Iva Dlurrotun N.
2201409009
Thursday, 405-406
SUMMARY OF SEX, POLITENESS, AND
STEREOTYPES
We are going to learn more about
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 three important issues that would be discussed.
The first part of this book discuss
about 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
In this chapter, 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.
The next material is INTERACTION. There
are many features of interaction which differentiate the talk of women and men:
interruption behavior and conversational feedback.
1. Interruptions
In the same sex-interactions, interruptions were distributed
between speakers. 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.
2. 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. In cross-sex conversation, women
ask more question than men, encourage others to speak, use more signal
like mhmm to encourage other to continue speaking, use more
instant of you and we, and do not protest as
much as men when they are interrupted. The mhmm a woman uses
quite frequently means only “I’m listening”, whereas the mhmm a
man uses, but much less frequently, tends to mean “I’m agreeing”.
The differences between women and men in ways of interacting
may be the result of different socialization and acculturation patterns.
The third is gossip. The author describes gossip as the kind
of relaxed in-group talk that goes on between people in informal contexts. Its
overall function for women is to affirm solidarity and maintain the social
relationships between the women involved. It focuses on personal experiences
and relationships also personal problems and feelings.
The last section in this chapter talks about “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. 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.
