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Language and gender (Key terms (Marked term (A term which stands out as…
Language and gender
Key terms
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Marital status
A person's situation with regard to whether they are single, married, separated, divorced or widowed.
Lexical asymmetry
Pairs of words which mean the same thing, however the female reference of the term is somehow degraded e.g. 'bachelor vs. spinster'
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Negative politeness
A more indirect, hedged approach to politeness which often uses negative constructions e.g. 'you couldn't take the bin out for me, could you?'
Positive politeness
An informal approach to politeness that assumes the other participant in the conversation will agree e.g. 'I think that just about wraps it up, don't you?'
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Turn taking
A type of hidden organisation in conversation and discourse where participants speak one at a time in alternating turns.
Tag question
An interrogative clause added to the end of a declarative to make it into a question; usually encouraging the other participant to agree e.g. 'We're meeting for lunch today, aren't we?'
Difference model
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Women's language is cooperative, whereas males language is competitive.
Neither uses of language are superior, but both are different.
Janet Holmes
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Women give and receive more compliments than men. They also regard them as positive politeness devices.
Men tend to consider compliments as less positive than women do and often see them as face threatening.
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Deborah Cameron
Suggests that there has been more focuses on difference in language and gender and that their speech is actually very similar.
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Cameron believes hat research undertaken by Lakoff, Fishman and Tannen has little evidence to suggest there is a difference in male and female language.
Jennifer Coates
Believes that men and women use language differently due to initiating different topics of conversation.
Women's language is cooperative, whereas men's language is competitive.
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Men will often reject topics of conversation brought on by women, while women will accept topics chosen by men.
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Dominance model
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Zimmerman and West
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Problems - there could have been one dominant male (anomaly) which skewed the results / the sample size was not large enough to generalise.
Geoffrey Beattie replicated the study to find little difference between the number of interruptions of males and females.
Also questionable what the meaning of interruptions actually is, as could be a sign of positive engagement or interest within the conversation.
Pamela Fishman
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Without effort from women to keep conversations going between mixed sexes, there is no conversational flow, so it is bound to fail.
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Jenny Cheshire
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She believed that the boys used more non-standard forms due to being a part of denser social networks.
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Deficit model
Robin Lakoff
O'Barr and Atkins
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Language differences are situation-specific. They rely on who has the authority and power in a conversation, rather than the gender of the people involved.
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Critcisms
Critics would say that this theory cannot be applied to modern language as it is over 40 years old, so is outdated and the roles of women have changed and are now more equal.
She also used phrases such as 'many men' in her findings, which shows a lack of statistical evidence to back up her theory.