gender Flashcards
What is the deficit approach?
- Female language seen to be weaker and a lesser version of male language
What is the dominance approach?
Men’s language dominates women.
What’s the difference approach
Men and women use language differently due to their different cultures.
Otto Jeperson (1922)
Suggested male language forms were the ‘norm’ and the language of others
(including women) were ‘deficient’ and had a smaller vocabularly than men.
Theoriesed that women link sentences with the coordinating conjunction “and” as they are emotional rather than ‘grammatical’
Women use descriptive adjectives “pretty” and “nice” often as well as using the intensifier “so” (“so pretty”)
Also claimed women use adverbs and hyperbole often.
Robin Lakoff (1975)
Language and Women’s Place - Described male language as stronger, more prestigious and more desirable because women are taught to speak like ‘ladies’. She proposed (Language and Woman’s Place) that women’s speech
can be distinguished from that of men in a number of ways.
These included-
The overuse of qualifiers eg “I think that”
Hedge using phrases like “sort of”, “kind of”
Use tag questions “your going to dinner, aren’t you?”
Indirect requests
Dale Spender (1980)
Man-made language - suggests language is patriarchal and has been made by men for men in such a way as to ensure their continued dominance.
Edwin and Shirley Ardner (1975)
Women’s conversational behaviour is less assertive and less
confident than that of men precisely because they occupy a less powerful position in society than men.
Pamela Fishman (1983)
Conversational Shitwork - Women have to do the majority of the
‘conversational shitwork’ when interacting with men, because men, in their dominance, are less concerned to do so. Critised Lakeoffs believe that tag questions shows womens insecurity in conversation and instead believes women ask questions as an attribute of interactions.
Zimmerman and West (1975)
Observed that in same-sex conversations that interruptions were fairly evenly distributed but in mixed-sex conversations most interruptions were carried out by men.
They used a fairly small sample of conversations with the subjects being white, middle classed and under 35.
Deborah Tannen (1980)
Differences in male and female attitudes and values are cultural and that they grow up with completely different ideas about themselves, their place in the world and the functions of conversation.
Claimed there were 6 main differences:
Status vs Support
Independence vs intimacy
Advice vs understanding
Information vs feelings
Orders vs proposalls
Conflict vs compromise
Jenny Cheshire (1989)standard prestige
Young females used more standard prestige forms than young males who used more of the non-standard utterances such as non standard -s “They calls me all types of names” and “ain’t” replacing the auxilliary “have” “I ain’t seen my nan in seven years”, suggesting differences were already evident in childhood.
May be because many children are in same sex friendship groups growing up, and subsequently develop different styles of speaking.
However, study was conducted in the playground on only 2 groups of boys and 1 group of girls
Jane Pilkington (1990)
Women in same sex talk are more collaborative than men were in all-male talk.
Jenny Cheshire (1982)vernacular
‘Variation is controlled by both social and linguistic factors. In boys’ speech variation is governed by norms that are central to the vernacular culture, and are transmitted through the peer group. Variation in the girls’ speech appears to be a more personal process, and less rigidly controlled by vernacular norms.’
O’Barr and Atkins (1980)
Language differences are situation-specific, relying on who has the authority and power in a conversation, rather than the gender of the people involved.
They propesed this theory after studying courtroom cases for 30 months and examining them for the ten basic speech differences Lakoff proposed eg empty adjectives “cute” and tag questions “isn’t it”. Concluded that differences were not due to being a woman but instead of being powerless
Geoffrey Beattie (1982)
Challenged the concept of interruptions only signifying dominance. Suggested they could also signify interest and involvement. In his study he noted 557 interruptions (compared to 55 found by Zimmerman and West) and found men only slightly interrupt more than women and thus he was critical of Z+W theory.
