Gender,

politeness and
stereotypes
Armando Coronado
Erendira Quiroz
WOMEN´S LANGUAGE AND
CONFIDENCE.
Some social dialectologists suggested that
women were status concious.

Robin Lakoff suggested almost the opposite.

Women were using language which reinforce

their subordinate status.
Social dialect research focussed on
differences between women´s and men´s
speech in the areas of pronunciation
and morphology.

Lakoff shifted the focus of research on

gender differences to syntax, semantics
and style.

She suggested that women´s subordinate

social status in American society is
indicated by the language women use.
• Example.

1. Lawyer- What was the nature of your acquaintance

with the late Mrs. E. D.?

• Witness A- Well, we were, uh, very close friends. Uh

she was even sort of like a mother to me.

2. Lawyer- And had the heart not been functioning, in

other words, had the heart been stopped, there would
have been no blood to have come from that region?

• Witness B- It may leak down depending on the

position of the body after death. But the presence of
blood in the alveoli indicates that some active
respiratory action had to take place.

“A” Uses features of what Lakoff

labelled “women´s language”, while
“B” does not.
 FEATURES OF WOMEN´S
LANGUAGE
1. Lexical hedges or fillers- YOU KNOW, SORT OF, WELL YOU SEE.

2. Tag questions- SHE IS VERY NICE, ISN´T SHE?

3. Rising intonation on declaratives- IT´S REALLY GOOD.

4. “Empty” adjectives- DIVINE, CHARMING, CUTE.

5. Precise colour terms- MAGENTA, AQUAMARINE.

6. Intensifiers- JUST, SO. I LIKE HIM SO MUCH.

7. !Hypercorrect” grammar-CONSISTENT USE OF STANDARD VERB

FORMS.

8. “Superpolite” forms- Indirect requests, euphemisms.

9. Avoindance of strong swear words- FUDGE, MY GOODNESS.

Most of this initial research was
methodologically
10.Emphatic stress- IT WAS A BRILLIANT PERFORMANCE.unsatisfactory.
Speech was recorded in laboratory
conditions with assigned topics.
 • EXAMPLE.
• THE FINAL SYNTACTIC CATEGORY IS IMPERATIVE
CONSTRUCTONS IN QUESTION FORM, WHICH ARE
DEFINED AS ALTERNATIVES TO SIMPLE AND DIRECT
WAYS OF ORDERING ACTIONS. THEY ARE QUESTIONS
WHICH ARE SUBORDINATED FOR COMMANDS. “WILL
YOU PLEASE OPEN THE DOOR?” INSTEAD OF “CLOSE
THE DOOR”. IS AN EXAMPLE OF AN IMOERATIVE IN
QUESTION FORM.

No linguist would describe “will you please open the door?” as an

imperative constructionn and the expression “imperative
construction in question form” confuses form and function.

(it is an interrogative construction expressing directive function)

 • The internal coherence of the features Lakoff
identified can e illustrated by dividing them
in to two groups

FEATURES WHICH MAY SERVE AS:

HEDGING DEVICES. BOOSTING DEVICES.

Firstly, 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.
• Lakoff argued that both kinds of modifiers
were evidence of an unconfident speaker.
• Hedging devices explicitly signal lack of
confidence, while boosting devices express
the speaker´s anticipation that the addressee
may remain unconvinced and therefore
supply extra reassurance.
• Women use hedging devices to express
uncertainty and they use intensifying devices
to persuade their addressee to take them
seriousl.
• Women boost the force of their utterances
because they think that otherwise they will
not be heard or paid attention to.
LAKOFF´S LINGUISTIC FEATURES
AS POLITENESS DEVICES.

The tag question is a syntactic device listed by Lakoff

which may express uncertainty.

Susan is uncertain about the date, and she indicates this

with a tag which signals doubt about what she is
asserting
 • Tags may also express affective meaning.
They may function as faciltative or positive
politenes devices, providing an addressee
with an easy entree into a conversation.

Margaret- Andrew, this is our new neighbour, Frank. Andrew has just changed
jobs, haven´t you?

Andrew- Yes i am now a well paid computer programmer instead of a poorly

paid teacher.
 • A tag may also soften a directive or
criticism.
Zoe and her mother Claire have just come home from the supermarket. Zoe
empaties the shopping basket all over the kitchen floor.

Claire- That was a bit of a daft thing to do, wasn´t it?

Tags may also be used as confrontational and

coersive devices. The following tag is used to force
feedback from an uncooperative addressee

A police superintendent is interviewing a detective constable and is criticising the

constable´s performance.

A- … you´ll probably find yorself um before the Chief Constable, okay?

B- Yes, Sir, yes, understood.
A- Now you er fully understand that, don´t you?
B- Yes sir, indeed, yeah.
The following tale summarises the patterns found in a 60,000
word corpus containing equal amounts of female and male speech
collected in a range of matched contexts.

