Ami :-)

GENDER DIFFERENCES

• women - talk more than men, talk too much, are more polite, are indecisive/hesitant, complain and nag, ask more questions, support each other, are more co-operative, overlap each other

• men - swear more, don't talk about emotions, talk about sport more, talk about women and machines in the same way, insult each other frequently, are competitive in conversation, dominate conversation, speak with more authority, give more commands, interrupt more.

• Robin Lakoff, in 1975, published an influential account of women's language. This was the book Language and Woman's Place. In a related article, Woman's language, she published a set of basic assumptions about what marks out the language of women. Among these are claims that women:

• Hedge: using phrases like “sort of”, “kind of”, “it seems like” etc

• Use (super) polite forms: “Would you mind...”,“I'd appreciate it if...”, “...if you don't mind”.

• Use tag questions: “You're going to dinner, aren't you?”

• Emphasis equal to underlining words - so, very, quite.

• Use many adjectives: wonderful, lovely, adorable, and so on

• Use hypercorrect grammar and pronunciation: English prestige grammar and clear enunciation.

• Use direct quotation: men paraphrase more often.

• Women use more words for things like colours, men for sports.

• Women make declarative statements into questions by raising the pitch of their voice at the end of a statement, expressing uncertainty. For example, “What school do you attend? Eton College?”

• Use “wh-” imperatives: (such as, “Why don't you open the door?”)

• Overuse qualifiers: (for example, “I Think that...”)

• Apologise more: (for instance, “I'm sorry, but I think that...”)

• Use modal constructions: (such as can, would, should, ought - “Should we turn up the heat?”)

• Avoid coarse language or taboo language

• Use indirect commands and requests: (for example, “isn't it cold in here?” - really a request to turn the heat on or close a window)

• Use more intensifiers: especially so and very (for instance, “I am so glad you came!”)

DOMINANCE THEORY

• 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 Don Zimmerman and Candace West at the University of California in 1975. The subjects of the recording were middle class and under 35. Zimmerman and West produce in evidence 31 segments of conversation. They report that in 11 conversations between men and women, men used 46 interruptions, but women only two.

Women often suggest that people do things in indirect ways - “let's”, “why don't we?” or “wouldn't it be good, if we...?” Men may use, and prefer to hear, a direct imperative.

• Women –

• Talk too much

• Speak in private contexts

• Build relations

• Overlap

• Speak symmetrically

• Men –

• Get more air time

• Speak in public

• Negotiate status/avoid failure

• Speak one at a time

• Speak asymmetrically

• For example, women tend to use more affective markers (e.g., “I know how you feel”), more diminutives (e.g., “little bitty insect”), more hedge words (e.g., perhaps, sort of), more politeness markers (e.g., “I hate to bother you”), and more tag questions (e.g., “We’re leaving at 8:00 pm, aren’t we?”) than do men. Men, on the other hand, are likely to use more referential language (e.g., “The stock market took a nosedive today”), more profanity, and fewer first person pronouns than are women.

• Men may be more directive; they use more nonstandard forms, talk more about sports, money, and business, and more frequently refer to time, space, quantity, destructive action, perceptual attributes, physical movements, and objects. Women are often more supportive, polite, and expressive, talk more about home and family, and use more words implying feeling, evaluation, interpretation, and psychological state.