Table of Contents

Table of  Contents  

1.  Introduction  3

2.  Pragmatics and Interactional Sociolinguistics as Approaches to the Analysis  

of  Informal Talk  7

2.1.  Informal Talk as a Social Activity  7

2.2.  Pragmatics  8

2.3.  Interactional Sociolinguistics  11

3.  Definition of the Terms Sex and Gender  13

3.1.  The Individualist Approach to Gender  13

3.2.  The Interactional Approach to Gender  14

4.  Feminist Approaches to the Explanation of Gender-Related Differences in  

Language  Use and Conversational Behaviour  15

4.1.  Feminist Linguistics and Its Drawbacks  15

4.2.  The Sex-Difference’ Perspectives  17

4.2.1.  The Deficit’ Approach Women’s Linguistic Deficiency  17

4.2.2.  The Dominance’ Approach Power and Subordination  19

4.2.3.  The Difference’ Approach Socialisation and Subcultures  21

4.3.  Doing Gender’ in Communities of Practice  23

5.  Features of Gender-Specific Language Use and Conversational Behaviour  27

5.1.  Features of Gender-Specific Lexical Choice  27

5.1.1.  Specific Adjectives  27

5.1.2.  Swear Words and Vulgar Language  28

5.2.  Features of Gender-Specific Conversational Behaviour  29

5.2.1.  Women’s Cooperative and Men’s Competitive Speech Styles  29

5.2.2.  Interruptions  32

5.2.3.  Questions  33

5.2.4.  Tag Questions  34

5.2.5.  Hedges  36

5.2.6.  Minimal responses  38

5.3.  Conclusion  39

6.  A Pragmatic Analysis of Sex and the City.  40

6.1.  Sex and the City A Provocative American TV-series  40

6.2.  Gender-Specific Lexical Choice in Sex and the City.  42

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Table of Contents

6.2.1.  Specific Adjectives  42

6.2.2.  Swear Words and Vulgar Language  44

6.3.  Gender-Specific Conversational Behaviour in Sex and the City  47

6.3.1.  The Women’s Conversational Styles  47

6.3.2.  Interruptions  54

6.3.3.  Questions  56

6.3.4.  Tag Questions  60

6.3.5.  Hedges  63

6.3.6.  Minimal Responses  70

7.  Conclusion  72

8.  Bibliography  75

9.  Appendix  78

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1. Introduction

In view of the fact that all Western communities have been created as democratic and pluralistic societies a widespread phenomenon apparently still exits, i.e. traditional beliefs about women’s and men’s social roles and stereotypes about specifically female and male speech behaviour still seem to be prevalent in people’s minds. Stereotypes are defined as “a set of beliefs about the characteristics presumed to be typical of members of a group.” ¹ These stereotypical beliefs are reflected in the facts that, for instance, women are often regarded as gossipers constantly talking about apparently irrelevant issues and as being very emotional and self-disclosing, while they themselves often feel that men do not really talk to them and are incapable of understanding them. In addition, they are believed to use less taboo language and to be more cooperative as well as polite in social interactions, because they supposedly express a higher degree of involvement and intimacy towards their conversational partners and give more positive feedback. On the other hand, it is often assumed that men behave more task-oriented, competitively, bluntly, and that they are more direct in face-to-face interactions, more interested in the maintenance of status and independency, and apparently tend to use more swear words. ² But even though in our modern society women’s upward social mobility and social status has enormously increased during the last centuries, these stereotypes about gender-related linguistic differences have remained stable over the last twenty years. ³ They sometimes even result in the more dramatic and fiercely disputable assumptions that women and men allegedly do not speak the same language, as it is claimed, for instance, in pseudo-scientific bestsellers and sharply criticised “pop psychology advice books” ⁴ like Deborah Tannen’s (1990) You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation or John Gray’s (1992) Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus: The Classic Guide to Understanding the Opposite Sex, in which Gray more drastically assumes that women and men behave as if they came from different planets.

The research of language and gender is a very controversial, contradictory, and complex field of study, which has aroused the interest of scholars from various different areas of

¹ Aries, Elizabeth (1996), Men and Women in Interaction: Reconsidering the Differences, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 163.

² Aries 1996: 164.

³ Aries 1996: 166.

⁴ Speer Susann A. (2005), Gender Talk: Feminism, Discourse and Conversation Analysis, London, New York: Routledge, p. 44.

