Gender Theorist's
- Female language is seen to be weaker and lesser version of male language
Deficit approach
- Men's langauge dominates women
Dominance approach
- Men and women use language due to their different cultures
Difference approach
- Male language forms are the 'norm' and the language of others (including women) were 'deficient'.
- What approach?
Jesperson (Deficit)
- Male language is stronger, more presitgious and more desirable.
- Women's speech can be distinguished from that of men in multiple ways
- What approach?
Lakoff - Langauge and a women's place (Deficit)
- Men not only control women, but also the language system
- What approach?
Spender (Dominance)
- Women's conversational behaviour is less assertive and less confident than that of men precisely because they occupy a less powerful position in society than men
- What approach?
Ardner and Ardner (Dominance)
- Men in their dominance are less concerned with the "conversational shitwork" so they leave it to the women to carry it on
- What approach?
Fishman (Dominance)
- Same sex and mixed sex conversations had similarly distributed interuptions, with most being by men.
- What approach?
Zimmerman and West (Dominance)
- Men and women come from different 'cultures' causing the difference in language.
- What approach?
Tannen (Difference)
- Young females use more standard prestige forms than young males, suggesting a difference is evident in childhood
- What approach?
Cheshire (Difference)
- Women in same sex talk were more collabrative than men were
- What approach?
Pilkington (Difference)
- In an all-male rugby team, men were likely to pay less attention to the need to save face and instead used insults as a way of expressing solidarity
- What approach?
Kuiper (Difference)
- "Varitation is controlled by social and lingutic features"
- Male variation is governed by social norms created by a central standard culture and are transmitted through peer groups
- Female varitation is a more personal process and controlled by rigid norms
- What approach?
Cheshire (Difference)
- Langauge differences are situation specific
- Concerned with authority and power, not the gender
O'bar and Atkins
- Challenged the concept of interuptions only signifying dominance
- Could also suggest interest and desire for involvement
Beattie
- Tag question's can be modal or affective
Holmes
- Hedges are multifunctional based on the situation, context and intonation
- Could signal uncertainty, but also politeness
Holmes
- Identified elements of both cooperative and competative talk in adolecent single sex conversations
Baxter
- 'Myth of Mars and Venus' critisised the notion that there are innate difference in male and female language
- "...great myths of are time"
Cameron
- Gender performativity - refers to the idea that we perform in roles as we communicate
Butler
- Gender similarities hypothesis
- Substantially more similarities than difference in male and female language
Hyde
- Distinct catagories of day and night are clear, but the boundries are foggy
Bing and Bergvall
- A belief that any specific entities have a set of charateristics/attributes that make it what it is and are nessasary to its function of indentity.
Essentialism
- A theory about how identity is created through social interaction
- "Meaning is created through the things we do and say"
Social constructivism
- Practise of giving a universal characteristic to a specific entity
- Generalisation
- Universaling