Theory: Gender (The Deficit Model) Theorists, Experiments and Studies

Question 1

Lakoff: different features?

Answer 1

Lakoff believes that women’s language contains many different features which make it weak. Here are just a few:
* Intensifiers - ‘very’, ‘so’, ‘really’.
* Hedging - expressing weak opinion - ‘sort of’.
* Avoiding swearing.
* Weak adjectives - adjectives which contain a small value, for example, ‘nice’.
* Back-channeling - passively agreeing and supporting, for example, ‘yeah’, ‘umhumm’.

Question 2

O’Barr and Atkins: deficit language features?

Answer 2

Men use deficit language features in the courtroom. This suggests that it’s more about powerless language than it is about gendered language.

Question 3

Jesperson: non-fluency features?

Answer 3

Women’s language is littered with non-fluency features because they speak before thinking. BUT, this is not a linguistic report - it’s based on public perception.

Question 4

ESRC: ‘fuck’?

Answer 4

Women use ‘fuck’ 50 times more often than before 1990.