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research, for instance anthropology, psychology, sociology, literature studies, and sociolinguistics, of course. In accordance with their different theoretical approaches, many feminist researchers like Robin Lakoff (1975), Pamela Fishman (1978, 1983), and Deborah Tannen (1990) have claimed that there are sex differences in conversational behaviour and that these disparities often result in the discrimination of women and in the breakdown of cross-sex communication and relationships. However, the approaches and studies in feminist linguistics have to be assessed with great caution and from a very critical point of view since they mostly base their assumptions and conclusions on stereotypes. For this reason, my aim in this paper is to critically review the existing approaches to sex-and gender-related differences in conversational behaviour before I will examine one of the most influential American TV-series called Sex and the City in order to discover how gender-specific language use and conversational behaviour are represented in this very modern, but heavily debated TV show. I will analyse the communicative behaviour of the four characters Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha with reference to gender-related features in order to show how these protagonists are characterised by their language. Although I am aware of the fact that scripted conversations in a TV-series such as Sex and the City are, to a certain degree exaggerated, based upon stereotypes and therefore not entirely comparable to naturally occurring conversations, they nevertheless do reflect reality in some way since scriptwriters usually attempt to create dialogues that are supposed to appear as natural as possible. The incentive to investigate Sex and the City resulted from the fact that the female protagonists predominately perform their gender identity and deal with every-day problems of typical women in the 21 ^st century so that their language provides a useful and fascinating material to be investigated in relation to gender as well as stereotypes.

My analysis of the women’s conversational behaviour will include qualitative research methods using two linguistic approaches to spoken interaction: pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics, which will be introduced in chapter 2 along with a detailed definition of informal talk, since both approaches are particularly used to analyse this type of discourse, which takes place in informal settings such as dinners or other simple gettogethers of friends like those of the four women in Sex and the City. I will use these approaches because the methods taken from pragmatics can be applied to examine the functions of particular linguistic features, while interactional sociolinguistics allows for the inclusion of the social context of the character’s interaction in the interpretation as well. Chapter 3 will provide the definition of the term gender in contrast to the term sex, and I

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will indicate some aspects of the controversial discussion about the appropriate use of these terms. In chapter 4, I will give a critical overview of the most important theoretical approaches to the research on gender and language from a feminist and thus strongly biased viewpoint. At first, the three different frameworks from the ‘sex difference’ perspective, which are the ‘deficit’, ‘dominance’, and the ‘difference’ framework, will be introduced. These frameworks reflect the different perceptions on gender differences while they investigate the same linguistic features, especially of “women’s language” ⁵ and speech styles, but with a slightly different interpretation. Finally, the more modern ‘doing gender’ approach to differences in conversational behaviour will be discussed in more detail.

Afterwards, Chapter 5 will present selected features of gender-specific language use, which will include the use of specific adjectives as well as swear words and vulgar language, and characteristics of gender-related conversational behaviour, which will focus on women’s and men’s specific speech styles as well as on interruptions, questions, tag questions, hedges, and minimal responses.

In chapter 6, I will investigate these linguistic features and their communicative functions in a pragmatic analysis of Sex and the City. On the basis of selected scenes from the sixth season, I will demonstrate how the four women apply forms of allegedly female and male conversational behaviour discovered in feminist sociolinguistic studies. The linguistic features in the selection of scripted material are used to analyse the women’s conversational behaviour by means of qualitative methods from pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics in order to compare and contrast them with the findings and interpretations of feminist linguists. I aim to show that, on the one hand, Carrie and Charlotte tend to use a lot of stereotypically female features of language use and conversational behaviour while, on the other hand, Miranda and Samantha rather tend to use linguistic strategies that are supposed to be typically male, according to feminist theory. Due to their presentation as independent and self-confident Manhattan single women and female friends, it will be interesting to discover the respective linguistic features and conversational strategies Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha make use of and how their confident appearance and compassionate character as friends varies depending on the linguistic forms in combination with the situational context. It is definitely not my aim to generalise about typically female conversational interaction.

⁵ This term is used in the feminist literature on gender and language, especially by Robin Lakoff. It is, however, highly problematic to refer to a ‘women’s language’ due to its stereotypical nature.

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Instead, I intend to show that women (at least in Sex and the City) do communicate in a particular gender-related conversation style, but also tend to apply both types of conversational behaviour − typically female as well as typically male features based on criteria established by feminist linguists.

