gender Flashcards
Jennifer Cheshire’s reading Study
Reading is a traditionally industrial and working class town
Cheshire studied a mixed-sex group of teenagers whom she met in a playground, truanting from school
Cheshire recorded their speech and identified 11 non standard grammar features and measured their frequency of use
Eg. non standard ‘s’ inflections, non-standard copular, and multiple negation
Reading Boys
She created social networks for each member of the group and gave them a network strength scores, determining whether they were a primary member, secondary member or non-member of the group
She discovered there was a positive correlation between between social network and 6/11 features
She then created the vernacular culture index which determined status, including things such as style of dress and carrying knives
She discovered that some features were very closely linked to status
Reading girls
Cheshire then looked at girls’ social networks which were small intense groups which tended to fall out and reform easily
She divided the girls into ‘Good girls’ and ‘Bad Girls’ (girls who shoplifted)
She found that boys use more non standard forms than girls, and there is closer link to boys and their social network score
Otto Jesperson (The deficit view)
Jesperson believed that men and women’s language differed because women were ‘inherently deficient’
He believed that: women talk too much, women are more fluent due to the fact they have a smaller vocabulary, women link sentences with ‘and’ because they are emotional rather than grammatical, women use words such as ‘nice’ and ‘pretty’ ‘too much’
Criticisms: no empirical evidence, fundamentally misogynistic, no quantified measure of ‘too much’
Robin Lakoff (deference model)
Working from a feminist perspective, she tried to explain how language contributed to women’s lack of power and status in society
She argued that girls are ‘socialised’ into using a special kind of language which she called ‘Women’s Language’ which is ‘deferential’ and gives the impression that women are weaker than men
Some features of Women’s Language: superpoliteness, hypercorrectness, use of implication, tag questions
Criticisms : no empirical research, studied off her own sample which was middle class and educated, Betty Lard and Isabelle C argued that she was factually incorrect as men use more tag questions than women and argued that tag questions were to promote cooperation rather than seem unsure
Dom Zimmerman and Candace West (dominance through turn-taking)
A response to lakoff’s ideas
Whereas Lakoff said that women’s behaviour is weak and men merely respond to it, the dominance model argues that men purposely behave uncooperatively in order to undermine and dominate women
They researched dominance through turn-taking and discovered two types of flouting Sack’s No gap No overlap: overlaps, interruptions
Overlaps: a slight over-anticipation of the TRP
Interruptions: violations of the turn-taking process, an interlocutor starts to speak at a place that is clearly not the TRP
They found that: between same-sex pairs there is an even distribution between overlaps and interruptions across both interlocutors, and there was 3x more overlaps than interruptions
Between mixed-sex pairs they found that men interrupt women 23x more than women interrupt men, and there were 5x more interruptions than overlaps
Criticisms: their data sample was entirely young, educated, privileged students (unrepresentative) highlighted by Beattie, people change their behaviour when being recorded (observation bias), almost all the interruptions were committed by one particular male student, highlighted by Beattie, G&B Eakens argued that the interruptions were hierarchical since the study was conducted in a faculty meeting
Dom Zimmerman and Candace West (dominance through minimal responses)
Used the same data as the turn-taking
Z&W identified ‘delayed minimal responses’ which actually reverses the effect and suggests the listener is unenthusiastic and unsupportive
They argued that this is a way men can dominate women
Pamela Fishman
Taped three young couples over several days
Noted that women use y’know 5x more than men in an attempt to stimulate a response from their interlocutor
Concluded that men actively withhold support by delaying or withholding minimal responses
Therefore making women do the ‘conversational shitwork’
Janet Holmes
Disagrees with fishman
Believes that tags can be used for two purposes: speaker-oriented and addressee-oriented
Speaker-oriented: ‘she’s coming at 12 o’clock isn’t she?’
Addressee-oriented: ‘that’s a nice picture, isn’t it?
Holmes’ study revealed that men and women used about the same number of tags, however men use more speaker-oriented tags and women use more addressee-oriented tags
Victoria DeFrancisco
Observed that: women introduce more topics than men, talk more than men, work harder to keep the conversation going
However: women are less successful at getting their conversation topic accepted, men who are talking to women reject topics they do not wish to discuss, yet virtually all of the topics men discuss were accepted
Helena Leet-Pelligrini
She focussed on the effect of gender and expertise in mixed sex conversations
Male experts
Female experts male non-experts
Female non-experts
Female non experts spoke the least and were the most supportive
Deborah Tannen (the difference model)
Developed in response to both Lakoff and the Dominance model
Tannen said: boys and girls grow up in ‘different cultures’ so talk between men and women is ‘cross-cultural communication’
Claimed that women are socialised to use conversation as rapport talk (to establish and maintain relationships)
Yet, men are socialised to use conversation as report talk (predominantly to give information, and compete for positions of power)
Tannen’s Binary Opposites
Behaviour that women and men do that are the opposite of eachother
Independence (M) vs Intimacy (W) ~ men want to suggest they don’t need people whereas women want to suggest they do
Status (M) vs Support (W)
Tannen and turn violations
Identified two kinds of turn violations
Uncooperative overlaps ~ what Zimmerman and West would call an interruption ~ a male feature used to show competitiveness, winning is shutting the other person up
Cooperative overlaps ~ simultaneous speech but not trying to silence you, can be seen as supportive
Cooperative overlaps are a sign of ‘high involvement speakers’, speakers who follow Sacks’s No Gap No Overlap are ‘high considerateness speakers’
Carmen Fought’s - power tools
What Lakoff believed was deference, Fought interpreted this as ‘power tools for building relationships’
Features of women’s language such as uptalk or vocal fry is immediately seen as immaturity or stupidity, however Fought believe that young girls embellish this in sophisticated ways
