"An Introduction to Sociolinguistics" by Janet Holmes

Chapter 12

Gender, Politeness and Stereotypes

Women’s language and confidence

Robin Lakoff, an American linguist, believed that women language expressed uncertainty and lack of confidence. She also shifted the focus of research from gender differences to syntax, semantics and style, suggesting that women’s subordinate social status is reflected in the language they are using.

She therefore suggested that women’s speech is characterized by the following features:

   Lexical fillers or hedges: “you know”, “sort of”, “well”.

   Tag questions

   Rising intonation on declaratives “it’s really good?”

   Empty adjectives (meaning: using the adjective alone like wonderful, pretty, and cute).

   Precise color terms “aquamarine”

   Intensifiers

   Hypercorrect grammar

   Super-polite forms like indirect requests or euphemisms

   Swear words avoidance

   Emphatic stress “it was a WONDERFUL show”.

 

The research

Lakoff features were researched by linguists, but such researches lacked linguistic expertise. An evidence of this is the following:

1.    A study regarded a statement like “will you open the door, please?” as an imperative construction in the form of question, the thing which confuses form and function.

2.    Another study made a distinction between fillers and hedges, regarding “sort of” as a hedge, and “well” as pause fillers like “um, eh, ah”.  

3.    Some studies could not identify the fundamental function of these features presented by Lakoff, which is “expressing lack of confidence”. The list of Lakoff was not arbitrary but rather unified. All the features express uncertainty or tentativeness. But researches ignored this function and listed any forms that produced difference between men and women.

(How this list is coherent?) The internal cohesion of lakoff features can be illustrated by dividing them into two groups:

a- Features that serve as hedging devices: signal lack of confidence

b- Features that serve as boosting devices: reflect the speaker’s anticipation that the addressee may remain unconvinced.

So Lakoff suggested that women use hedging devices to express uncertainty and use intensifying devices to persuade their addressee. They use boosters because they believe that they will not be heard or paid attention. Therefore, hedges and boosters are coherent because both express uncertainty and lack of confidence. 

 

The results

The research results were often contradictory.

1- In some studies women were sometimes found as using more tags than men, while in other studies men used more tags than women.

2-Some studies found that there were no gender differences in using hedges, while other studies found that women used hedges three times more than men do.

3- Most studies claimed that women used more boosters, but some studies did not.

4- A study recorded speech of male and females in court, has found that a male witness used a language that is full of features presented by Lakeoff. Therefore the study labeled such features as “powerless forms” which are related to speech of powerless in general rather than women. 

5- Some studies also found out that although women really used more boosters than men, they were not expressing uncertainty or lack of confidence.

Lakoff linguistic features as politeness devices

a-    Tags are may function as a facilitative politeness device, providing the addressee with an easy entrée into a conversation. This is used by teachers fro example to facilitate the participation of a student, or by party hosts to give a topic to the addressee to talk about. For example, a host addressing one of the guests, saying “he has just came from Europe, haven’t you?” will allow this guest to talk about his journey to Europe.

b-   A tag may also soften a directive or a criticism. For example, a mother addressing her child after he had emptied all the shopping items on the floor saying “that was a daft thing to do, wasn’t it?” will soften her criticism of him, and will consider his feeling.

c-   A tag may function as confrontation and coercive devices. In such cases, a tag is regarded as a booster not a hedge.

Based on Holmes (1984), a distribution of tag use between men and women, Women are found to focus more than men on the polite function of tags, while men are found to be focusing more than women on tags for uncertainty. 

Analyses which take account of the function of the features of women speech often reveal women as more facilitative conversationalists rather than uncertain and unconfident. By using more standard forms, these women could be seen as responding positively to their addresses by accommodating to their speech. Women’s greater use of politeness devices can be another aspect of their consideration to the addressee. Also, many of the features which characterize women language are positive politeness devices expressing solidarity.

Politeness in other cultures:

1- A study of a Mayan community in Mexico, the women used more politeness forms than men, which resembles the western norms. Men were using few politeness forms with each other, so the men talk was plain and unmodified. In all other contexts everyone used politeness devices. In this community, men’s talk could be seen as the unusual variety rather than women’s talk.

2- In Malagasy, men not women who modify and qualify their utterances, and who generally use indirect language. Men are considered as the more polite speakers in this community, which is in contrast with western norms. But this is due to social roles of men and women in that community.

3- A study of Samoan personal narratives has found that status was more important than gender in accounting for the use of positive politeness devices. Statusful women with a Samoan title used fewer politeness forms than young untitled men.  On the other hand, titled Samoan men used the highest frequency of negative politeness forms expressing social distance.     

*The next section shows how context, interaction, status and the meaning conveyed is relevant to the comparison between men and women use of politeness devices. 

1-   Interaction

There are many features of interaction which differentiate the talk of women and men:

Interruptions: in same gender interactions in a context of a coffee bar, interruptions are distributed equally between speakers. In cross-gender interactions, all interruptions are from males. In other contexts, it is found that men interrupt others more than women do, and that parents interrupt children, and daughters are interrupted the most.  A study of pre-schoolers found out that some boys start practicing this strategy for dominating the talk at a very early age.

