Gender, politeness and stereotypes

Armando Coronado Erendira Quiroz

WOMENS LANGUAGE AND CONFIDENCE.

Some social dialectologists suggested that women were status concious. Robin Lakoff suggested almost the opposite. Women were using language which reinforce their subordinate status.

Social dialect research focussed on differences between womens and mens speech in the areas of pronunciation and morphology.
Lakoff shifted the focus of research on gender differences to syntax, semantics and style. She suggested that womens subordinate social status in American society is indicated by the language women use.

Example.

1. Lawyer- What was the nature of your acquaintance with the late Mrs. E. D.?

Witness A- Well, we were, uh, very close friends. Uh she was even sort of like a mother to me.

2. Lawyer- And had the heart not been functioning, in other words, had the heart been stopped, there would have been no blood to have come from that region? Witness B- It may leak down depending on the position of the body after death. But the presence of blood in the alveoli indicates that some active respiratory action had to take place.
A Uses features of what Lakoff labelled womens language, while B does not.

1. Lexical hedges or fillers- YOU KNOW, SORT OF, WELL YOU SEE.
2. Tag questions- SHE IS VERY NICE, ISNT SHE? 3. Rising intonation on declaratives- ITS REALLY GOOD. 4. Empty adjectives- DIVINE, CHARMING, CUTE. 5. Precise colour terms- MAGENTA, AQUAMARINE. 6. Intensifiers- JUST, SO. I LIKE HIM SO MUCH. 7. !Hypercorrect grammar-CONSISTENT USE OF STANDARD VERB FORMS. 8. Superpolite forms- Indirect requests, euphemisms. 9. Avoindance of strong swear words- FUDGE, MY GOODNESS.

FEATURES OF WOMENS LANGUAGE

Most of this initial research was methodologically unsatisfactory. 10.Emphatic stress- IT WAS A BRILLIANT PERFORMANCE. Speech was recorded in laboratory conditions with assigned topics.

 EXAMPLE.
THE FINAL SYNTACTIC CATEGORY IS IMPERATIVE CONSTRUCTONS IN QUESTION FORM, WHICH ARE DEFINED AS ALTERNATIVES TO SIMPLE AND DIRECT WAYS OF ORDERING ACTIONS. THEY ARE QUESTIONS WHICH ARE SUBORDINATED FOR COMMANDS. WILL YOU PLEASE OPEN THE DOOR? INSTEAD OF CLOSE THE DOOR. IS AN EXAMPLE OF AN IMOERATIVE IN QUESTION FORM.

No linguist would describe will you please open the door? as an imperative constructionn and the expression imperative construction in question form confuses form and function.
(it is an interrogative construction expressing directive function)

 The internal coherence of the features Lakoff identified can e illustrated by dividing them in to two groups
FEATURES WHICH MAY SERVE AS: HEDGING DEVICES. BOOSTING DEVICES.

Firstly, there are linguistic devices which may be used for hedging or reducing the force of an utterance. Secondly, there are features which may boost or intensify a propositions force.

 Lakoff argued that both kinds of modifiers were evidence of an unconfident speaker. Hedging devices explicitly signal lack of confidence, while boosting devices express the speakers anticipation that the addressee may remain unconvinced and therefore supply extra reassurance. Women use hedging devices to express uncertainty and they use intensifying devices to persuade their addressee to take them seriousl. Women boost the force of their utterances because they think that otherwise they will not be heard or paid attention to.

LAKOFFS LINGUISTIC FEATURES AS POLITENESS DEVICES.

The tag question is a syntactic device listed by Lakoff which may express uncertainty. Susan is uncertain about the date, and she indicates this with a tag which signals doubt about what she is asserting

 Tags may also express affective meaning. They may function as faciltative or positive politenes devices, providing an addressee with an easy entree into a conversation.

Margaret- Andrew, this is our new neighbour, Frank. Andrew has just changed jobs, havent you?
Andrew- Yes i am now a well paid computer programmer instead of a poorly paid teacher.

 A tag may also soften a directive or criticism.

Zoe and her mother Claire have just come home from the supermarket. Zoe empaties the shopping basket all over the kitchen floor. ClaireThat was a bit of a daft thing to do, wasnt it?

Tags may also be used as confrontational and coersive devices. The following tag is used to force feedback from an uncooperative addressee
A police superintendent is interviewing a detective constable and is criticising the constables performance. A- youll probably find yorself um before the Chief Constable, okay? B- Yes, Sir, yes, understood. A- Now you er fully understand that, dont you? B- Yes sir, indeed, yeah.

The following tale summarises the patterns found in a 60,000 word corpus containing equal amounts of female and male speech collected in a range of matched contexts. FUNCTION OF TAG Expressing uncertainty Facilitative WOMEN % 35 59 MEN % 61 26

Softtening
Confrontational Total

6
--100

13
--100

Women put more emphasis than men on the polite or affective functions tags, using them as facilitative positive politeness devices. Men, on the other hand, used more tags for the expression of uncertainty.

