SEX, POLITENESS AND STEREOTYPES
In
this paper, we are examining styles and registers, the way language is used,
and linguistic attitudes, the issue of “woman’s language” is one which
illustrates all these concept. Is women’s language a distinct style or register
of a language? Are women more polite than men? Are there any differences in the
way women and men interact? How is language used to refer to women and men?
What massage does the language used about women convey about their status in
the community?
A.
Women’s
Language and Confidence
While some social
dialectologist suggested that women were status conscious, and that this was
reflected in their use of standard speech forms. Robin Lakof, an American
linguist, suggested almost the opposite. She argued that women were using
language which reinforced their subordinate status; they were “colluding in
their own subordination” by the way the spoke.
Robin lakof shifted the
focus of research on gender differences to syntax, semantic and style. She
suggested that women’s coordinates social status in America society is reflected in the
language women use, as well as in the language used about them. She identified
a number of linguistic features which she claimed were used more often by women
than by men, and which in her opinion expressed uncertainty and lack of
confidence.
1.
Features
of “women’s language”
Lakof suggested that
women’s speech was characterized by linguistic features such as the following:
a) Lexical
hedges or fillers, e. g. you know, sort
of, well, you see.
b) Tag
Question, e. g. she is very nice, isn’t
she?
c) Rising
intonation on declaratives, e. g. it’s
really good.
d) “Empty”
adjectives, e. g. divine, charming, cute.
e) Precise
color terms, e. g. magenta, aquamarine.
f) Intensifiers
such as just and so, e. g. I like him so
much.
g) “Hypercorrect”
grammar, e. g. consistent use of standard verb forms.
h) “super
polite” forms, e. g. indirect request, euphemisms.
i) Avoidance
of strong swears words, e. g. fudge, my
goodness.
j) Emphatic
stress, e. g. it was a brilliant
performance.
Features which may serve as:
Hedging devices
|
Boosting devices
|
Lexical hedges
Tag questions
Question intonation
Super polite forms
euphemisms
|
Intensifiers
Emphatic stress
|
The hedging devices can be used to
weaken the strength of an assertion while the boosting devices can be used to
strengthen it. For example, it’s a good film can be strengthened by adding the
intensifier really (it’s really good film) or weakened by adding the lexical
hedge sort of (it’s sort of a good film). However, some of these devices serve
other functions too, as we will see below.
Lakoff claimed both kinds of modifiers
were evidence of an unconfident speaker. Hedging devices explicitly signal lack
of confidence, while boosting devices reflect the speaker’s anticipation that
the addressee may remain unconvinced and therefore supply extra reassurance.
So, she claimed, women use hedging devices to express uncertainty, and they use
intensifying devices to persuade their addressee to take them seriously. Women
boost the force of their utterances because they think that otherwise they will
not be heard or paid attention to. So, according to Lakof, both hedges and
boosters reflect women’s lack of confidence.
2.
Lakof’s
Linguistic Features as Politeness Devices
(/ indicates rising intonation)
Susan is a university student.
She is telling her friend and flat mate about her experiences at school.
I
did my exams in sixty three was it?
The tag question is a syntactic device
listed by Lakof which may express uncertainty as example illustrates. Susan is
uncertain about the date, and she indicates this with a tag which signals doubt
about what she is asserting. This tag focuses on the referential meaning of
Susan’s assertion, the accuracy of the information she is giving. But tags may
also express affective meaning. They may function as facilitative or positive
politeness devices, providing an addressee with an easy entrée into a
conversation
B.
Interaction
There are many futures
of interaction which differentiate the talk of women and men. Mrs Fleming’s
distinction reflection of them. In this section I will discuss two others:
interrupting behavior and conversational
feedback.
1)
Interruptions
Example
Wanda : Did
you see here that two sociologists have just proved that men interrupt women
all the time?
They –
Ralph
: Who says?
