n r j G e n d e r f D I T [ Blackwell Publishing

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1 n r j G e n d e r f D I T [ J e n n i f e r ( n a t e s Blackwell Publishing

2 L a n g u a g e a n d G e n d e r : A R e a d e i Edited by Jennifer Coates DAI HOC THAI F' : l 7 VEM _J / TRUNG f "htt HCC Ll : C7 J l ^ Blackwell J f t r Publishing

3 1998 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization 1998 by Jennifer Coates BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Maiden, MA , USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Jennifer Coates to be identified as the Author of the Editorial Material in this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Language and gender : a reader / edited by Jennifer Coates. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN (hbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Language and languages-sex differences. I. Coates, Jennifer. P120.S48L dc CIP A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10.5 on 12.5 pt Ehrhardt by Graphicraft Typesetting, Hong Kong Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd The publisher's policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website:

4 Contents Notes on Contributors Editor's Note Acknowledgements Transcription Conventions 1 Transcription Conventions 2 ix xv xvi xviii xx Introduction 1 Part I Gender Differences in Pronunciation and Grammar 7 Introduction 7 1 Yanyuwa: 'Men speak one way, women speak another' 13 John Bradley 2 Sex and Covert Prestige 21 Peter Trudgill 3 Linguistic Variation and Social Function 29 Jenny Cheshire 4 Girl-talk/Boy-talk: Sex Differences in Adolescent Speech 42 Edina Eisikovits 5 Black Women in the Rural South: Conservative and Innovative 55 Patricia C. Nichols 6 Gender and Sociolinguistic Variation 64 Penelope Eckert

5 vi Contents Part II Gender Differences in Conversational Practice 7" Introduction 77 7 How and Why Are Women More Polite: Some Evidence from a Mayan Community 81 Penelope Brown 8 Complimenting - A Positive Politeness Strategy 100 Janet Holmes 9 Cooperation and Competition Across Girls' Play Activities 121 Marjorie Harness Goodwin 10 Peasant Men Can't Get Wives: Language Change and Sex Roles in a Bilingual Community 147 Susan Gal Part III Conversational Dominance in Mixed Talk 161 Introduction Women's Place in Everyday Talk: Reflections on Parent-Child Interaction 165 Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman 12 The Sounds of Silence: How Men Silence Women in Marital Relations 176 Victoria Leto DeFrancisco 13 Talk Control: An Illustration from the Classroom of Problems in Analysing Male Dominance of Conversation 185 Joan Swann 14 Participation in Electronic Discourse in a 'Feminist' Field 197 Susan C. Herring, Deborah A. Johnson and Tamra DiBenedetto Part IV Same-Sex Talk 211 Introduction The Talk of Women Friends 215 Fern L. Johnson and Elizabeth J. Aries 16 Gossip Revisited: Language in All-Female Groups 226 Jennifer Coates 17 'Don't try and make out that Tm nice!' The Different Strategies Women and Men Use when Gossiping 254 Jane Pilkmgton

6 Contents vii 18 Performing Gender Identity: Young Men's Talk and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity Deborah Cameron 19 Sporting Formulae in New Zealand English: Two Models of Male Solidarity Koenraad Kuiper Part V Women's Talk in the Public Domain 295 Introduction Female Speakers of Japanese in Transition 299 Katsue Akiba Reynolds 21 T don't smile much anymore': Affect, Gender and the Discourse of Pittsburgh Police Officers 309 Bonnie S. McElhinny 22 'Not just doctors' orders': Directive-Response Sequences in Patients' Visits to Women and Men Physicians 328 Candace West 23 Women's Ways: Interactive Patterns in Predominantly Female Research Teams 354 Marie Wilson Nelson Part VI Theoretical Debates (1): Gender or Power? 373 Introduction 'Women's Language' or 'Powerless Language'? 377 William M. O'Barr and Bowman K. Atkins 25 Are 'Powerless' Communication Strategies the Japanese Norm? 388 Patricia J. Wetzel 26 When the Doctor is a 'Lady': Power, Status and Gender in Physician-Patient Encounters 396 Candace West Part VII Theoretical Debates (2): Difference or Dominance? 413 Introduction A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication 417 Daniel N. Maltz and Ruth A. Borker 28 Talk in the Intimate Relationship: His and Hers 435 Deborah Tannen

7 viii Contents 29 Selling the Apolitical 446 Senta Troemel-Ploetz Part VIII Looking to the Future 459 Introduction Women's Talk: The Question of Sociolinguistic Universals 461 Janet Holmes 31 Communities of Practice: Where Language, Gender, and Power All Live 484 Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet 32 The Question of Questions: Beyond Binary Thinking 495 Janet M. Bing and Victoria L. Bergvall Index 511 Sources 515

