Dominance Flashcards
Dominance Theory - Schulz and Lakoff
- They looked at terms which are marked in a way to identify them as different.
- The research details that the ‘-ess’ suffix marks out a feminine equivalent.
- For example, actress to mark a female actor.
- They also looked at semantic derogation. This is where words have gained negative connotations as time has progressed.
- For example, ‘masters’ female equivalent is ‘mistress’ which has connotations of prostitution.
Schulz-the greater number of negative terms for women embodies the patriarchal order of society
Dominance Theory
Dominance theories examine language use in respect to men being more dominant.
Dominance Theory - Janet Holmes
- Janet Holmes’ research looked into the way in which women are referred to in affectionate nominatives (names).
- She noted that the nominates used for women were predominately from the semantic fields of food and animals.
- For example, you may notice women being called ‘sugar’, ‘honey’, ‘bitch’ and ‘cow’
Dominance Theory- Stanley and supporting link
- Stanley’s research from the 1970s examined the number of insults for women against men.
- She found that there were 220 insults to describe a promiscuous woman vs 20 for a promiscuous male.
- In 2015, Tyger Drew-Honey asked people in the streets how they would describe a woman who had slept with 30 men and how they would describe a man who had slept with 30 women.
- Both men and women described the woman as a ‘slag’ and ‘slut’, whereas the man was labelled as a ‘lad’.
Dominance Theory - Dale Spender
- Dale Spender believes that there is a culture of ‘male as norm’ in which men are the dominant models and women are add-ons.
- For example, the fact that men are almost always introduced first (Lord and Lady, Mr and Mrs) and when women are not introduced first, it is symbolic of their lesser role (mothers and fathers – puts women in a maternal role).
- In addition, words like ‘mankind’ add to the idea that men are the norm.
Germaine Greer
Australian author Germaine Greer has tried to linguistically reclaim the term ‘c*nt’ in an attempt to remove the negative connotations attached to the female genitals.
Dominance- Zimmerman and West (1975) studied interruptions in conversations between men and women.
They found that men interrupted 96%-100% more of the time. In 1975, at the University of California, Zimmerman and West recorded 31 conversations between two people each time. 10 of which were male only, 10 female only, and 11 mixed.
So, what happened in their study? Well, they reported that males interrupted a total of 46 times, usually silencing the speaker, whereas women only interrupted twice.
Opposing theorist to Zimmerman & West
However, Beattie’s research considered over ten times the corpus of Zimmerman and West (1975) and discovered that there was pretty much an equal number of interruptions by men and women alike.
Limitations of Zimmerman & West’s Study
Zimmerman and West (1975) examined a small number of subjects, all of whom were white, middle-class men under the age of 35. * This is not a representative sample. This means their research is flawed and not necessarily investigating what they think they are investigating. It is entirely possible that the research shows traits typical of middle-class conversations, but this may be atypical of all over conversations. Didn’t count interruptions within same gender conversations
Dominance- Pamela Fishman
Fishman’s Idea is that men dominate women in language, reflecting a patriarchal society. Pamela Fishman’s research discovered that conversations between men and women often fail because of how men act. She details that men use a third of the number of questions as women and gave minimal responses.
* This leads to, as Fishman describes, women doing the ‘conversational shitwork’. She thought that this was due to a woman’s inferior status in society and that women did this in order to be able to form relationships with men- asking questions gives them conversational power as women lack societal power.
Limitations of Fishman
Five out of the six subjects were attending graduate school; all subjects were either feminists or sympathetic to the women’s movement, were white, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five.
Findings Fishman
Questions (3x more than men), They used supportive mininal responses to demonstrate their interests, attention-gestures (Women used phrases such as “you know what?” to grab
attention), topic initiation (Her research showed that the topics proposed by women weren’t always taken up by the other participants).
Beattie also questions the meaning of interruptions:
“Why do interruptions necessarily reflect dominance? Can interruptions not arise from other sources? Do some interruptions not reflect interest and involvement?”
Janet Holmes tag questions
Wanting to explore Lakoff’s ideas about tag questions…
•Referential tag questions, Affective (facilitative), Affective (softening)
Holmes Affective (softening)
tag questions – weakening a command or criticism – Take out the rubbish, won’t you? Women 6%, Men 13%
