Language and Gender

Question 1

Sara Mills (1995)

Answer 1

research revolving around semantic derogation, lexical pairs where male term is positive and female is negative, eg. bachelor is positive, spinster negative. lord is high, lady is low (dinner lady but not dinner lord)

Question 2

Julia Stanley

Answer 2

• 1973 - marked inequality for number of sexually promiscuous female words (200) to males (20), most females have a negative connotation
• 1977 - women occupy a negative semantic space because of number of marked forms that exist to describe female equivalents

Question 3

Peter Trudgill

Answer 3

• men use more non-standard pronunciation
• claimed to use more non-standard forms than they actually did
• women opposite
• males attach a covert prestige to non-standard forms

Question 4

Jenny Cheshire

Answer 4

• agreed with Peter Trudgill

- said males tend to converge towards vernacular that shows linguistic solidarity

Question 5

Robin Lakoff (1975)

Answer 5

claimed women’s language lacked real authority:

• precise colour terms
• empty adjectives (eg. sweet, cute)
• tag questions
• polite terms
• hedges (more than one option)

socialisation important in this
‘pointless principle’

Question 6

Janet Holmes (1992)

Answer 6

• tag questions used to maintain discussion or to be polite
• instead of being a sign of weakness, used in many different ways
• suggested something similar for hedges and fillers

Question 7

Dubois and Crouch (1975)

Answer 7

men use more tag questions, therefore asserted men were the less confident speakers

Question 8

O’Barr and Atkins (1980)

Answer 8

• similar results in men of lower class backgrounds - suggest features of uncertain speech were more to do with power relations than gender
• ‘powerless language’ rather than ‘woman’s language’

Question 9

Dominance Approach

Answer 9

• Zimmerman and West - 96% of interruptions made by men, parents more than children to daughters more than sons

Question 10

Difference Approach

Answer 10

• Jennifer Coates (1989) - female talk is supportive, negotiate discussion in all female talk
• Jane Pilkington (1992) - women more collaborative, use more positive politeness strategies
• Koenraad Kuiper (1991) - men less likely to feel the need to save face and used insults to build solidarity

Question 11

Deborah Tannen

Answer 11

• book - ‘You just don’t understand: men and women in conversation’ - 1990
• considered mixed sex talk and was a reaction to the dominance theory
• attempted to explain male-female miscommunication claiming mixed sex talk was ‘cross-cultural communication’
• the difference theory - status v support, independence v intimacy, advice v understanding, information v feelings, orders v proposals, conflict v compromise