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Pragmatics and Interactional Sociolinguistics as Approaches to the Analysis of

2. Pragmatics and Interactional Sociolinguistics as Approaches to the

Analysis of Informal Talk

2.1. Informal Talk as a Social Activity

For the purpose of clarifying the scope of analysis in this paper, I want to highlight that the pragmatic analysis of the TV-series Sex and the City only involves informal talk, which includes casual conversations between the four female friends Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha. In contrast to formal discourse, casual conversations are not mainly directed at the exchange of facts, albeit pieces of information are always included in every kind of verbal interaction. But above all, casual conversations are social activities in which relationships, especially friendship as in Sex and the City, are shaped and negotiated. Informal talk often only occurs when people “talk simply for the sake of talking itself” ⁶ and meet in order to chat with each other about a variety of topics that are regarded as relevant to discuss. For the most part, it takes place spontaneously when the interactants are most relaxed and not always aware of the fact that they construct a social world and interact on the basis of their social identities and relationships. Even though casual conversations sometimes seem to contain trivial issues about the interactants’ life and experiences, they are not aimless or even unstructured. People might not be aware of the fact that they ‘have a chat’ for certain purposes. But in fact, they try to fulfil specific goals since they aim at creating and enacting their own social identity or role and establish, maintain, and negotiate interpersonal relationships, for instance by showing familiarity and affection or even by challenging and questioning different ideas when they argue about their opinions and experiences. As Eggins and Slade (1997) note, “casual conversation is, in fact, a highly structured, functionally motivated, semantic activity” ⁷ with which people try to understand and organise daily, social life. In this respect, people make meaning of the world and the social life while they negotiate different meanings in social situations, for instance, their feelings, opinions, and perceptions of reality, but either their social relationships. Of course, the level of formality is lower and the use of colloquial expressions is more frequent than in formal discourse. In addition, linguistic means to express politeness are applied less frequently. Since the speakers are socially equal in their rank as friends or family members, they tend to be more direct to each other than

⁶ Eggins, Suzanne; Slade, Diane (1997), Analyzing Casual Conversation, London: Cassell, p. 6.

⁷ Eggins and Slade 1997: 6.

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Pragmatics and Interactional Sociolinguistics as Approaches to the Analysis of

interactants in formal settings, in which the social positions or power relations of the conversational partners often differ, for example, between managers of a company and their employees. 8

Especially the social variable of gender plays an important role in social interactions since people incline to orientate themselves towards being rather masculine or feminine. In this way, they create and communicate their own gender identity, especially by using language. It is often assumed that “it seems to be typical of all-women groups that they discuss people and feelings” on account of their social roles as women or mothers, “while men are more likely to discuss things” ⁹ in informal talk. Even though this assumption is definitely a stereotype, it is evident for the four main characters in Sex and the City since the show portrays Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha as women constantly concerned with female-male relationships in their speech community. This one-sidedness of women’s discussion topics, however, can be seriously doubted with regard to real-life conversations between females.

Since all kinds of human interaction and informal conversations, in particular, are embedded in a diversity of situations, the social and situational context plays a crucial role in a linguistic analysis of the women’s gender-specific speech behaviour in Sex and the City and thus requires the application of methods taken from pragmatics as well as interactional sociolinguistics.

2.2. Pragmatics and the Theory of Politeness

Pragmatics describes a significant and broad linguistic approach to the analysis of informal talk as a form of spoken interaction, which is rooted in both linguistics and philosophy. Based on the philosopher J. L. Austin and his speech act theory, pragmatics is predominately concerned with the “study of language usage” ¹⁰ , i.e. how language is used to perform a vast variety of speech acts ranging from requests and refusals to advices and recommendations, and how it is used to convey a particular meaning by a rich diversity of linguistic features. Pragmatics, accordingly, attempts to analyse and explain the relationship between words and grammatical forms and their meaning and function in consideration of the situational context and thus aims to infer the potential influence or

⁸ Eggins and Slade 1997: 6-21.

⁹ Coates, Jennifer (1998), “Gossip Revisited: Language in All-Female Groups”, in: Coates, Jennifer (ed.), Language and Gender: A Reader, Malden, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, p. 229.

¹⁰ Levinson, Stephen C. (1983), Pragmatics, Cambridge: CUP, p. 5.

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Pragmatics and Interactional Sociolinguistics as Approaches to the Analysis of

rather the illocutionary force an utterance exerts on the hearer. ¹¹ Jenny Thomas, hence, defines pragmatics as a linguistic field of research investigating “meaning in interaction” with a focus on “speaker meaning”, which is what the speaker aims to express by an utterance, and on “utterance interpretation”, which describes the meaning the addressee attempts to decipher. ¹² Moreover, Crystal enunciates the following definition:

Pragmatics is “a term traditionally used to label one of the three major divisions of SEMIOTICS (along with SEMANTICS and SYNTACTICS). In modern LINGUISTICS, it has come to be applied to the study of LANGUAGE from the point of view of the users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction, and the effects their use of language has on the other participants in an act of communication.” 13

As already indicated above, the situational context is taken into account in a pragmatic analysis. It describes a great variety of fundamental criteria as well as social and psychological features of individuals that predominately shape talk-in-interaction such as the interactants’ identities and social roles, the time and place of an utterance within different turns during conversations as well as “beliefs, knowledge and intentions of the participants in that speech event.” ¹⁴ Therefore, the pragmatic analysis of Sex and the City will account for the situational context ¹⁵ , i.e. the specific situation in which the interaction between the four protagonists occurs, as well as for the interpersonal context, i.e. the knowledge about their personalities Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha have jointly gained. 16

