- It is a proposition that men and women differ fundamentally in the way they use language to communicate.
- Men's goals in using language tend to be about getting things done, whereas women's tend to be about making connections to other people. Men talk more about things and facts, whereas women talk more about people, relationships and feelings.
- Language and communication matter more to women than to men; women talk more than men.
- Women are more verbally skilled than men.
- Men's way of using language is competitive, reflecting their general interest in acquiring and maintaining status; women's use of language is cooperative, reflecting their preference for equality and harmony.
- These differences routinely lead to
"miscommunication" between the sexes, with each sex misinterpreting
the other's intentions. This causes problems in contexts where men and women
regularly interact, and especially in heterosexual relationships.
- Historian Mary Beard believes that female broadcasters must lower their voices to sound like men if they want to be successful.
- Professor Beard also believes broadcasters must address the position of women across TV, not just on panel shows, in order to make their voices more valued.
- It’s not a coincidence that even on radio, the successful women presenters tend to have unusually deep (ie male) voices.
O'Barr and Atkins's challenge to deficit
theory
- William O’Barr and Bowman Atkins are known for developing the idea that language differences are situation-specific, relying on who has the authority and power in a conversation, rather than the gender of the people involved.
- This challenged the theory that Lakoff had presented, that variants in speech were due to gender. A simple example to explain their theory may be that in an interview situation, if a man were interviewing a woman, then perhaps the man would seem more assertive in the conversation, not due to his gender, but simply because he has more authority in that circumstance.
- The theorists studied courtroom cases for 30 months, observing a broad spectrum of witnesses, and examining them for the ten basic speech differences between men and women that Lakoff proposed. These differences or “women’s language” components consisted of; hedges, empty adjectives, super-polite forms, apologising more, speaking less frequently, avoiding coarse language or expletives, tag questions, hyper-correct grammar and punctuation, indirect requests and using tone to emphasise certain words.
- O’Barr and Atkins discovered that Lakoff’s proposed differences were not necessarily the result of being a woman, but of being powerless. They used three men and three women to prove this. The first man and first woman both spoke with a high frequency of “women’s language” components. The woman was a 68-year-old housewife and the man drove an ambulance, suggesting stereotypically that power and control would perhaps be lacking from their lives. Pair number 3, a doctor and policeman respectively, both testified as expert witnesses, suggesting that the power they experienced in their jobs and lives meant that they had less components of “women’s language”. Man and woman number 2 fell between the first two pairs in the frequency of hedges and tag questions in their speech, ie. “Women’s language” component.
- From this study, O’Barr and Atkins
concluded that the quoted speech patterns were “neither characteristic of all
women, nor limited to only women”. According to the researchers, the women who
used the lowest frequency of women’s language traits had an unusually high
status
The effect of written and computer-mediated
forms on gendered language
- This experiment examined what situational and dispositional features moderate the effects of linguistic gender cues on gender stereotyping in anonymous, text-based computer-mediated communication.
- Participants played a trivia game with an ostensible partner via computer, whose comments represented either masculine or feminine language styles. Consistent with the social identity model of deindividuation effects, those who did not exchange brief personal profiles with their partner (i.e., depersonalization) were more likely to tell their partner’s gender from the language used, than those who did.
- Depersonalization, however, facilitated
stereotype-consistent conformity behaviors only among gender-typed individuals;
that is, participants conformed more to their masculine- than feminine-comment
partners, and men were less conforming than were women, only when they were
both gender-typed and depersonalized.
Beattie's
challenge to Zimmerman and West - evaluating data
"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."
- Beattie also questions the meaning of interruptions: : "Why do interruptions necessarily reflect dominance? Can interruptions not arise from other sources? Do some interruptions not reflect interest and involvement?
- Beattie’s own study:
Source: The student room- powerpoint presentation
No comments:
Post a Comment