Wanda
: Candace
west of Florida State and Don Zimmerman of the University of California at Santa Barbara. They taped a bunch of private
conversations, and guess what they found. When two out three women are talking,
interruptions are about equal. But when a man talks to a woman, he makes 96 per
cent of the interruptions. They think it’s a dominance trick men aren’t event a
were of. But –
Ralph
: These people have nothing better to do than eavesdrop on interruptions?
Wanda
: -
but woman make ‘retrievals’ about one third of the time. You know, they pick up
where they left off after the man –
Ralph : Surely
not all men are like that Wanda?
Wanda
: -
cuts in on what they were saying. Doesn’t that-
Ralph : speaking
as a staunch supporter of feminism, I deplore it Wanda.
Wanda : (sign)
I know, dear.
Ralph here
illustrated a pattern for which there is a great deal of research evidence. The
most widely quoted study, and the one referred to by Wanda in example 11,
collected examples of students’ exchanges in coffee bars, shops and other
public places on tape-recorder carried by one of the researches. The results
were dramatic, as table 12.2 illustrates. In some-sex interaction interruptions
were pretty evenly distributed between speakers. In cross-sex interactions
almost all the interruptions were from males.
These researches
followed up this study with one which recorded interactions in sound-proof
booths in a laboratory. The percentage of male interruptions decreased to 75 per
cent in this less natural setting, but there was no doubt that men were still
doing most of the interrupting. In other contexts too, it has –
Table
12.2: Average number of interruptions per interaction.
Interruption
%
Same – sex
interaction
Speaker
1 43
Speaker2
57
Cross sex
interaction
Woman
4
Man 96
Source: from Zimmerman and west
1975: 116
-been found that men interrupt
others more than woman do. In department meetings and doctor-patient
interaction , for instance, the pattern holds. Woman gets interrupted more than
man , regardless of whether they were the doctors or the patients. In exchanges
between parents and children, father did most of the interrupting, and
daughters were interrupted most-booth by their mothers and their fathers. And a
study pre-scholars found that some boys start practicing this strategy for
dominating the talk at very early age. Woman are evidently socialized from
early childhood to expect to be interrupted. Consequently, they generally give
up the floor with little or no protest, as example 21.2 illustrated.
2)
Feedback
Example
Marry : I
worked in that hotel for- ah eleven years and I found the patrons were really
you know good
Jill : Mm.
Mary : You had the odd one or two
ruffian’d come in and cause a fight but they were soon dealt with.
Jill : Right, really just takes one eh? To start trouble.
Marry : Yeah, and and it was mostly the younger ones.
Jill : Mm.
Marry : that would start you know.
Jill : Yeah.
Marry : the younger – younger ones couldn’t handle their booze.
Jill : Mm.
Another aspect
of the pictures of woman as cooperative conversationalists is the evidence that
woman provide more encouraging feedback to their conversational partners than
man do.
One New Zealand
study which examined the distribution of positive feedback (noises such as mm
and mhm) in casual relaxed interaction between young people found that woman
gave over four time as much on this type of supporting feedback as men.
American studies of informal speech as well as talk in classrooms and under
laboratory condition have also demonstrated that women provide significantly
more encouraging and positive feedback to their addressees than men do. One
researches noted that women students were also more likely than men to enlarge
on and develop the ideas of a previous speaker rather than challenge them.
3)
Explanation
In a interesting
range of this research, it is quite clearly gender rather than occupational
status, social class, or some other social factor, which most adequately accounts
for the interactional patterns described. Women doctors were consistently
interrupted by their patient, while male
doctors most of the interrupting in their consultations. A study of women in
business organizations showed that women bosses did not dominate the
interactions. Male dominated regardless of whether they were boss or
subordinate. The societally subordinate position of women reflected in this
patterns has more to do whit gender that role or occupation. For this data at
least, women’s subordinate position in male-dominated society seems the most
obvious explanatory factor.
