Sex, Politeness, and Stereotypes

We are examining styles and registers, the way language is used, and linguistic attitudes, the issue of ‘women’s language’ is one which illustrates all these concepts in this chapter. There are four important issues that would be discussed.

A.      WOMEN’S LANGUAGE AND CONFIDENCE

According to Robin Lakoff, she argued that women were using language which reinforced their subordinate status, they were “colluding in their own subordination” by the way they spoke.

Features of women’s language

Lakoff suggested that women’s speech was characterized by linguistic features such as the following:

·         Lexical hedges or fillers, e.g. you know, sort of, well, you see.

·         Tag questions, e.g. she is very nice, isn’t she?

·         Rising intonation on declaratives, e.g. it’s really good.

·         ‘Empty’ adjectives, e.g. divine, charming, cute.

·         Precise color teams, e.g. magenta, aquamarine.

·         Intensifiers such as just and so, e.g. I like him so much.

·         ‘Hypercorrect’ grammar, e.g. consistent use of standard verb forms.

·         ‘Superpolite’ forms, e.g. indirect requests, euphemisms.

·         Avoidance of strong swears words, e.g. fudge, my goodness.

·         Emphatic stress, e.g. it was a brilliant performance.

The internal coherence of the features Lakof identified can be illustrated by dividing them into two groups. First, there are linguistic devices which may be used for hedging or reducing the force of an utterance. Secondly, there are features which may boost or intensify a proposition’s force. She claimed women use hedging devices to express uncertainty, and they use intensifying devices to persuade their addressee to take them seriously. According to her, both hedges and boosters reflect women’s lack of confidence.

B.      INTERACTION

There are many futures of interaction which differentiate the talk of women and men: interrupting behavior and conversational feedback.

·         Interruption

Interruptions were distributed between speakers in the same sex-interactions. In cross-sex interactions almost all the interruptions were from male. It has been found that men interrupt others more than women do. Men interrupt more, challenge, dispute, and ignore more, try to control what topics are discussed, and are inclined to make categorical statements. Women are evidently socialized from early childhood to expect to be interrupted. Consequently, they generally give up the floor with little or no protest.

·         Feedback

Another aspect of the picture of women as cooperative conversationalists is the evidence that women provide more encouraging feedback to their conversational partner than men do. Research on conversational interaction reveals women as cooperative conversationalists, whereas men tend to be more competitive and less supportive of others.

C.      GOSSIP

Gossip is a kind of talks between two or more people (mostly women) about someone else’s information in informal context. It has function to affirm solidarity and mantain the social relationship between the women involved.

Women do gossips mostly to criticize other’s behaviour, but they are discomfort to speak directly in front of person they are talking. In gossiping, women mostly supporting or agreeing each other. On the other hand, men are not. They often mocking, contrasting or disagreeing each other, but those express solidarity and maintain social relationship among them. That’s why sometimes there are miscommunication between man and woman.

D.     SEXIST LANGUAGE

It is concerned with the way language expresses both negative and positive stereotypes of both women and men. However, in reality, it is more concerned with language conveys negative attitudes to women. Feminists have claimed that English is a sexist language. At first sight it may seem odd to suggest that a language rather than its speakers are sexist. Sexism involves behavior which maintains social inequalities between women and men.

According to the author, based on linguistic data supports the view that women are often assigned subordinate status by virtue of their gender alone and treated linguistically as subordinate, regardless of their actual power or social status in a particular context.