The Dominance Model Flashcards
Define the dominance approach.
It is different to the ideas of Lakoff, who states that women’s language patterns match their deficit status within society. Fishman argues that in society, it is the male language patterns that are accepted by society more redily than the pattern used by females. This links to the concept of the ‘male as norm’ approach.
Who is Pamela Fishman and what does she argue?
Pamela Fishman argues in “Interaction: the Work Women Do” (1983) that conversation between the sexes sometimes fails, not because of anything inherent in the way women talk, but because of how men respond or don’t respond. Her very memorable phrase for the work that women do to keep a conversation going is ‘conversational shitwork’ (1977). In “Conversational Insecurity” (1990) Fishman questions Lakoff’s theories.
Dale Spender and “Man Made Language”
Spender believes that the world is biased against the ways in which women use language. Because men hold more influential jobs than women, it is their voices that get heard most often.
Jennifer Coates (1980)
Coates found that when looking at conversations and topics, men will often reject a topic of conversation introduced by women while women will accept the topics introduced by men. Men discuss ‘male’ topics and women are more likely to initiate conversation than men, but less likely to make the conversation succeed.
Zimmerman and West
Don Zimmerman and Candece West recorded mixed sex and same sex conversations recorded in a coffee shop (all middle class and all same ethnicity).
What were the results of Zimmerman and West’s mixed gender conversations?
- 31 segments of conversation recorded in total
- 46 interruptions from men (96%)
- 2 interruptions from women (4%)
What were the results of Zimmerman and West’s same gender conversations?
Males overlapped 9 times and females overlapped 0 times.
Geoffrey Beattie
He was critical of the work of Zimmerman and West. He argues that not all interruptions are a sign of power struggles and a quest for dominance. He recorded 10 hours of tutorial discussions with 557 interruptions. He found that men and women interrupted with a relatively equal frequency (men 34.1, women 33.8). No significant statistical differences were found here.
Esther Grief (1980)
Research on family discourse found that:
- Both parents interrupt daughters more than sons when they are talking.
- Fathers interrupt more than mothers in family conversations.
O’Barr and Atkins
Recorded courtroom interaction and found that language features traditionally associated with women were also used by men when they were not in positions of power. So, it is not gender that is the chief consideration with regards to linguistic choice, it is the context. They spent 30 months studying courtroom interaction, looking at the work of Lakoff to see how far they were true. They found that these features were not associated with women’s language, but were associated with both genders in regards to being in a position of powerlessness. These were all middle class professionals with well paid occupations and so should be used to being in authority, but not the same type of authority as a judge.
Define vocal fry
Vocal fry involves dropping the voice to its lowest natural register, which changes the way a person’s vocal folds vibrate together. Those changes create inconsistencies in the vibration and lend the speaker’s voice a subtly choppy or creaky quality.
Casey Klofstad and vocal fry
Klofstad refers to vocal fry as “creaky voice” and is an associate professor of political science at the University of Miami. There is some evidence that people respond negatively to vocal fry. In a 2014 study, Klofstad and colleagues found that recordings of speakers who used vocal fry were judged harshly by listeners, compared to recordings of people speaking normally. These negative judgements were strongest when both the speaker and listener were women. “Young adult female voices with exhilarating vocal fry are perceived as less competent, less educated, less trustworthy, less attractive and less hireable,” Klofstad and his colleagues write.
Research on vocal fry at Centenary College of Louisiana.
Women aren’t the only ones who use vocal fry. In a forthcoming study of 18- to 22-year-olds, researchers at Centenary College of Louisiana found that men not only fry, but they do so more than young women. “Our data showed that men spend about 25% of their time speaking using fry, while women use it about 10% of the time,” says Jessica Alexander, an assistant professor of psychology at the college.
Research on vocal fry at Utah State University.
It’s well established that people mimic one another’s posture, mannerisms and even their speech patterns in order to establish trust and facilitate conversation. “People modify their behaviours to more closely align with others,” says Stephanie Borrie, an assistant professor of speech language pathology at Utah State University. Sometimes referred to as “social mirroring” or entrainment, this practice “just helps people feel more connected,” she says, “If we’re talking to people who use a lot of vocal fry, we’re going to use a lot of vocal fry.”
Penelope Eckert on vocal fry.
Stanford linguist Penelope Eckert, who confessed that she found the sound of vocal fry so grating she decided to conduct an informal poll of her students to see if they did too. What she discovered surprised her: while Eckert heard a reporter who creaked as sounding less authoritive than one who didn’t, her students percieved no such difference in authority. And she was able to duplicate those results in a larger study of 500 adults. Those over 40 were bugged by vocal fry, and those under 40 were not. Eckert concluded that it was she who was “behind the curve.” Or, in other words, cringing inwardly when somebody talks is one thing, but making pronouncements about how other people should speak is another.
