Women, Men and Type of Talk: What Makes the Difference?
Alice F. Freed & Alice Greenwood
- Examine: “you know” and use of questions
- Study based on: same-sex conversations broken up into three parts (Spontaneous talk, Considered talk, Collaborative talk) + Experimental setting
- Asserts that: though previously associated with female speech styles, it is not so – instead, it is the particular context of the conversations and the particular requirements – men and women use them with equal frequency and in comparable ways
o What accounts for this = requirements associated with the talk situation responsible for eliciting/supporting specific discourse forms not the sex or gender of speakers
- Countering: gender-based patterns of communication and the characterization of men and women having distinct conversational styles
o “The concept of stable and mutually exclusive gendered speech styles, uniquely associated with women and girls or men and boys, is unfortunately still pervasive in the field of linguistics”
o Results of early cross-sex studies cannot be unproblematically transferred to generalized conclusions about the speech styles of men and women in all contexts
o Conception of gender: unquestioningly treated as a dualistic, polarized category parallel to sex = simplistic and naive
§ Need to re-evaluate some of the principal categories of analysis that have been previously accepted in language and gender studies
- “You Know” : often described as a female hedging device, and interpreted as a marker of both insecurity and of powerlessness, subordination of the female – counters Lakoff
o Their data = increase in frequency of occurrence of “you know” in same-sex interaction; in informal dyadic conversation – not unusual for one partner to use ‘you know’ more than the other
o Hearer-oriented expression, checking for shared background information, reassurance, intimacy signal, positive politeness, mutual involvement – assists in joint production of conversation
- Use of Questions: stereotypically associated with the conversational style of women – counters Lakoff (again) who interprets it as a sign of women’s hesitancy and societal powerlessness
o Brings in Tannen: question asking is seen as part of women’s cooperative speaking style and a device for sharing the floor
o Cameron: the absolute necessity of considering forms in their linguistic and social context, and not in general
o Men: more expressive style questions, women – more relational questions
§ Different socialization practices, engage in different activities and practices – different language behaviour as they may not participate in similar types of discourse
