Women’s language and confidence
Robin Lakoff, an American linguist argued that
women were using language which reinforced their subordinate status; they were
‘colluding in their own subordination by the way they spoke. Her research
focused on gender differences to syntax, semantics and style. 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 uncertaity and lack of
confidence.
Features of ‘women’s language’
Lakoff had iidentified a number of
language features which were unified by their function of expressing lack of
confidence.
The internal coherence of the
features Lakoff identified can be illustrated by dividing them into two groups.
First, there are linguistic devices which may be used for hedging or reducing the
force of an utterance. Secondly, there are features which may boost or
intensify a proportion’s force.
Lakoff’s linguistic features as politeness devices
Taq question is a syntactic device
listed by Lakoff which may express affective meaning. They may express
uncertainty. Taq may also express affective meaning. They may function as
facilitative or positive politeness devices, providing an addressee with an
easy entree into a conversation. A taq may also soften a directive or a
criticism. The taq functions not to express uncertainty, but rather to soften
the negative comment. Taqs may also be used as confrontational and coercive
devices.
It is clear that the women used
more taqs than the men. Women didn’t use
them for the same purposes as men. Women put more emphasis than men into on the
polite or affective functions of taqs, using them as facilitative positive
politeness devices. Men used more taqs for the expressions of uncertainty.
Interaction
There are many features of interaction which
differentiate the talk of women and men.
- Interruptions
In same-sex interactions, interruptions were pretty evenly distributed
between speakers. In cross-sex interactions almost all the interruptions were
from male. Women are evidently socialised from early childhood to expect to be
interrupted.
- Feedback
Another aspect of the picture of women as cooperative conversationalists is
the evidence that women provide more encouraging feedback to their
conversational partners than men do. Men tend to be more competitive and less
supportive of others.
- Explanations
The
differences between women and men in ways of interacting may be the result of
different socialisation and acculturation patterns.
Gossip
Gossip describes the kind of relaxed in-group talk
that goes on between people in informal contexts. Women’s gossip focusses
predominantly on personal experiences and personal relationships, on personal
problems and feelings. In parallel situations the topics men discuss tend to
focus on things and activities.
Sexist language
Sexist language is one example of the way a
culture or society conveys its values from one group to another and from one
generation to the next. Sexist language encodes stereotyped attitudes to women
and men. The 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.
Can a language be sexist?
Sexism involves
behaviour which maintains social inequalities between women and men. There are
a number of ways in which it has been suggested that the English language
discriminates against women. For example, in semantic
area, the English metaphor tends to describe women using derogatory images
compared to those used to describe men. For example, in animal imagery, women
describe as negative and weak animal like bitch,
and chicken, whereas men symbolized
with such a strong and positive animal like wolf.
In food imagery, women are also described as equally insulting as above.
It also suggests that suffixes –ess and –ette diminish women for its meaning that represents connotation of
lack of seriousness. English also renders women invisible, when it uses he and men as generic forms of human.
The relative status of the sexes in
a society may be reflected not only in the ways in which men and women use
language, but also in the language used about women and men. The linguistic
data also supports the view that women are assigned and treated linguistically
subordinate, regardless of their
actual power or social status in a particular context.
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