Novinda Pitoyo

SEX, POLITENESS, AND STEREOTYPES

 

This section discusses about the way language is used, linguistic attitudes, and also the evidence that women and men use language differently. There three main explanations of this section, they are Women’s language, Gossip, and Sexist language.

1.     Women’s Language

Women’s language and confidence

Features of “women’s language”

ü  Lak off suggested that women’s speech was characterized by linguistics features such as the following:

ü  Lexical hedges or fillers, e.g. you know, sort of, well, you see.

ü  Tag questions, e.g. she’s very nice, isn’t she?

ü  Rising intonation on declaratives, e.g. it’s really good.

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

ü  Precise color terms, e.g. magenta, aquamarine.

ü  Intensifiers such as just and so e.g. I like him so much.

ü  “Hypercorrect” grammar, e.g. consistent use of standard verb forms.

ü  “Superpolite” forms, e.g. indirect request, euphemisms.

ü  Avoidance of strong swears words, e.g. fudge, my goodness.

ü  Emphatic stress, e.g. it was a BRILLIANT performance.

The internal coherence of the features Lako ff identified can be illustrated by dividing them into two groups.

• First, there are linguistic devices which may used for hedging or reducing the force of an utterance.
• Secondly, there are features which may boost or intensify a proposition’s force.

Features which may serve as:

ü  Hedging devices                                             

ü  boosting devices

ü  Lexical hedges                                                 

ü  intensifiers

ü  Tag questions                                                     

ü  emphatic stress

ü  Question intonation

ü  Superpolite forms

ü  Euphemisms

The hedging devices can be used to weaken the strength of an assertion while the boosting devices can be used to strengthen it. For example, it’s a good film can be strengthened by adding the intensifier really (it’s a really good film) or weakened by adding the lexical hedge sort of (it’s sort of a good film). However, some of these devices serve other functions too, as we will see below.

Lakoff claimed both kinds of modifiers were evidence of an unconfident speaker. Hedging devices explicitly signal lack of confidence, while boosting devices reflect the speaker’s anticipation that the addressee may remain unconvinced and therefore supply extra reassurance. So, she claimed, women use hedging devices to express uncertainty, and they use intensifying devices to persuade their addressee to take them seriously.

Women boost the force of their utterances because they think that otherwise they will not be heard or paid attention to. So, according to Lakoff, both hedges and boosters reflect women’s lack of confidence.

Lakoff’s linguistic features as politeness devices

(/ indicates rising intonation)

/

I did my exams in sixty three was it?

The tag question is a syntactic device listed by Lakoff which may express uncertainty.

The tag in this exchange functions not to hedge but rather to strengthen the negative force of the utterance in which it occurs. So, here we have a tag which could be classified as a boosting device. Treating all tags as signals of uncertainty is clearly misleading.

Many linguistic forms have complex functions. Similar results have been found when other so-called “hedges” such as you know and I think have been analyzed. They are used differently in different contexts. They mean different things according to their pronunciation, their position in the utterance, what kind of speech act they are modifying, and who is using them to whom in what context. Like tags, they are often being used as politeness devices rather than as expressions of uncertainty.

Interaction

There are many features of interaction which differentiate the talk of women and men. Mrs. Fleming’s distinction reflects one of them. This explanation will explain two others; interruption behavior and conventional feedback.

Interruptions

In-same-sex interactions, interruptions were pretty evenly distributed between speakers. In cross-sex interactions almost all the interruptions were from males. In other contexts, it has been found that men interrupt others more than women do.

Feedback

Another aspect of the picture of women as cooperative conversationalists is the evidence that women provide more encouraging feedback to their conversational partners than the men do.

In general then research on conversational interaction reveals women as cooperative conversationalists, whereas men tend to be more competitive and less supportive of others.

2.     Gossip

Gossip descries the kind of relaxed in-group talk that goes on between people in informal contexts. In Western society, gossip is defined as “idle talk” and considered particularly characteristic of women’s interaction. Its overall function for women I to affirm solidarity and maintain the social relationships between the women involved.

The male equivalent of women’s gossip is difficult to identify. In parallel situations the topics men discuss tend to focus on thing and activities, rather than personal experiences and feelings. Topics like sport, cars, and possessions turn to feelings and reactions.

3.     Sexist language

Sexist language is one example of the way a culture or society conveys its values from one group to another and from one generation to the next. Language conveys attitudes. Sexist attitudes stereotype a person according to gender rather than judging on individual merits. Sexist language encodes stereotyped attitudes to women and men. In principle, then, the study of sexist language is concerned with the way language expresses both negative and positive stereotypes of both women and men. In practice, research in this area has concentrated on the ways in which language conveys negative attitudes to women.