Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

LANGUAGE AND GENDER - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Coined by Fishman in 1977
      - Refers to how women have to make more effort for the conversation to progress due to lack of men's input
      - Includes backchannelling and asking lots of questions to encourage engagement
      - Aim is to form relationships with men
    - - Compared men and women's use of the following features
      - Questions
        
        Women- asked 3x the amount of questions that men did
        
        Men- asked a 1/3 of the questions that women did
      - Minimal responses
        
        ???
      - Attention gestures
        
        Women- used phrases such as 'you know what' for engagement
        
        Men- hardly ever used attention gestures (perhaps because they assumed they had attention due to thier dominance)
      - Topic initiation
        
        Women- topics proposed by women weren't always engaged with by others in the conversation
        
        Men- topics initiated by men were always supported by others in the conversation including women
    - - Dale Spender
      - Robin Lakoff suggests that women asking questions demonstrates inferiority and hesitance, Fishman says that it gives women conversational power as they lack societal power
- - - - Women
        
        Language is more emotional and long winded
        
        They tend to speak more often in private
        
        Speak symmetrically (speaker and respondent mirror use of maxims, if the quesion is long the answer is long)
      - Men
        
        Language has more 'airtime' gets more attention and respect
        
        Language used to negotiate staus
        
        Asymmetrical speaking (speaker and respondent aren't speaking similarly, following the same maxims)
    - - Independence vs intimacy
        
        Men are concerned with staus and therefore being independent, relying on others would suggest weakness or insecurity in thier speech/ opinions
        
        Women consider language as a way to establish intimacy and preserve it
      - Advice vs understanding
        
        Men seek a solution when faced with a problem
        
        Women offer symathy to a problem and show understanding and acknowledgement of feelings
      - Information vs feelings
        
        Men use language to convey information in a brief matter of fact manner
        
        Women have more emotion in thier language and it is subsequently more verbose
      - Status vs support-
        
        Men's speech is competitive trying to prevent others from dominating them, language is a way to gain and maintain status
        
        Women's language is more supportive and they speak for confirmation and validation from men, they support the man speaking
      - Orders vs proposals
        
        Men use clear imperatives to command
        
        Women will pose a command as a request or proposal, indirectly
      - Conflict vs comprimise
        
        Men will openly resist and oppose others, perhaps due to wanting to maintain strength and status
        
        Women will let conflict pass and oppose later in private
- - - - Hedges e.g. "sort of", "I think", "kind of", etc.
      - Super-Polite Forms e.g. "Would you mind...?", etc.
      - Tag Questions e.g "You like it, don't you?"
      - Intonational Emphasis: This could mean speaking in italics to emphasise certain words, such as "very" or "so", and so on.
      - Empty Adjectives: Using adjectives to over-describe something, making more emotional evaluations rather than intellectual ones. E.g. "divine", "adorable", etc.
      - Hyper-Correct Grammar: They use correct grammar with very clear articulation.
      - Direct Quotation: Because men paraphrase more.
      - Apologise more e.g. "I'm sorry, but I think that..."
      - Use euphemisms more than men
      - Use indirect commands and requests i.e. Off-record Indirect e.g. "Isn't it cold in here", wanting the heater to be turned on, for example.
      - Avoid slang and expletives
    - - No research
        
        All ideas are based off of 'observations' which have no scientific method, can't be trusted
        
        Quote from Lakoff "It is my impression, though I don't have precise statistical evidence"
      - Example of STRONG gender determinism- the strength of an individual's belief that gender is a foundational force dictating people's: personality traits, behaviors, abilities, attitudes, and values.
      - Highly generalised and ignores individual differences, only focuses on gender affecting speech