deficit model Flashcards
Robin Lakeoff (70’s)
–one of the first women to publish theories on the existance of womens language.
-Her book Language and Womens Place(1975), and her article entitled womens language” have served as the basis for much research on the subject. She labelled womens language as “symbolically powerless”
-in her 1975 arcticle she published 10 basic assumptions about what she felt constituted womens language. Most of her work agreeing with Otto Jespersen (20’s) theories, these are the main three:
-hedges; “sort of” “kind of”
-super polite forms (spf); “would you mind.” Id appreciate if.”
-tag questions; “you’re going to dinner, aren’t you?”
otto jespersen(20’s)
- claimed women dont have advanced knowledge, we use smaller vocabularies, fewer abstracts terms, and we string basic ideas together using the conjunction “and”
janet holmes-challenger
Janet Holmes(80’s)
-Whilst Lakeoff argued women use tag questions to seek validation and reasurance, Holmes agreed that women do use more tag questions but that we use them for a more facilitative function- as a cooperative means
kathy o leary- challenger
kathy O leary (80’s)- argues that tag questions are more to do with occupation than gender, she did a study in a professional context such as teachers and students, doctors and patients, and concluded that professional participants used a much higher frequency of tag questions. This therefore supports Holmes’ assertion that tag questions reflect cooperation rather than insecurity, but challenge them because it did not reflect female preferences, but was determined by occupational role.