Gendered Language

Question 1

Difference

Deborah Tannen ‘you just don’t understand: Men and Women in conversation’ theory

socialisation

Answer 1

• Examines gender differences in communication.
• Argues that men and women have different styles, causing misunderstandings.
• Men focus on status and independence, using conversation to assert dominance.
• Women prioritize connection and intimacy, using conversation to build relationships.
• Tannen suggests understanding these differences can improve communication between genders.

Question 2

Pamela Fishman’s ‘The Work Women Do’ theory

Invisible, maintainance work

Answer 2

• Explores how women perform emotional labor in relationships, managing emotions and maintaining harmony.
• This theory highlights the gendered division of labor and the invisible work women do to maintain relationships.
• Fisherman questions Lakoff’s theories - that women asking questions shows insecurity and hesitation in conversation.
• Fisherman believed that these questions were attributes to a conversation.

Question 3

Robin Lakoff’s gendered language theories (1975)

Answer 3

• Theory that language reflects and reinforces gender inequality.
• Asserts that women’s speech is marked by hedging, tag questions, and qualifiers, reflecting their subordinate status.
• Men’s speech is seen as dominant, assertive, and authoritative.
• Lakoff argues that these language differences contribute to the marginalization of women in society.
• Examples: special lexicon, apologise more, lack of sense of humour, use direct quotations, speak in italics, use empty adjectives.

Question 4

Keith and Shuttleworth’s theory on Gendered language

Gender inequalities and language

Answer 4

• Explores how language reinforces gender stereotypes and inequalities.
• Women- talk more than men, talk too much, are more polite, are indecisive/hesitant, complain, ask more questions, are more supportive, are more cooperative.
• Men - swear more, avoid conversations on emotions, talk about sport more, talk about women and machines alike to one another, more banter, more competitive in conversation, dominate conversation, speak with more authority, give more commands, interrupt more.

Question 5

Zimmerman and West’s mixed sex conversation theory

Answer 5

• Examines conversational dominance and interruptions in mixed-sex conversations.
• Men tend to interrupt more, while women are interrupted less
• Men also tend to dominate conversations by talking for longer periods of time.
• This theory highlights power imbalances and gender differences in communication.
• The subjects of this experiment were all white middle class and under 35. → not a true representation of a population.

Question 6

Pamela Fisherman’s gendered language theory

‘Tag Questions’

Answer 6

• Examined the use of tag questions being asked
• Stated that women frequently use tag questions ‘isn’t it?’ or ‘couldn’t we?’ following a thought or suggestion.
• For females, questions are an effective method of beginning and maintaining conversations with males.
• Fishman argues that women use questions to gain conversational power rather than from lack of conversational awareness.
• She claims that questioning is required for females when speaking with males; men often do not respond to a declarative statement or will only respond minimally.
• Fishman also analyzes the frequent use of the phrase “you know” used by women. “You know” is an attention-getting device to discover it the conversational partner is listening. When “you know” is combined with a pause, she realized that the woman is inviting the listener to respond.
• When little or no response is heard from the male the pause is internalized by the speaker and she will continue the conversation.
• With her study she found that women in her study used four times as many yes/no and tag questions as the men
• But she was adamant that this was not because women were more uncertain and tentative as Lakoff suggested but because women are the ones generally trying to keep the conversation going.
• Fishman therefore concludes again that women’s style of communicating is not from lack of social training, but to the inferior social position of women.

Question 7

Deborah Jones’ Gossip theory (1990)

HT,S,B,C

Answer 7

• House Talk - its distinguishing function is the exchange of information and resources connected with the female role as an occupation.
• Scandal - a considered judging of the behaviour of others, and women in particular. It is usually made in terms of the domestic morality, of which women have been appointed guardians.
• Bitching - this is the overt expression of women’s anger at their restricted role and inferior status. They express this in private and to other women only. The women who bitch are not expecting change; they want only to make their complaints in an environment where their anger will be understood and expected.
• Chatting - this is the most intimate form of gossip, a mutual self-disclosure, a transaction where women use to their own advantage the skills they have learned as part of their job of nurturing
  others.