Women’s
cooperative conversational strategies, however, may be explained better by
looking at the influence of context and patterns of socialization. The norms
for women’s talk may be the norms for small group interaction in private
context, where the goals of the interaction are solidarity
stressing-maintaining good social relations. Agreement is sought and
disagreement avoided. By contrast, the norms for male interaction seem to be
those of public referentially oriented interaction. The public model is more
likely than agreement and confirmation of the statement of others. Speakers
compete for the floor and for attention, and wittiness, even at other’ expense
is highly valued. These patterns seem to characterize men’s talk even in
private contexts, as will be illustrated bellow.
The differences
between women and men in ways of interacting may be the result of different socialization
and acculturation patterns. If we learn ways of talking mainly in single sex
peer groups, then the patterns we learn likely to be sex-specific. And the kids
of miscommunication which undoubtedly occurs between women and men may well
attributable to the different expectations each sex has of the function of the
interaction, and the ways it is appropriately conducted. Some of these
differences will be illustrated in the next section.
C. Gossip
Gossip described
the kids of relaxed in group talk that goes on between people in informal
context. In western society, gossip is defined as “idle talk” and considered
particularly characteristic of women’s interaction. Its overall function for
women is to affirm solidarity and maintain the social relationship between the
women involved.
Women’s gossip
focuses predominately on personal experiences
and personal relationship, on personal
problems and feelings. It may include criticism of the behavior of
others, but the women tend to avoid criticizing people directly because this
would cause discomfort.
The male equivalent
of women’s gossip difficult to identify. In parallel situation the topics men
discuss tend to focus on things and activities, rather than personal
experiences and feelings. Topic likes sport, car and possessions turn up
regularly. The focus is on information and fact rather than on feelings and
reaction.
Example
Bernard
: And er they’re very smart.
Con
: well, then, how come
they keep getting caught all the time.
Judd : Maybe that’s why they.
Bernard : (interrupts) They don’t. you’ve got to really clever to pull one you
know.
The men provided
conflicting accounts of the same event, argued about arrange of topic such as
whether apples where kept in cases or crates, criticized each other constantly
for apparently minor differences of approach to things and change topic
abruptly. Their strategies for amusing each other were of cap the previous
speaker’s utterance or to put them down. In other words, their talk contrasted
completely with the cooperative, agreeing, supportive, topically coherent talk
of the women in exactly the same context-working in the bakery-on a different
night.
D.
Sexist
language
Sexist language
encodes stereotyped attitudes to women and men. In principle, then, he study of
sexist language is concerned with the way language expresses both negative and
positive stereotypes of both women and men. In practice research in this area
has concentrated on the ways in which language conveys negative attitudes to
women.
Feminists have
claimed that English is a sexist language. At first sight it may seem odd to
suggest that a language rather than its speakers are sexist. Sexism involves
behavior which maintains social inequalities between women and men.
There are number
of ways in which has been suggested that the English language discriminates
against women. Most obviously, perhaps, in the semantic area the English
metaphors available to describe women include an extraordinarily high number of
derogatory images compared to those used to describe men.
·
Animal imagery is one example where of
women seem considerably less positive than those for men. Consider the
negativity of bitch, old biddy, and cow, compared
to stud and wolf. Animal imagery
which refers to men often has at least some positive component (such as wiliness or
sexual prowess). Birds are widely regarded as feather-brained and flighty
even the more positive chick and kitten are sweet but helpless pets.
·
Women may also be described or referred
to in items of food imagery, which is equally insulting. Saccharine terms, such
as sugar, sweetie, honey, are mainly, though not exclusively, used for
addressing women.
·
Many words reflect a view of women as a
deviant, abnormal or subordinate group. For example, English morphology – its
word-structure- generally takes the male form as the base form and adds a
suffix to signal female ‘ example : lion/lioness, count/countess,
actor/actress, usher/usherette, hero/heroine, aviator/aviatrix.
