05/03/2023

Session 5:
Language, Gender and Phuong-Anh Nguyen, MA

Politeness
Phuong-Anh Nguyen, HANU

Gender and speech

features

Gender stereotypes
and politeness
Lesson
objectives Gendered language

Politeness theory

Phuong-Anh Nguyen, HANU

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Gender vs Sex
Sex Gender
¬ refers to biological category, which is ¬ refers to social category, which is
usually fixed before birth. associated with certain behavior.

¬ Sex has little influence on gender. ¬ Gender helps us understand the

different ways people perform their
¬ Not all women and men behave identity and how they are judged.
exactly like the other members of
¬ Gender is something
their biological sex group. people accomplish through their
behavior, clothing, habits, and
speech.

Phuong-Anh Nguyen, HANU

1. Gender and speech features Phuong-Anh Nguyen, HANU

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Gender-exclusive features

There are mono-lingual communities where particular linguistic features occur only in the women’s
speech or only in the men’s speech, aka gender-exclusive features.
These features are usually small differences in pronunciation or word-shape (morphology).
Phuong-Anh Nguyen, HANU

Gender-exclusive features
¬ Morphological difference: e.g. different affixes.
Yana, a (now extinct) North American Indian language: which gender uses longer forms?

¬ Pronunciation difference
Gros Ventre American Indian tribe: women say [kja'tsa] for 'bread' while the men say [dʒa'tsa]

¬ What if someone uses the ‘wrong’ form for their gender?

Bengali (a language of India): the women use an initial [l] where the men use an initial [n] in
some words

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Gender-exclusive features
¬ Japanese: vocabulary differences

Japanese

Women’s form Men’s form

otoosan oyaji ‘father’
taberu kuu ‘eat’
onaka hara ‘stomach’

¬ In modern standard Japanese, these distinctions are more a matter of

degrees of formality or politeness than gender.
¬ Women are also challenging restrictive social norms, and using the ‘men’s’
forms - they are no longer so much signals of masculinity as of
informality and modernity.

Phuong-Anh Nguyen, HANU

Why are there gender differences in

language?
Gender differences in language are often just one
aspect of linguistic differences reflecting social
status or power differences in society.
Gender-exclusive speech forms reflect
gender-exclusive social roles: The responsibilities of
women and men are very different in such
communities, and everyone knows what they are

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Discussion:
1. Do English pronouns encode the gender of the referent
(= addressing other people)? Gender of the speaker
(addressing yourself)?

2. What about your mother tongue?

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Gender-preferential speech features

¬ When women’s and men’s social roles overlap, the speech forms they use
also overlap, but with different quantities or frequencies.
à Gender-preferential speech features

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Gender-preferential speech features

Pronunciation features
¬ E.g. house -> ouse; horrible ->orrible
wwomen tend to use more of the standard sound forms than men do, while men use more of the
vernacular forms than women do.

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Gender-preferential language
Grammatical features
Is the sentence more likely to be said by men or women?
'I don’t know nothing about it'
¬ Across all social groups in Western societies, women generally use
more standard grammatical forms than men and so, correspondingly, men
use more vernacular forms than women.
¬ This pattern has been found in Western speech communities all over the
world.
¬ à ‘the single most consistent finding to emerge from sociolinguistic studies
over the past 20 years’ - Trudgill (1983)

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The social status

explanation
Why do women The social expectation
use more explanation
standard forms The subordinate group
than men? explanation
The masculinity
explanation
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A. The social status explanation

Which social class (upper, middle, lower) is often associated with H-dropping and [in] forms?
They are used less by women. What's the interaction between these findings?
¬ Women use more standard speech forms than men because they
are more status-conscious than men.
Standard speech forms - high social status -> women using more standard speech forms as
a way of claiming such status
Standard or prestige forms represent linguistic capital which people can use to increase
their value or marketability in some context.

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B. The social expectation explanation

¬ Women’s designated role as guardian of society’s values
Society tends to expect 'better' behaviour from women than from men.
Misbehaviour from boys is tolerated where girls are more quickly corrected.
-> society expects women to speak more correctly and standardly than men, especially
when they are serving as models for children's speech.
But is it true that women use standard speech all the time?
Think slangs and expletives (swear words)

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C. The subordinate group explanation

¬ Subordinate groups must be polite

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C. The subordinate group explanation

¬ Standard forms = more polite?
¬ Link to social status explanation: by using more standard speech forms
women are looking after their own need to be valued by the society =
protecting her ‘face’ and others’ 'face’

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D. The masculinity explanation

¬ Why don’t men use standard forms?

Vernacular forms express machismo: It is claimed that men prefer vernacular forms because they carry
macho connotations of masculinity and toughness. If this is true, it would also explain why many women
might not want to use such forms.

¬ Evidence from research: the speakers on a tape who were identified as most likely to win
in a street fight were those who used most vernacular forms.
One New Zealand study suggested that women avoid vernacular forms because they are
associated with promiscuous women, 'slut' and 'loose morals" Phuong-Anh Nguyen, HANU

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2. Women’s
language and
politeness

This Photo by Unknown author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND.