Question 8

Janet Holmes

How men and use language, compliments

Answer 8

• Men use language as a tool to give and obtain information (also referred to as the referential function of language)
• Women use language as a means of keeping in touch (also known as the social function)
• Women: Pay and receive more compliments.
• Regard compliments as positive and affective politeness devices
• Men:Tend to consider compliments as less positive than women do.
• Often see compliments as face threatening or at least not as unambiguous in intentions.

Question 9

Dale Spender’s Man Made language theory.

SI: ‘don’t be a girl,’ LOP, Nick C, alike to Zimmerman and West (90-100)

Answer 9

• Language is a system that embodies sexual inequality.
• She offers evidence of the loss of prestige experienced when men are referred to in female terms (“don’t be such a girl”), and the way that words to describe women are consistently sexualised or imply over-emotion and weakness.
• (Nick Clegg, since the earliest coalition negotiations, has been described by critics as a “harlot”, a “flirt” and “arm candy”.)
• Spender noted that, while males have more control over meaning and more control over talk one study found men were responsible for 98% of interruptions in mixed conversation), women are in a double bind: damned if they do and damned if they don’t talk like a lady.

Question 10

Address terms

Answer 10

Men are usually only Mr whereas women can be Mrs, Miss or Ms. Women’s address terms are therefore impacted by marriage.

Question 11

Diminutive suffixes

Answer 11

Using ‘ess’ or ‘ette’ on the end of words to make them feminine’ and therefore
smaller or weaker.

Question 12

Generic terms

Answer 12

Man’ tends to be used to mean all people; it is a generic term for all of us.

Question 13

Lexical asymmetry

Answer 13

• Pairs of words which ought to be equal are often not because the female version of the word has negative connotations.
• Bachelor, Master
• Slut, Mistress, Spinister

Question 14

Marked terms

Answer 14

We have to say ‘female doctor’ because people assume all doctors are men - same with ‘male nurse’, but there isn’t a suffix we can add to the word to denote it as masculine or feminine.

Question 15

Hedges

ME! VT, N-AL

Answer 15

Terms which tend to include modal expressions and vague terms. Non-absolute language.

Question 16

Empty adjectives

Answer 16

An adjective that adds little meaningful content.

Question 17

Tag questions

Answer 17

A question added to the end of a statement but does not change the statement e.g. ‘it is nice outside today, isn’t it?’

Question 18

Coarse language

Answer 18

Subset of language considered impolite, rude, or offensive.

Question 19

Hyper-correct

Answer 19

• Non-standard use of grammar that results from over application of perceived grammar rule.
• E.g. Whom when who is correct or You and I when You and Me is actually correct

Question 20

Super-polite forms

Answer 20

Adding phrases in attempt to display good manners.

Question 21

LET TOYS BE TOYS (2017)

Answer 21

The study conducted in 2017 and was done by a charity called Let Toys be Toys’. They studied a wide range of catalogues selling toys for children.

• Boys were 4x as likely to be shown playing with cars
• 97% of children that were shown with guns and war toys were boys
• Girls were nearly twice as likely to be shown with kitchens or other domestic play items
• Girls were nearly 7x as likely to be in a caring or nurturing play role
• Girls were 12x as likely to be shown playing with baby dolls (rises to 50x as likely if we exclude the Early Learning Centre catalogue)
• Boys twice as likely to be shown with construction toys
• Girls were twice as likely to be shown with arts and crafts toys

Question 22

The Deficit model:

Answer 22

Refers to how women’s language use contributes to women’s lower status

Question 23

The Dominance model:

Answer 23

Suggests that men’s use of language dominates’ the weaker female sex,due to their dominance in society.

Question 24

The Difference model:

Answer 24

Men and women are just different and neither one nor the other is more dominant necessarily.

Question 25

(Critisim of Lakoff)

O’BARR AND ATKINS

Powerless language and associations

Answer 25

William O’Barr and Bowman Atkins (1980) saw Robin Lakoff’s list, and considered it reductive.
They conducted a 30-month study of courtroom footage, and they recorded over 150 hours of trials in a North Carolina superior criminal court.

