SUMMARY

Ika Kurniawati K. / 2201409032
Rombel 405-406

Sex, Politeness and Stereotype

Women’s language and confidence

Robin Lakoff, an American linguist, argued that women were using language which reinforced their subordinate status; they were colluding in their own subordination by the way they spoke. She shifted the focus of research on gender differences to syntax, semantics, and style.

Features of ‘women’s language’

Lakoff suggested that women’s speech was characterized by linguistic features such as the following:

1.      Lexical hedges or fillers, e.g. you know, sort of, you see, well. à hedging devices

2.      Tag questions, e.g. she is very nice, isn’t it?. à hedging devices

3.      Rising intonation on declaratives, e.g. it’s really good. à hedging devices

4.      ‘Empty’ adjectives, e.g. divine, charming, cute.

5.      Precious colour terms, e.g. magenta, aquamarine.

6.      Intensifiers such as just and so, e.g. I like him so much. à boosting devices

7.      ‘Hypercorrect’ grammar, e.g. consistent use of standard verb forms.

8.      ‘Superpolite’ forms, e.g. indirect requests, euphenism. à hedging devices

9.      Avoidance of strong swear words, e.g. fudgr, my goodness.

10.  Emphatic stress, e.g. it was a BRILLIANT performance. à boosting devices

Lakoff had identified a number of linguistic features which were unified by their function of expressing lack of confidence, by the fact that all the forms identified were means of expressing uncertainty or tentativeness. However, other researchers ignored this functional coherence. The internal coherence of the features Lakoff identified can be illustrated by dividing them into two groups: (1) linguistics devices which may be used for hedging or reducing the force of utterance (weakening the strength of assertation), and (2) features which may boost or intensify  a proposition’s force (strenthenoing it).

Lakoff’s linguistic features  as politeness devices

-          Tag question is a syntactic device listed by Lakoff which may express uncertainty, with raising intonation. It focuses on the referential meaning of an assertion. But tags may also express affective meaning (positive politeness devices), with falling intonation. They also may soften the negative comment.

-          Other so-called hedges such as you know and I think are used differently in different contexts and often used as politeness devices rather than as expressions of uncertainty.

Other facts about politeness device, Western female usuallly used more politeness devices that male. As the contrary, for example in Malagasy, the men used more politeness devices that the women.  So, actually many factors influenced the differents pattern of language use by women and men.

Interaction

There are many features of interaction which differentiate the talk of women and men.

Interruptions

Based on one of the researchs conducted, in same-sex interaction, interruptions were pretty evenly distributed between speakers. In cross-sex interaction almost all the interruptions were from males. In general, research on conversational interaction reveals women as cooperative convrsationalist, whereas men tend to be more competitive and less supportive to others.

Explanation

The societally subordinate position of women reflected in these patterns of socialisation. The norm for women’s talk are solidarity stressing (agreement sought and disagreement avoided), whereas for males it is to be those of public referential-oriented interaction. The public model is an adversarial one, where contradiction and disagreement is more likely thatn agreement and confirmation of the statements of others.

Gossip

Gossip (‘idle talk’ in Western society) describes the kind of relaxed in-group talk that goes on between people in informal contexts. The function is to affirm solidarity and maintain the social relationship between the women involved. It may include critisim of beahiours of others, but women tend to avoit criticising people directly. A common male reaction to this behaviour is to label it two-faced.

Sexist language

Basically the study of sexist language is concerned with the way language expresses both negative and positive stereotypes of both women and men. Practically research in the area has concentrated on the ways in which language conveys negative attitudes to women.

Can a language be sexist?

Feminists have claimed that English is a sexist language. Sexist involves behaviour which maintains social inequalities between women and men. There are a number of ways in which it has been suggested that the English language discriminates against women. For example, animal imagery is one example where the images of women (bitch, old biddy, and cow) seem considerably less positive that for men.

Generic structures provide further evidence to support the claim that English language marginalises women and treats them as abnormal. Words like generic he and man can be said to render women invisible. However, they is nowadays the most frequently heard pronoun in informal speech, and it is spreading to more formal context.

The categories discussed in this section reflect the society’s view of women in many English-speaking communities. It will be different with other cultures.