Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Language and
Gender Theorists
- Robin Lakoff
- 1975
- Women's subordinate role in society may
cause them to display difference to men
- Women use more tag questions ("Isn't it?")
- More indirect polite forms
("Could you possibly..?")
- Intensifiers ("Really" / "Ever so")
- Generally weaker lexis
("Oh that's lovely")
- Feedback support / minimal
responses ("Hmm" / "Yeah")
- Hypercorrect grammar
- Standard verb forms
- In order to claim higher status
- Avoid strong swear words
- Indirect request forms "Would you mind..?"
- Zimmerman and West
- Carried out a language experiment
- Subjects all white, middle class and under 35
- Evidence of 31 segments of conversation in 11
conversations between men and women
- Men used 46 interruptions
and women only 2
- Therefore it was suggested that 96% of
interruptions came from men
- They concluded that since
men interrupt more often, they
are either dominating or
attempting to do so
- FLAW; not enough variables, though in that
particular societal microcosm it may be relevant
- Geoffrey Beattie
- Recorded 10 hours of tutorial discussion
- Made note of 557 interruptions - far
more than Zimmerman and West
- Found that Males interrupted 34.1 and females 33.8
- He concluded that while in this
experiment men did appear to interrupt
more, the margin was so slight it could
not be statistically significant
- O'Barr and Atkins
- 1980
- Recorded in courtroom cases, particularly witness' speech
- Their findings challenged Lakoff's view
- They coined the term
"Powerless language"
- Differences in language are based on
situation-specific power and not gender
- Jennifer Coates
- Dale Spender
- Pamela Fishman
- Deborah Cameron