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Question 1

Who is Robin Lakoff and what was the ‘Deficit Theory’?

Answer 1

• First linguistic to look specifically at the relationship between gender + language
• Argued that women’s lang use reflected their comparative lack of status

Lakoff claimed that women:

• Speak less (than men)
• Use fewer expletives (“oh dear…”, “oh my…”)
• Use more correct grammar
• Use more polite forms (“would you mind”, “I’d appreciate it if…”)
• Apologise more
• Don’t ‘get’ jokes as much

Question 2

Who was Deborah Tannen and what was the ‘Difference Model’?

Answer 2

Acknowledges men + women each use lang in specific ways because they’re socialized differently
- Men + women are socialized differently = The Difference Model

• The differences aren’t specific because men have more power than women, but because men + women want different things out of their conversations

Question 3

What did Tannen mean by ‘Report vs Rapport’?

Answer 3

Tannen suggested that men’s lang can be categorised as ‘Report talk’ whilst women’s lang can be categorised as ‘Rapport talk’

• Tannen summed up the difference between male and female speech:

Women:

• Speak in private contexts
• Talk too much
• Build relations
• Overlap
• Speak symmetrically

Men:

• Speak in public
• Get more air time
• Negotiate status/avoid failure
• Speak one at a time
• Speak asymmetrically

Question 4

How does Gender affect our language?

Answer 4

Jespersen, 1922:

Women’s lang is a projection of their deficiency compared to the male norm; their lang is deficient because they have an innate deficiency

What characteristics make women's lang as deficient?
Talk a lot
-Tend toward hyperbole
- Have a smaller vocab
- Use empty + base adjectives

Question 5

What did Zimmerman and West find? What criticisms occurred?

Answer 5

In mixed-sex convos, men are more likely to interrupt than women. Men are dominating (or attempting to) the convo

Criticism: Beattie (1982) questioned why interruptions reflected dominance, why not interest? Conducted own study and found that men + women interrupt w/ more or less equal frequency

Question 6

What was O’Barr + Atkins ‘Powerless Language’ Theory?

Answer 6

• They’re best known for developing the idea that lang is specific, depending on who has authority+power as opposed to gender
• E.g. in an interview, if a man were interviewing a woman, then the man would be more assertive in the conversation, not because of gender, but because of his authority+power

Question 7

What was Beattie’s ‘Interruptions’ Theory?

Answer 7

Recorded some 10 hours of tutorial discussions + some 557 interruptions

• Found that women + men interrupted with more or less equal frequency (men 34.1 , women 33.8)

Question 8

peter trudgill (1974)

Answer 8

• Men use non-standard features to fit in with friends whereas women use standard English to be perceived as prestigious