FUNCTION OF TAG WOMEN % MEN %

Expressing uncertainty 35 61
Facilitative 59 26
Softtening 6 13
Confrontational --- ---
Total 100 100

Women put more emphasis than men on the polite or affective

functions tags, using them as facilitative positive politeness devices.
Men, on the other hand, used more tags for the expression of
uncertainty.
 INTERACTION.
Despite the widespread stereotype of
women as the talkative sex, and proverbs
which characterise women as garrulous (
Women´s tongue are like lambs´ tails,
they are never still), most of the research
evidence points the other way.
In a wide rage of contexts, particularly
non-private ones such as television,
interviews, staff meetings and conference
discussions, where talking may be
increase your status, men dominate the
talking time.
INTERRUPTIONS.
The most widely quoted study on interruptions collected examples of
students´ exchanges in coffee bars, shops and other public places an
a tape recrder carried by one of the researchers. The results were
dramatic.

In same gender interactions, interruptions were pretty evenly

distributed between speakers.
In corss-gender interactions, almost all the interruptions were from
males.
Interruptions %
Same-sex interaction
Speaker 1 43
Speaker 2 57
Cross-sex intercation
Women 4
Man 96
This researchers followed up this study with one which
recorded interactions in sound-proof booths in a laboratory.
The percentage of male interruptions decreased to 75 per
cent in this less natural setting, but there was no doubt that
men were still doing most of the interrupting.
Speaker Average turns Average no. Average “did Average “was
per meeting Of seconds interrupt” interrupted”
per turn. per meeting per meeting.
Woman A 5.5 7.8 0.5 3.0
Woman B 5.8 10.0 0.0 3.0
Woman C 8.0 3.0 1.0 3.2
Woman D 20.5 8.5 2.0 7.5
Man E 11.3 16.5 2.0 2.6
Man F 32.3 17.1 8.0 6.7
Man G 32.6 13.2 6.6 6.3
Man H 30.2 10.7 4.3 5.0
Man I 17.0 15.8 4.5 2.5
Another aspect of the picture of women as cooperaqtive
conversationalists is the evidence that women provide more
encouraging feedback to their conversational partners than
men do.

On New Zeland study which examined the distribution of

positive feedback (noises such as ntm and mhm) in casual
relaxed interaction between young people found that women
geve over four times as much of this type of supportive
feedback as men.

Research on conversational interctions reveals women as

cooperative conversationalts, whereas men tend to be more
competitive and less supportive of others.
Why are women´s patterns of interaction
different from men´s?

Is it because they are subordinate in status

to men in most communities so that they
must strive to plase?

Or are there other explanations?

 EXPLANATIONS
The norms for women´s talk may be the norms for small group
interaction in private contexts, where the goals of the interaction are
solidarity stressing-maintaining good social relations. Agreement is
sought and disagreement is avoided.

By contrast, the norms for male ineraction seem to be those of public

referentially-oriented interaction. The public model is an adversarial
one, where contradiction and disagreement is more likely than
agreement and confirmation of the statements of others.
 GOSSIP
Relaxed in- group talk that
goes on between people in
informal situations.
Women´s gossip focusses on :

Personal experiences.
Personal relationships.
Personal problems and
feelings
Western Society: “idle-
talk”
Study:
women
Recordings of women´s group
over 9 months.

Linguistic Features:

 Prepositions which express

feelings.

 Facilitative tags

 Women complete each other

utterances.
Study: men
Men tend to focus on things
and activities , rather than
personal experiences and
feelings.

Linguistic Features:

Long pauses.

Responses frequently
disagreed with.

Change topic abruptly.

Mock – insults.
Malagasy
community
Women : take more
confrontational roles, their speech
is more direct than men´s.
Men: speech is circumlocutionary,
they hold the position of power.
The construction of gender.
o Ed: he´s I mean he´s like a real artsy fartsy
fag he´s like … he´s so gay he´s got this like
really high voice and wire rim glasses.
• Uses of features associated with more
feminine speech style:
 Frequent use of like.
 Hedges such : I mean
 Intensifiers such as real, so, really.
Approaching gender identity
• One way to adopt gender identity is for instance
when women adopt masculine context and men
adopt feminine by using features.

• Women: police force

• Example:
• Men: clothing shops

• A second way is through narratives of personal

experience.
Sexist
language
Is concerned with the way that
language express negative and
positive stereotypes of women
and men.
Sexist language
• Dwight Bolinger: variety of ways in which
the English language provides categories
and ways of encoding experiences.

• He also consider the idea of language sexist

• Sexist language is one example of the way a

culture or society conveys its values.
Can a language be sexist?
• Sexism involves behavior.
• English language discriminate women.
• In the semantic area metaphors are available
to describe women in derogatory images.

Animal Food
Imagery Imagery
There are an extraordinary …compare with the ones used
high number of derogatory for men.
images for women…
• Many words reinforce a view of women as a
deviant, abnormal or subordinate group.

 Lion- lioness
 Actor- actress
 Hero- heroine.
• it has been suggested that suffixes –ess and
–ette trivialize and diminish women.
 Authoress
 Poetess.
EXAMPLES OF MALE
ORIENTED WORDS
• Chairman • Doctor
• Newsman • Professor
• Policeman • Engineer
• Salesman • Lawyer
• Congressman • Reporter

PROFESSIONAL
Generic
Generic provide evidence to
support that English language
marginalize women and treats
them as abnormal.
• He and man can be said to render women
invisible.

• English does not posses a third person

singular pronoun which is gender neutral
EXAMPLES
• All men are mortal.
• “Julia is a man” (?)
• “Therefore, Julia is mortal” (?)
• We want to hire the best men we can get
for the job.
• Only men? Both sex?