How men and women talk

Question 1

Trudgill (1983)

Answer 1

• Studied social class accents
• Women’s pronunciation closer to Received Pronunciation
• More prestigious accent
• Women attempt to find overt prestige more than men

Question 2

Cheshire (1982)

Answer 2

• Studied adolescent boys and girls
• Boys tended to use more non-standard grammatical forms
• Men prefer to find covert prestige to make them seem rebellious and independent

Question 3

Why do women use more prestigious forms and men non-standard grammatical forms?

Answer 3

1) Women may be less secure about social status and fear they are inferior
2) Society generally expects higher standards from women, to behave “ladylike”
3) Men already have higher social status than women so don’t need to use it
4) Non-standard English traditionally used by working class men, so they use it to show masculine qualities

Question 4

What features of women’s language makes it more polite than men’s?

Answer 4

1) Hedges and Fillers - “sort of” “kind of” “maybe”
2) Apologetic Requests - “I’m sorry”, “Would you mind..?”
3) Tag Questions - “…isn’t it?”
4) Indirect Requests - “it’s very noisy out there” (shut the door)

Question 5

What did Lakoff (1975) find when studying varying politeness?

Answer 5

• Women tend to speak less than men
• Use fewer expletives
• Use more intensifiers “very”,”so”

Question 6

What effect does this have? (Lakoff)

Answer 6

• Makes them seem indecisive and needy
• Weak
• Prevents them from being taken seriously
• This is called the Deficit Model

Question 7

O’Barr and Atkins (1980) suggested an alternative explanation to the deficit model. What did they do? And what did they find?

Answer 7

• Analysed transcripts from courtroom trials
• They found both male and female witnesses who came from lower class backgrounds used these linguistic features that Lakoff labelled female
• They suggested that this isn’t a female trait, but a trait associated with the individual feeling powerless

Question 8

What are the key points of The Dominance Model?

Answer 8

• Zimmerman and West (1975)
• 96% of interruptions by men in conversations!
• Suggested men are dominant in male - female conversations
• Does this reflect male dominance in society?

Question 9

What are the key points of The Difference Model?

Answer 9

• Tannen (1990)
  1) Men
• Concerned with status and independence
• They give direct orders & don’t mind conflict
• Interested in gaining factual information and solutions
  2) Women
• Concerned with forming bonds, talk less and agree more
• Polite and indirect orders to avoid conflict
• Women aim to show understanding by compromising and offering support

Question 10

How is traditional subject of conversation related to these linguistic features?

Answer 10

Men engage more about work and sport where factual information and status are important
women engage more about family and emotions where support and compassion are more important

Question 11

What did Beattie (1982) suggest to counter Zimmerman and West’s theory?

Answer 11

He questioned as to whether interrupting was a sign of dominance or not.
He said interruptions can be supportive and can show that the interlocutors are listening to each other.

Question 12

What did Cameron (2007) argue?

Answer 12

That a lot of research is biased because it only focuses on differences as opposed to similarities between female and male language