah Jones - 1990 - womens gossip

  • used category labels
  • house talk - exchange of information connected with the female role as an occuaption
  • scandal - judging of behaviour of others, women in particular
  • bitching - overt expression of women's anger at their inferior status. Expressed in private to other women only, they don't expect change
  • chatting - most intimate form of gossip. Transaction using skills they learned as part of job of nurturing
• Diversity - Deborah Cameron - Methodology

  • used the 'Gender Similarities hypothesis' - research by Janet Hyde, published in 2005
  • she compared the results from several hundred existing studies into male and female language, going back over several decades
  • research method = meta analysis
• Deborah Cameron - evaluation of methodology

  • used several hundred existing studies to gain data - would give valid results as a wider data set to confirm trends
  • perhaps cannot guarantee validity of others findings
• Diversity model

  • suggests that our sex doesn't make a difference to the language we use
  • our language is influenced by the roles we have in society and the way we interact socially with others
  • argues gender does not exist in isolation from factors such as ethnicity, social class, sexuality, age, etc
  • there are many features which contribute to the differences in the way we speak