Apart from the situational and interpersonal context, the politeness as one of the significant social principles accounted for in pragmatic studies will find application in the linguistic analysis of Sex and the City, too. Politeness is an important issue in the pragmatic field of study, and its abstract idea is based on the concept of ‘face’ initially established by the sociologist Erving Goffman and finally integrated into the theory of politeness by Brown and Levinson. ¹⁷ Their theory claims that every competent speaker of a

¹¹ Cameron, Deborah (2001), Working with Spoken Discourse, London: Sage, 70.

¹² Thomas in Cameron 2001: 68.

¹³ Crystal, David (2003), A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, 5 ^th ed., Malden, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, p. 364. [capitals in original]

¹⁴ Levinson 1983: 5.

¹⁵ A short description of the situational context for each conversation analysed from Sex and the City is given in the appendix.

¹⁶ Cutting, Joan (2008), Pragmatics and Discourse: A Resource Book for Students, 2 ^nd ed., London, New York: Routledge, p. 5-6.

¹⁷ Brown, Penelope; Levinson, Stephen (1987), Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 61f.

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Pragmatics and Interactional Sociolinguistics as Approaches to the Analysis of

language, a Model Person, has ‘face’ − a public self-image he wants to maintain in communication with other people or, to cite Goffman, “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact.” ¹⁸ Every person interacting with other people in human communication has face wants, i.e. two specific kinds of desires he seeks to satisfy and wants to be perceived by his conversational partners as well. In this respect, Brown and Levinson distinguish between negative face and positive face. While the concept of negative face describes a person’s desire not to be obliged to do something in order to keep his or her own actions unimpeded and to preserve his or her freedom of action, the notion of positive face represents a person’s desire to be approved of and accepted by others in order to satisfy his or her need for membership and connection. 19

However, a hearer’s as well as a speaker’s face can be threatened in most of the speech acts which “by nature run contrary to the face wants of the addressee and/or of the speaker.” ²⁰ These speech acts are called face-threatening acts (FTA) and occur in speech situations in which the speaker threatens the hearer’s positive face and respectively his need to be appreciated and accepted, for instance by insulting, criticizing, or disapproving him, or in which the speaker harms the hearer’s negative face and respectively his need for autonomy and freedom of action, for instance by requesting a favour or even by suggesting or advising. But not only can the hearer’s face be harmed in specific speech acts, even the speaker’s positive face can be threatened, e.g. by apologizing and accepting compliments, as can be his negative face, e.g. by accepting an offer or expressing thanks. Some facethreatening acts can even hurt both the positive and the negative face at the same time, for example complaints, interruptions, and strong expressions of emotions. ²¹ Since every individual, however, is interested in preserving its own face as well as the others’ face, politeness strategies are applied in order to mitigate potential face threats. Politeness strategies, thus, serve as a method to weaken face-threatening speech acts and simultaneously function as face-saving acts. As a result, speakers can communicate their implicated messages without taking the risk of being impolite and offending their conversational partner by using certain politeness strategies.

¹⁸ Goffman, Erving (1967), Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behaviour, Chicago: Aldine, p. 5.

¹⁹ Yule, George (1996), Pragmatics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 61-62.

²⁰ Brown; Levinson 1987: 65.

²¹ Brown; Levinson 1987: 65-67.

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Pragmatics and Interactional Sociolinguistics as Approaches to the Analysis of

Thus the analysis of gender-specific language use and conversational behaviour in Sex and the City will refer to the concept of politeness and face as well when the use of linguistic features such as interruptions, questions, tag questions, hedges, and minimal responses will be investigated.

2.3. Interactional Sociolinguistics

Interactional sociolinguistics has been established as an approach to spoken interaction with sociological backgrounds which does not only focus on talk-in-interaction, but also accounts for the influence of social variables, such as ethnic background, age, and gender, on the success of verbal as well as non-verbal communication and thus “takes into account the pragmatic and sociolinguistics aspects of interaction.” ²² Interactional sociolinguistics was originally established by John Gumperz and is based on Dell Hymes’ ethnography of communication and Goffman’s interaction order. It assumes that conversations are influenced by their social, cultural, and situational context since the communicated meaning of language always depends on the social context. Interlocutors, who are members of particular social groups at the same time, interpret this meaning on the basis of “contextualisation cues”, which are linguistic features individually used by every cultural group to communicate how the conveyed message is to be interpreted correctly. ²³ Consequently, the analysis of talk-in-interaction has to include social variables like gender and the situation as well in order to “bridge the linguistic and the social” ²⁴ aspects of conversations. Interactional sociolinguistics, thus, does not only focus on the data and avoids neglecting the interactants’ social backgrounds, but also accounts for the fact that language is interconnected with various aspects of social life. For this reason, the analysis of gender-specific conversational behaviour in the TV-series Sex and the City can be approached with both concepts of pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics because occurring linguistic patterns and their pragmatic functions can be detected while the social context is included in the evaluation as well so that the relationship between grammar and social interaction is taken into account. As a result, it is possible to draw conclusions about the correlations between the speakers’ gender, the situational context, and the linguistic

²² Cutting 2008: 32.