8 C o n t r i b u t o r s Elizabeth Aries is Professor of Psychology at Amherst College, Massachusetts, USA. Her research and writing have centred on gender and communication and she has published widely on the topic. Recent publications include Men and Women in Interaction: Reconsidering the Differences (Oxford, 1996). Bowman Kim Atkins is Associate Executive Director and Director for HIV programs at the Community Family Planning Council of New York City. He worked with William O'Barr at Duke University on the language and law project in the 1970s, and subsequently carried out field work in Northern Thailand for his own social anthropological research project. His current work includes publishing and presenting research on issues of HIV prevention and treatment for women. Victoria Bergvall is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Michigan Technological University, USA. Her present research interests include the coherence of gender as a linguistic variable and the politics of linguistic practice. Besides coediting Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice (1996), she has published recently in Discourse & Society and Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Janet Bing is a professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, USA. She is author of Aspects of English Prosody (1985), Grammar Guide (1989) and coeditor of Rethinking Language and Gender Research (1996) and of a number of articles in phonology and language and gender. Ruth Borker, at the time of her death in 1989, was the Coordinator of Women's Studies at Randolph-Macon Woman's College, USA. In the previous fifteen years she had taught anthropology and women's studies at a number of different institutions including Cornell University, UC Berkeley, San Francisco State, Lewis and Clark College, Santa Clara University and Pitzer College. Her major research concerned gender, language, and Evangelical Christianity in Scotland and California.

9 xii Notes on Contributors Worcester, Massachusetts (USA), where she served as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs from 1988 to She studies the discourses of gender and race in cultural context, and has published numerous articles and book chapters on these topics. Koenraad Kuiper is currently Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He is author of two recent books: Smooth Talkers (Erlbaum, 1996) and, with W. Scott Allan, An Introduction to English Language: Sound, Word and Sentence (Macmillan, 1996). Daniel Maltz is an independent scholar living in Lynchburg, Virginia. Trained as an anthropologist at Cornell University and the University of California at Berkeley, his research interests include gender, religious language, and community identity. He is presently involved in an ethnographic reconstruction of the world of his own childhood in the 1950s suburbs of Washington, DC. Sally McConnell-Ginet is Professor of Linguistics at Cornell University, where she has also been very active in Women's Studies. Although her training and many of her publications are in formal semantics, she began work on language and gender in the early 1970s and has a number of publications in this area. Much of her recent work on language and gender has been carried out in collaboration with Penelope Eckert, her co-author in this volume. Bonnie McElhinny is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on language, gender, and political economy. She has published widely and is currently completing a linguistic ethnography, tentatively entitled Policing Gender, based on her fieldwork with the Pittsburgh police department. Marie Wilson Nelson was formerly Director of the Composition Tutorial Center, based in the English Department of George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA. Patricia Nichols is Professor of Linguistics and Language Development at San Jose State University in California, where she teaches classes in sociolinguistics, English grammar, and teacher education. Her research focuses on language contact between African, European, and Amerindian languages in early South Carolina and between Spanish and English in contemporary California. William M. O'Barr holds joint appointments at Duke University in the departments of Cultural Anthropology, Sociology and Enghsh, and is Adjunct Professor of Legal Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In recent work he has collaborated with John M. Conley on a series of studies involving language in the courtroom, small claims and pension funds and institutional investment. Recent books (with Conley) include Roles versus Relationships: The Ethnography of Legal Discourse (1990) and Fortune and Folly - The Wealth and Power of

10 Notes on Contributors xiii Institutional Investing (1992). He is currently working on a new book, Discourse and Dominance: Studies in Law, Language and Power. Jane Pilkington studied linguistics at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, where she became interested in language and gender issues. She recently completed her MA, which looks at gender and gossip in more depth, and is now working as an editor with a legal publishing firm. Katsue Akiba Reynolds is Professor in Japanese and Sociolinguistics in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, and Professor in Comparative Language and Culture at Josai International University, Japan. She has translated major works by Robin Lakoff and Dale Spender into Japanese. Besides publishing articles on Japanese women's language, she edited Onna to Nihonngo ('Women and Japanese') in Joan Swann is a senior lecturer in the School of Education at the Open University, where her work includes the preparation of multimedia teaching materials on sociolinguistics and education. Her teaching and research reflect a long interest in language and gender. Books in this area include Gender Voices (1989, Blackwell, with David Graddol) and Girls, Boys and Language (1992, Blackwell). Deborah Tannen is University Professor and Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her fifteen books include Talking from 9 to 5 (1996) and You Just Don 7 Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (1990). Best known for her writing on communication between women and men, her research interests have included spoken and written language, cross-cultural communication, modern Greek discourse, and the relationship between conversational and literary discourse. Senta Troemel-Ploetz is an independent scholar living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She was a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz , and has held guest professorships in Europe and the USA. Her chief research interests are psychotherapeutic discourse and language and gender. Recent publications include Vatersprache - Mutter land: Beobachtungen zu Sprache und Politik (1992) and Frauengesprache: Sprache der Verstandigung (1996). Peter Trudgill is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Lausanne. Before moving to Switzerland, he taught at the Universities of Reading and Essex. His publications include Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society (Penguin, 1983), Dialects in Contact (Blackwell, 1986) and Dialects of England (Blackwell, 1990). Candace West is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her recent articles focus on talk as part of the interactional scaffolding of social structure: 'Goffman in feminist perspective' (Sociological Perspectives, 1996),