They assessed layers, witnesses, and those on witnesses and defendants and those on trial. Although almost all of the lawyers they observed were males, the sex distribution of witnesses and defendants was more nearly equal. Their hypothesis was that women’s language is, in large part, a language of powerlessness - a condition that can apply to men as well as women.

They did not believe that powerless language was a gendered concept, and that because women were in a generally powerless position in society, powerless language had just become associated with women.

As a result of their study, O’Barr and Atkins concluded that the speech patterns reported by Lakoff were neither characteristic of all women nor limited only to women. They found that the women who used the lowest frequency of Lakoffs ‘women’s language traits’ had an unusually high status (according to the researchers). They were well-educated professionals from middle class backgrounds.

A corresponding pattern was noted among the men who spoke with a high frequency of women’s language traits. The speech patterns outlined by Lakoff, they found, were less to do with gender and more to do with perceived power in society. O’Barr and Atkins tried and/or status accorded by the court.
to emphasize that a powerful position might derive from either social standing in the larger society and/or status accorded by the court.

Question 26

GEOFFREY BEATTIE (1982): - SOCIETY
BELIEVES MEN DOMINATE

Frequency: 34.1 > 33.8

Answer 26

Beattie (basically) wanted to prove Zimmerman and West wrong. He conducted 10 hours of tutorial discussion and some 557 interruptions (compared with the small number recorded by Zimmerman and West).

Beattie found that women and men interrupted with more or less equal frequency (men 34.1, women 33.8) - so men did interrupt more, but by a margin so slight as not to be statistically significant.

• Beattie’s work is rarely quoted, despite its relative reliability, and Zimmerman and West are regularly rolled out to prove a point. This could be seen to confirm the idea that as a society we choose to believe in male dominance rather than truly assessing the evidence.

Question 27

MULAC ET AL

Answer 27

• Investigated spoken features such as l’ reference (associated with males) and reference to emotions and verbs expressing uncertainty (associated with females) in written language.
• Enlisted 127 19-21 y/old students to see if common features of spoken language associated with both genders occurred in written work;
• Students were asked to write a description of 5 images; they imposed the follow scenarios on these descriptions:
• no scenario imposed (control writing)
• a man describing it to a man
• a man describing it to a woman
• a woman describing it to a man
• a woman describing it to a woman
• These parameters meant they could test if language altered dependent on the perceived gender of the producer and the recipient, in the control group, more stereotypical features were found in line with the gender of the writer;
• This was also true when they were asked to take on a gender persona, whereby if asked to write like a female, more of the features associated with female language appeared and vice versa; interestingly there was little differentiation in terms of perceived audience.

Question 28

VOCAL FRY:

PR,GF. Sound, Where.

Answer 28

• Also known as pulse register’ or ‘glottal fry.
• It has a very low register, it sounds very rough and deep, and it is the vibrating of the thick vocal cords at the back of the throat.

Question 29

House Talk

Janet Holmes, information & female occupation

Answer 29

• Its distinguishing function is the exchange of information and resources connected with the female role as an occupation.

Question 30

Scandal

Janet Holmes, judging p&w, family ethos, women responsible

Answer 30

• A considered judging of the behaviour of others, and women in particular. It is usually made in terms of the domestic morality, of which women have been appointed guardians.

Question 31

Bitching

Janet Holmes

Answer 31

• This is the overt expression of women’s anger at their restricted role and inferior status.
• They express this in private and to other women only.
• The women who bitch are not expecting change; they want only to make their complaints in an environment where their anger will be understood and expected.

Question 32

Chatting

Personal, Two way, learnt, nurturing

Answer 32

• This is the most intimate form of gossip, a mutual self-disclosure, a transaction where women use to their own advantage, the skills they have learned, as part of their job of nurturing others.