Despite the widespread stereotype of women as the talkative sex, and proverbs which characterise women as garrulous ( Womens tongue are like lambs tails, they are never still), most of the research evidence points the other way. In a wide rage of contexts, particularly non-private ones such as television, interviews, staff meetings and conference discussions, where talking may be increase your status, men dominate the talking time.

INTERACTION.

INTERRUPTIONS.
The most widely quoted study on interruptions collected examples of students exchanges in coffee bars, shops and other public places an a tape recrder carried by one of the researchers. The results were dramatic.

In same gender interactions, interruptions were pretty evenly distributed between speakers. In corss-gender interactions, almost all the interruptions were from males.
Interruptions % Same-sex interaction Speaker 1 Speaker 2 Cross-sex intercation Women Man 4 96 43 57

This researchers followed up this study with recorded interactions in sound-proof booths in a The percentage of male interruptions decreased cent in this less natural setting, but there was no men were still doing most of the interrupting.
Speaker Average turns per meeting Average no. Of seconds per turn. Average did interrupt per meeting

one which laboratory. to 75 per doubt that

Average was interrupted per meeting.

Woman A Woman B Woman C Woman D Man E Man F Man G Man H Man I

5.5 5.8 8.0 20.5 11.3 32.3 32.6 30.2 17.0

7.8 10.0 3.0 8.5 16.5 17.1 13.2 10.7 15.8

0.5 0.0 1.0 2.0 2.0 8.0 6.6 4.3 4.5

3.0 3.0 3.2 7.5 2.6 6.7 6.3 5.0 2.5

Another aspect of the picture of women as cooperaqtive conversationalists is the evidence that women provide more encouraging feedback to their conversational partners than men do. On New Zeland study which examined the distribution of positive feedback (noises such as ntm and mhm) in casual relaxed interaction between young people found that women geve over four times as much of this type of supportive feedback as men. Research on conversational interctions reveals women as cooperative conversationalts, whereas men tend to be more competitive and less supportive of others.

Why are womens patterns of interaction different from mens?

Is it because they are subordinate in status to men in most communities so that they must strive to plase?

Or are there other explanations?

EXPLANATIONS
The norms for womens talk may be the norms for small group interaction in private contexts, where the goals of the interaction are solidarity stressing-maintaining good social relations. Agreement is sought and disagreement is avoided. By contrast, the norms for male ineraction seem to be those of public referentially-oriented interaction. The public model is an adversarial one, where contradiction and disagreement is more likely than agreement and confirmation of the statements of others.

GOSSIP
Relaxed in- group talk that goes on between people in informal situations. Womens gossip focusses on :
Personal experiences. Personal relationships. Personal problems feelings
Western Society: idletalk

and

Study: women
Recordings of womens group over 9 months. Linguistic Features: Prepositions which express feelings. Facilitative tags Women complete each other utterances.

Study: men
Men tend to focus on things and activities , rather than personal experiences and feelings.

Linguistic Features:
Long pauses. Responses disagreed with. frequently

Change topic abruptly. Mock insults.

Malagasy community
Women : take more confrontational roles, their speech is more direct than mens. Men: speech is circumlocutionary, they hold the position of power.

The construction of gender.

o Ed: hes I mean hes like a real artsy fartsy

fag hes like hes so gay hes got this like really high voice and wire rim glasses.

Uses of features associated with more feminine speech style: Frequent use of like. Hedges such : I mean Intensifiers such as real, so, really.

Approaching gender identity

One way to adopt gender identity is for instance when women adopt masculine context and men adopt feminine by using features. Example: Men: clothing shops Women: police force

A second way is through narratives of personal experience.

Sexist language
Is concerned with the way that language express negative and positive stereotypes of women and men.

Sexist language
Dwight Bolinger: variety of ways in which the English language provides categories and ways of encoding experiences.

He also consider the idea of language sexist

Sexist language is one example of the way a culture or society conveys its values.

Can a language be sexist?

Sexism involves behavior. English language discriminate women. In the semantic area metaphors are available to describe women in derogatory images.

Animal Imagery

Food Imagery

There are an extraordinary high number of derogatory images for women

compare with the ones used for men.

 Many words reinforce a view of women as a deviant, abnormal or subordinate group. Lion- lioness Actor- actress Hero- heroine. it has been suggested that suffixes ess and ette trivialize and diminish women.

Authoress Poetess.

EXAMPLES OF MALE ORIENTED WORDS

Chairman Newsman Policeman Salesman Doctor Professor Engineer Lawyer

Congressman

Reporter

PROFESSIONAL

Generic
Generic provide evidence to support that English language marginalize women and treats them as abnormal.

 He and man can be said to render women invisible. English does not posses a third person singular pronoun which is gender neutral

EXAMPLES
All men are mortal. Julia is a man (?) Therefore, Julia is mortal (?)

We want to hire the best men we can get for the job.
Only men? Both sex?