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Women’s language
¬ While some social dialectologists suggested that
Western women were status conscious, Robin Lakoff,
an American linguist, suggested almost the opposite -
women were using language which reinforced their
subordinate status:
¬ Syntax, semantics and intonation features

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Features of 'women's language’ (Lakoff 1975)

What do they have in common?

According to Lakoff, these features unified by their function of

expressing lack of confidence. Phuong-Anh Nguyen, HANU

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Allocate as many as possible of the features in the list

provided by Lakoff to one of the following columns
Hedging devices Boosting devices
(expressing uncertainty) (supplying extra reassurance)

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What are the functions of the tag

questions in the situations?

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Lack of confidence or Politeness?

Question Tags
¬ Facilitative tags?
to provide an addressee with an easy entre into a conversation: e.g. teachers, interviewers, hosts at
parties and, in general, those in leadership roles
to soften a criticism

à Analyses which take account of the function of features of women’s speech

often suggest that women are facilitative and supportive
conversationalists, rather than unconfident, tentative talkers.

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Gender and Amount of talking

¬ Which gender speaks more?

¬ Preferred topics?
¬ Men to men:
¬ Women to women:
¬ Mixed gender:

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Gender and politeness

¬ Interruption: Coates (1993), James and Clarke (1993):
¬ In mixed-sex conversations:
¬ In single-sex conversations:
¬ Interruption vs overlap?

¬ Feedback/Back-channel support:
women provide more encouraging feedback to their conversational partners than men do
Verbal feedbacks: mmm, uh huh, yeah...
Non-verbal- feedbacks: nodding, smiling, frowning, body language (gestures, body postures)

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Gender and politeness

Women as cooperative conversationalists

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Explanation of interaction strategies

Women’s interaction Men’s interaction

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3. Gendered language
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Gendered language
¬ Many English words reinforce a view of women as a deviant,
abnormal or subordinate group.
¬ E.g.

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Moving forward…
¬ The categories discussed in this section indicate the encoded social view of
women in many English-speaking communities. It takes considerable time
and effort to alter the language, even when social attitudes are changing.
¬ Solution?
¬ Proposal of bisexual pronouns to replace generic ‘he’: tey, thon, et, ip, ou,
co, per, ne and hiser.
¬ Promotion of gender-sensitive language: see EIGE toolkits and other
projects
https://eige.europa.eu/publications/gender-sensitive-
communication/overview

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4. Politeness Theory
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What is politeness?

¬ Politeness refers to the behavior that is socially correct and

shows understanding of and care for other people’s
feelings. (Cambridge Dictionary)
¬ Politeness strategies are used by speakers to maintain harmony
between them. (Thomas,1995)

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Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory

¬ Brown & Levinson’s theory of politeness is based on the concept of ‘face’:
“the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself”.
(Brown and Levinson, 1987)
¬ Politeness = protecting participants’ face & avoiding conflicts
¬ 2 types of politeness:
• Positive politeness:
• Negative politeness:

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Brown &Levinson’s Politeness

Strategies (1987)
¬ When we make orders, requests, threats, or promises,
we’re making acts that threaten the face of others – Face
threatening act (FTA)
¬ What politeness strategies are available in these
situations?

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Brown & Levinson’s Politeness Strategies (1987) 36

- How to borrow a pen

Off record strategy:

Bald on-record strategy:

Positive politeness:

Negative politeness:

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Positive politeness strategies: 37

highlighting friendliness
¬ Strategy 1: Notice, attend to H ¬ Strategy 7: Presuppose/raise/assert
common ground
You must be hungry. It’s a long time since breakfast. How
about some lunch? ¬ Strategy 8: Joke
¬ Strategy 2: Exaggerate ¬ Strategy 9: Assert or presuppose S’s
knowledge of and concern for H’s
What a fantastic garden you have.!
¬ Strategy 10: Offer, promise
¬ Strategy 3: Intensify interest to H
¬ Strategy 11: Be optimistic
I come down the stairs, and what do you think I see? …
¬ Strategy 12: Include both S and H in
¬ Strategy 4: Use in-group identity markers
the activity
Hey mate, I was keeping that seat for a friend of mine.
¬ Strategy 13: Give (or ask for)
¬ Strategy 5: Seek agreement reasons
A: John went to London this weekend. ¬ Strategy 14: Assume or assert
B: To London. reciprocity

¬ Strategy 6: Avoid disagreement ¬ Strategy 15: Give gifts to H

Phuong-Anh Nguyen, HANU
In a way you are right but I suppose….

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Negative politeness strategies: showing deference,

avoid imposing
1. Be indirect 4. Communicate the S's want not to impinge on
the H
Oh, I forgot my pen!
I’m sorry for my carelessness.
There wouldn’t, I suppose, be any chance of your
being able to lend me your car for just a few I know you’re busy…
minutes, would there?
You’ll be late if you don’t go right now.
2. Don’t presume/assume
Suppose that Harry is coming.
5.Redress other wants of the hearer
3. Don’t coerce the hearer
I’ll be grateful to you if you help me do exercise
I don’t imagine there’d be any chance of you…
I just dropped by for a minute to ask if you..

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