Robin Lakoff’s Theory

Women’s language features

1. Lexical hedges or fillers (you know, sort of, well, you see)

2. Tag questions (She's very nice, isn't she?)

3. Rising intonation on declaratives (It's really good?)

4. "Empty" adjectives (divine, charming, cute)

5. Precise colour terms (magenta, aquamarine)

6. Intensifiers (I like him so much)

7. 'Hypercorrect' grammar (consistent use of standard verb forms)

8. 'Super-polite' forms (indirect requests, euphemisms)

9. Avoidance of strong swear words (fudge, my goodness)

10. Emphatic stress (It was a BRILLIANT performance)

Dominance theory

1980’s

This is the theory that in mixed-sex conversations men are more likely to interrupt than women. It uses a fairly old study of a small sample of conversations, recorded by Zimmerman and West at the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California in 1975.

Research - Method

31 conversational segments analysed

2-party interactions recorded in public places in a University community

Equal numbers of male-male, female-female, male-female conversations analysed

All were white, middle class, between 20-35 years of age

Research - Findings

In cross-sex talk, men with women, the pattern of interruptions “was grossly asymmetrical,” with men initiating 96% of the interruptions.

The second study involved college students who were unacquainted and randomly paired. They analysed only the initial twelve minutes of conversation, feeling that the students would be on their best behaviour during the process of getting acquainted. Of the interruptions in those conversations, 75% of them were initiated by men.

One explanation of these differences is that women talk so much that men must interrupt to get a word in edgewise. In order to test this hypothesis, West and Zimmerman analyzed their data to see if there was an association between the amount of talk and interruptions.

If men interrupt because women talk so much, then it would be expected that the interruptions would occur later in the conversations, after enough talk has gone by for the man to feel the need to interrupt. Their analysis found just the opposite: men interrupt earlier in the conversation rather than later.

In fact, when women interrupted, it took them over twice as long to initiate the interruption than it did the man. Thus, if the data shows anything, they show that it is women that must interrupt to get a word in edgewise.

Research - Conclusion

As Geoffrey Beattie, of Sheffield University, points out (writing in New Scientist magazine in 1982): “The problem with this is that you might simply have one very voluble man in the study which has a disproportionate effect on the total.”

From their small (possibly unrepresentative) sample Zimmerman and West conclude that, since men interrupt more often, then they are dominating or attempting to do so.

O’Barr & Atkins

Conducted studies during courtroom cases looking at the witnesses’ speech patterns.

Their findings challenged Lakoff’s views of women’s language.

Findings

They found that language differences are based on situation-specific authority or power – not gender.

They concluded that speech patterns were neither characteristic of all women nor limited only to women.

Pamela Fishman – Dominance?

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. Women ask questions to try to get a response from men, not because of their personality weaknesses.

 This consisted of the paper examining male – female hierarchy in everyday interaction. Beginning with a discussion of the concepts of power and of conversation as negotiated activity, it suggests that successful interaction depends on conversationalwork by the participants. She is based at the University of California , Santa Barbara.

Fishman’s research

Pamela Fishman conducted an experiment that involved listening to fifty-two hours of pre-recorded conversations between young American couples. All were white, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Fishman listened to recordings in their apartments and concentrated on four features.

Fishman’s features

Feature Males Females

Questions (inc. tags)

Attention-getters

Minimal responses

Topic initiation

Difference Model

Deborah Tannen said that since males and females grow up so differently, communication between the sexes is similar to communication between two entirely different cultures.

The feminine and masculine styles of speech are like two different regional dialects.

Tannen explains why a woman and a man can walk away from the same conversation with completely different ideas of what was said.

Differences between men and women

Men and women have different aims in conversation.

Women want intimacy Men want independence.

Men vs. Women

Status vs. support

Independence vs. intimacy

Advice vs. understanding

Information vs. feelings

Orders vs. proposals

Conflict vs. compromise

Male styles of talking

Contrary to popular belief, men are not trying to dominate women in conversation (even if that might be what ends up happening)

Men are concerned with status. When telling stories, they will try to impress their friends or “one-up” them.

Men try to preserve their negative face

Men are more comfortable with conflict than women since “life is a contest”

Men are less likely to be careful what they say

Men have an early warning system that detects signs that they’re being told what to do.

Female styles of talking

Women are not trying to manipulate men when they talk to them.

Women seek human communication

Women want to be liked and are concerned about their positive face

For women, conflict is a threat to communication and is often avoided.

When telling stories about themselves, women will often display themselves as clumsy or foolish so that she doesn’t imply that she is better than the people she is talking to.

Women display a co-operative overlap and engage in a lot of backchannel behaviour while listening to others.