²³ Cameron 2001: 106-109.

²⁴ Bubel, Claudia (2006), The Linguistic Construction of Character Relations in TV Drama: Doing Friendship in Sex and the City, Dissertation at the University of Saarland, URL: http://scidok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2006/598/pdf/Diss_Bubel_publ.pdf (01-09-2009), p. 75.

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Pragmatics and Interactional Sociolinguistics as Approaches to the Analysis of

expressions and means the interactants use. After all, these approaches to spoken interaction deal with the description and interpretation of the seemingly most commonplace activity of how people talk to each other in specific contexts, for even the most basic and simplest features of talk-in-interaction have specific social purposes and meanings which the speakers’ themselves often do not fully recognize, as I have already shown in chapter 2.1.

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3. Definition of the Terms Sex and Gender

In the course of the second feminism wave in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the term gender had become one of the key concepts in sociology, anthropology, sociolinguistics, and many other academic disciplines after these research fields had been criticised for being oblivious to women’s lives and achievements in history and science. Since then many theoretical and controversial discussions about what sex is and what gender is have taken place in the sociological and feminist field of research. These terms have been introduced in order to prevent prejudiced assumptions about women and their unequal status in society as well as in order to avoid conclusions about a person’s behaviour on the basis of his or her sex category, which can be either male or female in the majority of cases. ²⁵ It, however, seems that there is no definite agreement among scientists on how the terms sex and gender are to be used appropriately. As Wharton notices, “[s]ome reject the term ‘sex’ altogether and refer only to ‘gender’. Others use the terms almost interchangeably, while still others employ both concepts and recognize a clear distinction between them.” 26

3.1. The Individualist Approach to Gender

Whereas the term sex generally “refers to a biological distinction” ²⁷ , i.e. the biological differences between men and women in terms of their physical structure, hormones, and physiology, the term gender is used to describe “socially constructed categories based on sex” ²⁸ or “an achieved status: that which is constructed through psychological, cultural, and social means.” ²⁹ The individualist (or essentialist) approach describes gender as the characteristics of women and men which are socially and culturally established and encompass the social expectations to a specific gender role which are generally regarded as typical and appropriate for being either ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ in a certain culture. According to the individualist approach, these gender roles are acquired during socialisation when children learn to behave and act as either girls or boys while they

²⁵ Wharton, Amy S. (2005), The Sociology of Gender: An Introduction to Theory and Research, Malden, Oxford, Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, p. 4.

²⁶ Wharton 2005: 18.

²⁷ Coates, Jennifer (1993), Women, Men and Language, 2 ^nd ed., London: Longman, p. 3.

²⁸ Coates 1993: 3-4.

²⁹ West, Candace; Zimmerman, Don H. (1987), “Doing Gender”, Gender and Society, Vol. 1, No. 2, p. 125.

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interact with their guardians, friends, and family members. In this regard, gender is conceptualized as a relatively fixed attribute which individuals have achieved through socialisation and which determines their own identity, their behaviour in terms of what they do or say, and how they identify their fellow-beings. Even though people have more than one identity, gender identity is probably one of the most important identities a person orients to. 30

This individualist concept of gender is applied in the feminist ‘sex difference’ approach which examines the linguistic and conversational differences between women and men, but has received a lot of critique because of its tendency to generalize and over-simplify, because it applies conclusions about the use of language by selected men and women to all men and women. ³¹ After all, this framework assumes greater differences between rather than among both females and males and that these disparities do not seem to vary across situations. 32

3.2. The Interactional Approach to Gender

In contrast to the individualist view of gender, which regards gender as an individual’s characteristic acquired during socialisation and thus emphasises the stereotypical differences between women and men, a new understanding of gender has been established by feminist linguists. The interactional (or constructionist) approach called doing gender describes the term as “something one continually does” ³³ and not as something one has. A detailed description of this modern approach to gender differences in language will be given in chapter 4.3.

³⁰ Wharton 2005: 9.

³¹ Speer 2005: 21.

³² Wharton 2005: 23.

