7th Assignment : Sex, politeness and stereotypes

This part of the book told us about styles and registers, the way language was used, and linguistic attitudes, the issue of ‘woman’s language’ was one which illustrated all those concepts. The first part of the chapter told us about Women’s language and confidence. An American linguist, Robin Lakoff, argued that women were using language which reinforced status; they were ‘colluding in their own subordination’ by the way they spoke. The example given showed that social dialect research focused on differences between women’s and men’s speech in the areas of pronunciation, and morphology, with some attention to syntactic constructions. According to her there are some linguistic features of ‘women’s language’:
a) Lexical hedges or fillers
b) Tag questions
c) Rising intonation on declaratives
d) Empty adjectives
e) Precise color terms
f) Intensifiers
g) ‘Hypercorrect’ grammar
h) ‘Superpolite’ forms
i) Avoidance of strong swear words
j) Emphatic stress.
Those ten features were unified by their function of expressing lack of confidence. The internal coherence of the features Lakkof identified could be illustrated by dividing them into two groups. First, there were linguistic devices which might be used for hedging or reducing the force of an utterance. Secondly, there were features which may boost or intensify a proposition’s force. She claimed women used hedging devices to express uncertainty, and they used intensifying devices to persuade their addressee to take them seriously. According to her, both hedges and boosters reflected women’s lack of confidence. But, even if those features were said to differ women’s language from men’s language, it was still difficult to know how to interpret such apparently arbitrary differences between them without a theoretical.
Second part of the chapter told us about Interaction. There were many features of interaction which differentiate the way women and men spoke. In this section of the chapter there were two features discussed. They were interrupting behavior and conversational feedback.
  Interruptions
In the same sex-interactions, interruptions were distributed between speakers. In cross-sex interactions almost all the interruptions were from male. It had been found that men interrupted others more than women do. Men interrupted more, challenged, disputed, and ignored more, tried to control what topics were discussed, and were inclined to make categorical statements. Women were evidently socialized from early childhood to expect to be interrupted. Consequently, they generally gave up the floor with little or no protest.
  Feedback
Another aspect of the picture of women as cooperative conversationalists was the evidence that women provided more encouraging feedback to their conversational partner than men did. Research on conversational interaction revealed women as cooperative conversationalists, whereas men tended to be more competitive and less supportive of others.
The differences between women and men in ways of interacting might be the result of different socialization and acculturation patterns.
Then, the chapter explained about Gossip. It was described Gossip as the kind of relaxed in-group talk that went on between people in informal contexts. Its overall function for women was to affirm solidarity and maintain the social relationships between the women involved. It focused on personal experiences and relationships also personal problems and feelings.
The last part explained was Sexist language. It was concerned with the way language expressed both negative and positive stereotypes of both women and men. However, in reality, it was more concerned with language conveyed negative attitudes to women. It was said that based on linguistic data supports the view that women were often assigned subordinate status by virtue of their gender alone and treated linguistically as subordinate, regardless of their actual power or social status in a particular context.
The relative status of the sexes in a society may be reflected not only in the ways in which women and men use language, but also in the language used about women and men.