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Women, men, and type of talk: What makes the difference?

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 February 2009

Alice F. Freed
Affiliation:
Linguistics Department, Montclair State University, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043
Alice Greenwood
Affiliation:
AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ 07974

Abstract

In a study of dyadic conversations between four female and four male pairs of friends, the use of the phraseyou know and questions are examined within three types of discourse. Women and men are found to use these features with equal frequency; and all speakers, regardless of sex or gender, use them in comparable ways. Although these particular discourse features have been previously associated with a female speech style, the results of this study show that it is the particular requirements associated with the three types of talk that motivate their use, and not the sex or gender of the individual speaker. The problems of generalizing about the characteristics of female or male speech, outside of a particular conversational context, are discussed; and it is shown that a gendered style cannot be adequately defined by counting individual speech variables removed from the specifics of the talk context. (Gender, questions, tag questions, discourse analysis, conversation analysis)

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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