³³ McElhinny, Bonnie (2003), “Theorizing Gender in Sociolinguistics and Linguistic Anthropology”, in: Holmes, Janet; Meyerhoff, Miriam (eds.), The Handbook of Language and Gender, Malden, Oxford, Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, p. 27.

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Feminist Approaches to the Explanation of Gender-Related Differences in Language Use

4. Feminist Approaches to the Explanation of Gender-Related

Differences in Language Use and Conversational Behaviour

4.1. Feminist Linguistics and Its Drawbacks

Feminist linguistics is a particular field of study which, however, differs fundamentally from other linguistic areas of research within sociolinguistics since feminist ideas about language and gender are not value-free and often draw their conclusions on the basis of generalizations and the researcher’s own attitudes and intuitions on account of lacking empirical evidence for the explanation of gender differences. Especially the first attempts to describe gender-specific differences in language were often related to “folk linguistics”, which are “beliefs about language that are simply accepted as common sense” ³⁴ within a society. Therefore, the assumed gender differences in language use and conversational behaviour can be traced back to stereotypes rather than to actually existing differences so that feminist sociologists and linguists have often been criticised for not being scientific enough. 35

As opposed to researchers of other linguistic fields of research, feminist linguists take up a socially critical position and are motivated by political goals directed against the patriarchal structure of society which, as feminists argue, accords men privileges and advantages in all areas of social and political life. As Ruth Wodak points out, “feminist scholarship in every discipline is characterized by its criticism of science and its criticism of the androcentric view within ‘traditional science’.” ³⁶ Due to their basic political motivation to change society for the sake of an equal treatment of women and men, feminist linguists demand a reassessment of women’s specific speech style so that their way of speaking is not considered to be inferior to men anymore. ³⁷ But even though Robin Lakoff and other linguists claim to be feminist and advocate equality between the sexes, they can be criticised that they themselves contribute to the perpetuation of ingrained prejudices about typically female and male social and conversational behaviour because they accept and even highlight these supposed linguistic and conversational differences in their more or less scientific contributions.

³⁴ Cameron, Deborah (1992), Feminism and Linguistic Theory, 2 ^nd ed., London: MacMillan Press, p. 42.

³⁵ Romaine, Suzanne (1999), Communicating Gender, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, p. xiii.

³⁶ Wodak 1997: 7.

³⁷ Cameron 1992: 45.

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Feminist Approaches to the Explanation of Gender-Related Differences in Language Use

For these reasons, linguistic studies carried out by feminist researchers have to be analysed and evaluated with a high degree of criticism because the main problem remains the question whether or not women do really talk differently in comparison to men. In case they really do their specific conversational behaviour should be fully appreciated instead of seen as a disadvantage. 38

Since the beginning of the feminist research into the relationship between language and gender in the mid-1970s feminist (and on the whole female) sociolinguists have focused their attention on two different aspects. Following their political motivation to change language use and the unequal position of women in society, they have taken a close look at “how gender is represented in the language (the form of language)” and “how men and women use language (the function of language).” ³⁹ The main focus in this paper, however, is not placed on the way in which gender is embodied in sexist language, but on the specific ways of how particularly women use language as part of their conversational behaviour in contrast to men according to feminist language theory. In contrast to the research on sexist language, the perspective on the function of language within feminist linguistics intends to explore gender-specific language use in terms of pronunciation, intonation, and word choice as well as in terms of typically female and male conversational behaviour on the interactional level. The focus of research was initially on gender differences in grammar and phonology with special reference to “women’s language”, which was regarded as different and non-normative as opposed to neutral or “men’s language”, as well as on gender-specific speech behaviour in cross-sex conversations, i.e. between women and men. Afterwards, the interest in linguistic gender differences shifted towards specific conversational strategies applied by women and men in single-sex talks. ⁴⁰ The focus in this paper, however, will be placed on feminist theoretical approaches to the explanation of gender-specific conversational behaviour within the three different frameworks, which are the ‘deficit’, the ‘dominance’, and the ‘difference’ framework and the more modern ‘doing gender’ approach.

³⁸ Cameron 1992: 45.

³⁹ Speer 2005: 9.

⁴⁰ Coates, Jennifer (ed.) (1998), Language and Gender: A Reader, Oxford, Malden: Blackwell Publishing, p. 2-3.

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Feminist Approaches to the Explanation of Gender-Related Differences in Language Use

The research on gender-specific conversation styles is probably “the area where the debate among feminists themselves has been most heated.” ⁴¹ The distinct approaches investigate almost the same linguistic features particularly used by women, but differ in their explanations of gender differences. Their interpretations and explications of the alleged differences, however, are often very contradictory and their studies clearly lack definite and convincing answers to the question of gender-related linguistic differences. The serious drawbacks of the feminist sex-difference perspectives consist of their erroneous assumption that a speaker’s sex is an “independent variable” that creates and explains linguistic differences and thus mistakenly regard language “as a direct reflection of one’s sex and gender identity.” ⁴² Nevertheless, the following subchapters will be concerned with a brief overview of the feminist approaches to gender differences in language use and speech behaviour as well as with a critical evaluation of the arguments adduced by their advocates.

