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Genderlect
Researcher(s)
Key Concepts
Lakoff
Woman’s Language - suggests weakness. Hedges, tags, weak expletives, superpolite forms, speaking in italics etc. No research, just opinion.
Zimmerman & West
Studied 31 conversations. Men interrupted women 46 times, women interrupted men twice. More and longer silences in mixed-sex pairs.
Fishman
Women do “interactional shitwork” - minimal responses, questions, tags to keep conversation going.
Holmes
Different purposes of tag questions - women use affective tags to soften and to show solidarity, men use modal tags to check facts.
Coates
Women”duet”: overlapping and joining each other.
Tannen
Women and men are from different cultures and therefore have different expectations of conversations.
Goodwin
Males use aggravated directives (e.g. direct imperatives), while women use mitigated directives (e.g. modals, first person plurals).
Jones
Men compete, women cooperate. There are four types of gossip: house talk, scandal, bitching, chatting.
O’Barr and Atkins
Renamed ‘Women’s Language’ to ‘Powerless Language’ - found that status in context was much more relevant than gender.
West
Drs surgeries - female doctors use mitigated directives, males use direct imperatives. Only time doctors get interrupted is female doctors with white male patients.
Woods
3 way business conversations - females get interrupted by males, regardless of occupational status.