Language and Gender 4 pages

Language and Gender II

Part II: Language Use by Men and Women

• A popular, and controversial book:

Language Use by Men and Women

Tannen presents a framework for thinking about how and why men and women (supposedly) use language differently.

We’ll discuss critiques later, but for now let’s get to know the claims.

Language Use by Men and Women

About men:

“…conversations are negotiations in which people try to achieve and maintain the upper hand if they can, and protect themselves from others’ attempts to put them down and push them around. Life, then, is a contest, a struggle to preserve independence and avoid failure.”

Language Use by Men and Women

About women:

“…conversations are negotiations for closeness in which people try to seek and give confirmation and support, and to reach consensus. They try to protect themselves from others’ attempts to push them away. Life, then, is a community, a struggle to preserve intimacy and avoid isolation. Though there are hierarchies in this world too, they are hierarchies more of friendship than of power and accomplishment.”

Language Use by Men and Women

• In other words, women are primarily governed by a need to maintain or increase intimacy, men by a need to maintain or increase status.

• Suppose we try this out on various claimed research findings concerning language and gender?

Politeness Studies claim that women tend to be ‘more polite’ than men. ‘More polite’ can mean things such as

Using alternatives to imperatives, such as questions, indirect requests, “Let’s do…”, etc.

Using language that moderates the force of assertions, such as “maybe”, “perhaps”, etc.

Politeness Digression: what is politeness?

Consider this sentence:

Get me a drink

What are the different ways we can make this more polite? What do they all have in common?

Politeness

A dilemma arises for women who find themselves in social settings where the usual ‘dominance’ presumption is reversed, e.g., a supervisor of men.

Politeness

Does Tannen’s framework help us make sense of claimed differences between men and women in politeness? How?

Alternative explanations?

Interruptions

Claim: men interrupt women more often than the reverse, and more than either sex interrupts the same sex.

The classic work on this is by Candace West, a UCSC professor, and colleagues.

Interruptions

Tannen’s framework?

Public Settings

Claim: men dominate speaking in public settings: classrooms, electronic discussions, etc. Some studies suggest that women are complicit, for example female teachers dwell more on boys in the classroom.

Public Settings

Tannen’s framework?

Language and “Bonding”

Claim: talk has a more central place in female relationships than in male relationships, which are more often activity-centered.

(Women talk, men go fishing.)

Language and “Bonding”

Same question…

Gender and Standard Dialect

Where differences occur between women and men concerning adherence to a standard or prestigious dialect, it is (supposedly) women who adhere more, and men less.

That is, all things equal, women are more likely to adopt properties of prestigious varieties than men are.

Gender and Standard Dialect

Along the same lines, men are more likely to adopt properties of non-standard varieties. Do you recall what we call this?

For example, in many varieties of English, men are more frequent users of the -in’ pronunciation of -ing, e.g., workin’.

Gender and Standard Dialect

‘Self-evaluation tests’ are a useful way of exploring what is going on. From Trudgill, “Sex and Covert Prestige”: percentage of informants over- and under-reporting the more prestigious pronunciation of ‘r’ in words like ‘ear’, ‘here’, in Norwich, England...

Gender and Standard Dialect

Total Male Female Over-reporting 43 22 68 Under-reporting 33 50 14 Accurate 23 28 18

Note: ‘over-reporting’ means reporting more use of the prestigious form than is true of actual speech.

Notice how men under-report.

Gender and Standard Dialect

How does Tannen’s framework fare here?

Gender and Standard Dialect

Other explanations that have been floated:

Women want to convey the standard to children to better their chances in life.

Women are judged more by appearance than men.

Women work jobs that provide contact with a wider range of classes.

Gender and Standard Dialect

Men are under more covert prestige pressure.

Women gravitate to the standard to compensate for their lower status compared to men. (Compare to claims that women must be better behaved than men in other, non-linguistic, domains.)

Gender and Standard Dialect

A wrinkle on this finding: another sociolinguist, Penelope Eckert, studied ‘jock’s and ‘burnouts’ at a (white) Detroit high school.

‘Jocks’ are roughly middle-class and integrated into school life, ‘burnouts’ working class and more alienated.