4.2. The ‘Sex-Difference’ Perspectives

4.2.1. The ‘Deficit’ Approach − Women’s Linguistic Deficiency

The feminist ‘deficit’ framework was the first feminist approach to the study of language and gender. It assumes that the linguistic variations between women and men are the result of women’s lack of power and assertiveness. Robin Lakoff was the first feminist linguist who described the features of women’s use of language and conversational behaviour in terms of their lexical choices and the syntactical formation of their utterances in her article “Women’s Language” (1973) and later work Language and Woman’s Place (1975), which has been celebrated, among advocates of the controversial field of feminism, as “the first ever work of feminist linguistics.” ⁴³ The publication of her paper provoked a heated discussion about women’s and men’s language and, finally, influenced further research in the following years. Fifty years after the first attempts to describe women’s language, it was published as a backlash against Otto Jesperson’s “The Woman”, in which he unscientifically examined female language use in exotic languages, as well as against the

⁴¹ Cameron, Deborah (ed.) (1999), The Feminist Critique of Language − A Reader, 2 ^nd ed., London, New York: Routledge, p. 14.

⁴² Speer 2005: 46.

⁴³ Cameron 1999: 216.

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patriarchal organisation of society and its representation in sexist language and genderrelated speech behaviour. Robin Lakoff’s approach to women’s and men’s speech styles, however, was considered to be the apparently most advanced at that time since she was the first linguist who investigated women’s language in American English. Similarly to Jesperson’s research, previous work on this subject had concentrated on sex-specific differences in exotic languages. 44

Apart from her discussion of sexist language, Lakoff also described women’s typical use of language. She argues that women’s language and conversational behaviour is deficient and not as adequate as men’s way of speaking because they lack the ability to express themselves forcefully and decisively. This deficiency, however, is by no means a natural fact, but a result of women’s socialisation. Since girls are taught to ‘speak like a lady’, which means that they have to be less dominant and forceful in conversations, they lack the appropriate linguistic competence to convey their ideas and attitudes convincingly. However, their education to speak in a way which is considered to be socially respectable for women debars them from being fully accepted as a human being because social behavioural norms hinder them from expressing themselves as forcefully as would be necessary to be acknowledged. Women are therefore exposed to a harmful dilemma: if a woman does not abide by the social rules and avoids talking as she is expected to, she is mocked and denunciated as unfeminine. If she, however, speaks in a feminine way, Lakoff believes that she is not taken seriously and judged to be incapable of reasoning and discussing issues in an objective way. According to Lakoff, this confusing situation leads to the fact that women are discriminated. 45

Although Lakoff highly criticised Jesperson’s study of women’s language, she also equates “women’s language” with an extraordinary form of language while she relates “men’s language” to neutral or normal language. In other words, she claims that “women’s language” is not regarded as a socially acknowledged language and is marked as nonneutral and deviant from males’ language, which she considers to be normative. Therefore, Lakoff presents women as being incapable of using language appropriately. But since she highlights the peculiarities of typically female language and neglects to investigate “men’s language” (even though it is questionable that a male language exists at all), her approach is absolutely not value-free and unscientific. As a consequence, Lakoff and other feminists

⁴⁴ Weatherall, Ann (2002), Gender, Language and Discourse, East Sussex, New York: Routledge: 57.

⁴⁵ Lakoff in Cameron 1999: 242-244.

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have met with considerable criticism since they only focus on women’s language as an abnormal variety and thus also contribute to the perpetuation of stereotypes. Furthermore, she argues on the basis of her own intuitions and experiences of other people because, as she even herself admits, “[she does not] have precise statistical evidence” ⁴⁶ for her assumptions. It is not clear whether Lakoff created the sentences used as examples for women’s language, or whether they were, in fact, uttered by women in real situations. The first case, however, is more likely because the speech act theory at that time used to analyse fabricated sentences. 47

Nonetheless, her book motivated a lot of researchers from the various fields of study to empirically investigate the genuine characteristics of “women’s language”, but convincing evidence for Lakoff’s assumptions has, in fact, never been found. Instead, more recent studies have provided a lot of counterevidence. For instance, several studies have proven that men use at least as much tag questions as women or even more. ⁴⁸ But a detailed analysis of the linguistic elements characteristic for women’s speech will be given in chapter 5.