Feedback: women provide more encouraging feedback (hmm, mm, aha) to their conversational patterns. A study in New Zealand has examined the positive feedback distribution in casual contexts, and found out that women gave four times as much of positive feedback to their addressees than men do.

One researcher also found out that women students were more likely than men to develop the ideas of a previous speaker rather than challenge them.

In general, women are found to be cooperative conversationalists, while men are found as more competitive and less supportive.

Why?

2- Gossip

Gossip describes the kind of relaxed in-group talk that goes on between people in informal contexts. In western societies, it is considered as a characteristic of women’s interaction whose function is to affirm solidarity and maintain the social relationships between the women involved.  It focuses on personal experiences and personal relationships, non personal problems and feelings, and may include the criticism of others. In gossip sessions, they provide sympathetic responses focusing on the affective rather than the referential content.

As for men, a study of men working in a bakery has found that the topics discussed tend to focus on things and activities rather than feelings. The men gossip includes linguistic features like long pauses, responses challenged the previous speaker. The men criticized each other constantly, and change the topic abruptly. Their talks contrasted completely with the cooperative, supportive and agreeing and coherent one of women. 

However, there is a variation in the western communities too. Not all men and women behave the same way in western communities. For example, in Malagasy, women’s speech is more direct than that of men. Women take a more confrontational role, and handle bargaining in the market place.  Women not men deal with family disagreements and arguments.

The construction of Gender

Approaching gender identity as a construction is useful because:

1- It accounts for the cases where women adapt to masculine contexts, and men to feminine contexts.(How)Women in police force construct a masculine identity by wearing bulky sweaters, not smiling and talking roughly, while men in cloths markets or beauty salons are constructing a feminine identity by avoiding swear words, and encouraging the customer to talk. They also tend to gossip.

2- Narratives of personal experience allow one to construct social and gender identities. (How) A woman who encounters a personal story to one of her women friends would construct a gendered identity. The example no. 20 and 21 illustrates that the woman expressed the identity of a “loving mother” or a “dutiful daughter”. The discourse style would be full of hedges and pragmatic particles like “you know”, “you see”, as well as feminine adjectives as “cute” or “little”. In other context, the same woman, working as a senior manager, would construct a more contestive identity in her work place by challenging everything she disagrees with. She therefore constructs a less-conformist gender identity. The discourse style in this case will include less hedges and pragmatic particles. The characters talked about in the woman’s story would be also given gendered identities. For example, the woman’s daughter was given the identity of a sweet little girl. Therefore, narratives are a means of expressing gender identities, and every phonological, lexical and syntactic selection conveys social information. This is why women are against sexist languages.

Sexist language

Sexist language is one example of the way a culture conveys its values from one group to another and from one generation to the next. It encodes stereotyped attitudes to women and men.

In principle, the study of sexist language is concerned with the way language expresses both women and men. 

In practice, research in this area has concentrated on the ways in which language conveyed negative attitudes on women.

 

There are a number of ways that suggest English as discriminating against women due to the derogatory forms related to women which are more than those related to men, and due to the English metaphors that describe women negatively more than those related to men.

- Negative animal imagery related to women like “bitch”, “cow” in comparison to “wolf” which is related to men. “Birds” indicate feathery brains, and “chick” and “kitty” which indicate powerlessness.

- Food imagery: Women are also described in food imagery which is insulting.

- Male forms are regarded as the unmarked form (the base). Many words reflect women as deviant or subordinate group. For example, the English morphology generally takes the male form as the base, and adds a suffix to the end of the word to signal femininity: lion-lioness, usher-usherette, author- authoress.  The adding of the female suffix is seen as conveying the message that women are deviant or abnormal.

- Generic structures also support the claim that English marginalizes women. For example, the use of “Man” as generic forms supports the claim that English renders women as invisible. It is no longer accepted by English speakers because this meaning has indicated masculine meaning. It is also confusing, because when we say “man loves to hunt” we don’t know if the sentence means man in masculine sense or the generic sense. The word man is also associated with male images even when it is used generically. For example, a study instructed college students to select pictures that express political man, industrial man, social man, and most of the pictures were men pictures.

Generic “he” also raises the same questions. Grammarians used to deal with such a problem first by proposing many pronouns that are “genre-neutral”. Bisexual pronouns like per, ou, hiser were proposed since the eighteenth century.      

Writers and journalists are now avoiding the use of generic “he” and “man”. An American study of magazines found a dramatic drop in the use of generic forms.

Some writers use “he” and “she” in alternative chapters or in alternate paragraphs.

Singular “they” is used in many writing of old authors like Bernard show and Shakespeare.

However, in the nineteenth century the parliament passed a resolution by which in all acts the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include females.

Glossary:

Pragmatic particles: ألفاظ تستخدم أثناء الكلام وتدل على المعرفة القريبة بين المتحدثين

Ex: the phrase “You know” implies an attempt to maintain an already close relationship with the person being addressed, to simulate shared views – or to establish such a relationship.

Sexist language: لغة تمييزية بين الرجال والنساء

Gender-neutral محايد الجنس  

Imagery الصور البلاغية

Intensifying devices أدوات تشديدية

Hedges ألفاظ تقال للحيطة “في حالة عدم التأكد"

Boosters ألفاظ تقال للتأكيد على الكلام

To pass a resolution يصدر قرار

To account for يعلل