Gender and Standard Dialect

‘Burnout’ girls were the most advanced users of the local, urban, dialect, the Northern Cities shift; ‘jock’ girls the most conservative.

Gender and Standard Dialect

Eckert suggests that women must try harder to assert their membership in groups like ‘jocks’ and ‘burnouts’ than men must. Since ‘burnouts’ are identified with the Northern Cities shift, ‘burnout’ girls lead the way with this dialect.

So how gender and ‘standard’ usage interact depends a lot on the social context.

Important Questions

• One question: if real, are these differences between women and men basically about gender, or about something else?

Language and Power

Compare the many studies documenting interactions between doctor/patient, teacher/ student, judge/witness, etc. The former are said to

-interrupt more -talk more -control the direction of conversation…

Important Questions

• A second question: how culture-bound are our assumptions about what is ‘masculine’ versus ‘feminine’ speech? For example, very direct speech is considered childish in Japan, rather than masculine.

Important Questions

• Similarly, is the notion of ‘weak’ vs. ‘strong’ speech (female and male respectively) too simplistic?

• A guest speaker next class, Campbell Leaper, may address this question.

Important Questions

• The $10,000 question: is it fair or right to morally evaluate these differences between men and women, or should we simply view them as ‘cultural differences’, as Tannen does?

• What does Cameron think?

What’s true?

The following figures are from “The Gender Similarity Hypothesis”, an article in American Psychologist in 2005, by Janet Hyde.

Hyde carried out a meta-analysis of studies on gender and speech.

What’s true?

The ‘d’ statistic is a measure of effect size.

A “-” value means females show more of the relevant property. A “+” value means males do.

What’s true? Claim # Studies d Effect size

Interrupt 70 +0.15-+0.33 Small

Talkative 73 -0.11 Small

Self- disclosure

205 -0.18 Small

What’s true? Claim # Studies d Effect size

Assertive 75 +0.11 Small

Affiliative 46 -0.26 Small

Smiling 418 -0.40 Moderate

A case study: up talk and vocal fry

● Up talk – a rise in pitch at the end of a statement

● Up talk is not the same as question intonation—the timing of the pitch rise is different even though they both do rise

● People do not like these things… ● example

A case study: up talk and vocal fry

● Listen to a This American Life podcast about criticism of vocal fry: here

A case study: up talk and vocal fry

● Origins: likely became common in New Zealand and Australia in the 50s-60s

● Possibly originated even earlier in dialects in the British Isles

● Common in CA English starting in the 70s, became a topic of conversation in the 90s

● Now popularly associated with young women, men do it, too. Unclear if women do it more...

A case study: up talk and vocal fry

● What does it mean? ● Popularly it is assumed to be part of

hedging, or qualifying an opinion ● Therefore, demonstrates a lack of

confidence and indicates tentativeness ● These thoughts are usually linked to the

question-like nature (possibly erroneously) ● Is it lack of confidence?

A case study: up talk and vocal fry

● Alternate explanations ● Confirming your interlocutor is engaged ● Holding the floor ● Just 'cause?

A case study: up talk and vocal fry

● Vocal fry: a lowering of pitch accompanied by irregular vocal fold vibration (linguists call it “creaky voice”)

● Common in men's voices—often necessary to expand their voice's lower range

● Noted as being increasingly common in young women's voices

A case study: up talk and vocal fry

● Is it harmful to the vocal folds? ● No! Damage to the vocal folds (e.g.

laryngitis) can sound like it, but vocal fry is not doing any damage

● Do women do it more than men? ● Probably not—though it may be more

noticible in women's voices because they have to lower their pitch more to do it

A case study: up talk and vocal fry

● Data from UC Berkeley (via Keith Johnson):

● “some data from the voices of Berkeley (http://voicesof.berkeley.edu/) 348 women and 176 men read a few sentences for us. We used the Kane et al. creak detector to classify five points in each vowel.”

A case study: up talk and vocal fry

● Why vocal fry? ● Very unclear ● Yuasa (2012) argues that it's related to upward

social mobility ● Similar arguments are made that it is a natural

consequence of women using lower voice pitch (to sound more confident/commanding

● We really don't know yet...