Question 33

Candace West:

Male versus Female doctors

Answer 33

• Observed male and female doctors and their use of language and understood that both genders performed traditionally hegemonic masculinity and femininity
• West identified that patients with female doctors were more likely to comply with their medicinal instructions than they were with male doctors as a result of their use of mitigated directives in the form of joint action
• Stated that men used more aggravated directives as opposed to women using more mitigated directives

Question 34

Jennifer Coates:

Crit. of Zimmerman and West

Answer 34

• Epistemic Modality consist of linguistic forms which are used to indicate the speaker’s (lack of) confidence.
• Lexical terms such as ‘perhaps’ express epistemic modality.
• Coates believes that the term ‘interruption’ isn’t appropriate when describing instances of simultaneous speech.
• During a public domain, interruptions of simultaneous speech, the goal of participants is to grab speakership.
• However, in private conversations, the goal of participants is to maintain social relationships and is a joint endeavour.
• Coates interprets different types of simultaneous speech (challenging Zimmerman and West):
• Overlap-as-enthusiasm - Speakers jumping into conversation out of turn due to enthusiasm to participate
• Tailing off - Speakers tail off leaving their speech for others to complete
• Collaborative thematic development - Speakers contribute simultaneously to the same theme.

Question 35

direct disagreement versus agreement

Jane Pilkington:

Answer 35

• Also studied language and gossip in all-female groups
• Supports the theory that there’s a dichotomy between language and gender
• Argues that male and female speakers in same sex groups wish to demonstrate solidarity.
• Pilkington noted that men explicitly contradict polite strategies and emphasise on direct disagreement as opposed to women who act on direct agreement
• On the surface it seems that males challenge positive face and female interactions consist of indirect criticism, no verbal sparring and are complimentary.

Question 36

Judith Butler

Answer 36

• Performativity elaborates on the idea that gender is performed, there is a flexibility in gender performativity and sexuality
• Judith Butler argues that Masculinity and Femininity aren’t what we are but the effects we create by what we do
• Gender is a performance for which there is no original and doesn’t solely define an individual. It is defined as a social set of expectations. Gender is constantly reaffirmed through what we do, it is socially constructed in relation to identity

Question 37

Hedges

Janet Holmes:

Answer 37

• Stated that hedges are used as support structures.
• Stated that hedges are interpreted depending on context and that they aren’t just tentative.

Question 38

gossip is extension of JB

Deborah Cameron:

crit. of Tannen

Answer 38

• Cameron reviewed recordings of all-female gossip as a result of Butler’s theory on Performativity
• Argues that speakers are ‘basically engaged in a collaborative and solidarity exercise’
• Believes that the competitive versus cooperative difference model is inherently problematic
• Identifies how men and women learn and reproduce ways of speaking appropriate to their sex
• Elaborates on how performing masculinity and femininity changes depending on circumstance
• Cameron states that you can’t generalise about 50% of the population and that “we shouldn’t look at gender as a monolithic construct”

Question 39

Janet Hyde:

Crit. of difference model

Answer 39

• Believes that there are no discernible differences between the way men and women communicate.

Question 40

Penelope Eckert:

Answer 40

• Identifies how language cannot be divorced from its context
• Gender doesn’t work independently. People collaboratively contract a sense of themselves.

Question 41

Restricted Occupational - Lexis:

Answer 41

• Lexis that is only used within a specific occupational context. It is specialist language that is only ever used in a specific profession.
• E.g. benign (doctor) , ad litem (Lawyer)

Question 42

Instrumental Power:

Answer 42

• Explicit power of the sort imposed by the state, by its laws and conventions or by the organisations for which we work.
• It operates in business and education.

Question 43

Adjacency Pair Discourse Structure:

Answer 43

• Made up of two utterances, when the first pair part determines the range of responses or second pair parts that the other participant can give. Shows an indication of how mutual understanding is accomplished in talk.

Question 44

The Plain English Campaign:

Answer 44

The Plain English Campaign was founded in 1979 by a group of people who wanted to make forms and leaflets simple and clearer. They advocate the use of clear, accessible, unambiguous language and believe that the importance of language is to fulfil the function in which it is used.

Question 45

Guidelines for writing plain English:

Answer 45

• Avoid jargon:
• Words that have a special trade or professional meaning are called jargon and this can be useful for people within a trade, save time and make communication easier.
• Avoid long sentences:
• The Plain English Campaign recommends that in official texts writers should aim for an average sentence length of 15-20 words.
• Use active voice rather than passive voice:
• All non-immigrants must complete the form
• The form must be completed by every non-immigrant
• Use positives rather than negatives
  Write clearly
• Don’t write unclearly.