4.2.2. The Feminist ‘Dominance’ Approach − Power and

Subordination

The feminist ‘dominance’ approach to gender and language, assumes that sex differences in conversational behaviour result from the fact that men exert power and control over women in male-female interaction. Therefore, the focus shifted from a description of the separate features of “women’s language”, for instance in terms of word choice, to the interactional aspects of gender-specific speech behaviour, but still without treating gender as a flexible product of social interactions. Proponents of this framework like Barrie Thorne and Nancy Henley (1975), Dale Spender (1980), and Pamela Fishman (1978, 1983) are convinced that men abuse their allegedly greater power, which is said to result from their higher social status and assumed superiority to women, because they interrupt women more often and determine the topics in a conversation. The gender-specific differences in conversational styles are regarded as a reflection of the “androcentric” and hierarchical

⁴⁶ Lakoff in Cameron 1999: 250.

⁴⁷ Ayaß, Ruth (2008), Kommunikation und Geschlecht: Eine Einführung, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, p. 24.

⁴⁸ Speer 2005: 37.

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Feminist Approaches to the Explanation of Gender-Related Differences in Language Use

social organisation, in which social inequality between women and men has been created on the basis of the unequal social roles both sexes occupy as well as on rules and norms that are “man-made” ⁴⁹ , to quote the radical feminist Dale Spender. In addition to social institutions such as politics and education or the inequitable division of labour into male paid work and female non-paid house work, language is deemed as one significant dimension in which these unequal power relations are being mirrored. The ‘dominance’ approach assumes that women use a specific speech style because of their subordination to men. Females are expected and forced to speak in a more subordinate way while males are privileged to dominate conversations, for instance, in terms of topic control, floor apportionment, and amount of talk. Women’s conversational behaviour “is [apparently] low in conversationally assertive strategies” so that they “are less likely to get floor time, less likely to be heard seriously, and less likely to control the topic.” ⁵⁰ Thus, the ‘dominance’ approach erroneously portrays women as victims and outsiders, and men as domineering and suppressing villains.

As Weatherall notes, “the dominance approach to gender differences is limited in so far as the effects of power cannot wholly explain why women in some situations appear to use a different speech style from men.” ⁵¹ Further criticism can also be expressed with reference to women’s representation in this approach. Their conversational behaviour is contemptuously presented as subordinate because it assumes that a woman is mainly responsible for the emotional aspect of communication in the same way as they are obligated to do the housework, according to Fishman. 52

⁴⁹ Spender in Speer 2005: 36.

⁵⁰ Eggins and Slade 1997: 36.

⁵¹ Weatherall 2002: 67.

⁵² Cameron 1992: 72.

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Feminist Approaches to the Explanation of Gender-Related Differences in Language Use

4.2.3. The Feminist ‘Difference’ Approach − Socialisation and

Subcultures

The ‘difference’ approach to the explanation of gender variation in language use and conversational behaviour (also called the sub-cultural or two-cultures approach ⁵³ ) supports the highly disputable assumption that a “woman’s language” and speech style as described by Lakoff and Fishman really exists. However, advocates of this framework disapprove of Lakoff’s negative depiction of women’s gender-specific conversational style by suggesting “that it is not, in fact, inherently dysfunctional and should be valued as something positive and authentic: different, not inferior.” ⁵⁴ In this sense, gender-specific differences are regarded as different but yet as equal so that women’s apparently different conversational behaviour has to be evaluated as a strong, communicative skill. Daniel N. Maltz and Ruth A. Borker (1982) and Deborah Tannen (1990) as major proponents of the ‘difference’ approach contend that women and men behave differently in conversations on account of their socialisation into different subcultures approximately at the age of 5 to 15 since they acquire distinctive gender roles in communication within same-sex peer groups. Based on Gumperz’s theory of interethnic communication, Maltz and Borker came to the controversial assertion that women and men employ different speech styles: on the one hand, women are apparently more oriented to affiliation and support because, as girls, they used to play in a very cooperative way. This is reflected in girls’ “collaboration-oriented” ⁵⁵ talk, which is, for example, characterised by their use of predominately less straightforwardly expressed directives such as Let’s play…, We could…, or We’re gonna… involving every participant in the group. ⁵⁶ Men, on the other hand, are thought to be focused on competition and independency in their organisation of play activities because, as boys, they used to organise their games in a hierarchy with different roles distributed among them. Their typically “competition-oriented” ⁵⁷ talk

⁵³ Coates 1998: 413.

⁵⁴ Cameron 1992: 72.

⁵⁵ Maltz and Borker in Coates 1998: 158.

⁵⁶ Goodwin in Coates 1998: 124.

⁵⁷ Maltz and Borker in Coates 1998: 158.

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