GENDER, POLITENESS AND STEREOTYPES

In this paper we will analyze the style of language and how language is used or the attitudes of women and men. Is the language of women and men differently? Whether women are more polite than men? Are there differences in how men and women interact?

A. WOMEN’S LANGUAGE AND CONFIDENCE

women in the community are aware that their lower status than men, so they use more standard forms of language than men. It has to do with the way men treat women as gap-owned. The gap between men and women in terms of physical looks, sounds, and sociocultural factors in the recalled (eg politeness).

Men dominate the talking time. In conversations involving members of both sexes, men speak more than women do. When men talked to men, the content categories of such talk focused on competition and teasing, sport, aggression and doing things. In the other hand, when women talked to women, the equivalent categories were the self, feelings, affiliation with others, home and family. When the two sexes interacted, men tended to take the initiative in conversation, but there seem to be a desire to achieve some kind of accommodation so far as topics were concerned: the men spoke less of aggression and competition and the women reduced their amount of talk about home and family. Men tend to explain things to women and in doing so to patronize them, whereas women tend to apologize to men.

Usually women are more confidence than man when they explore their expression with their language and body language. More over the women’s' language it's more standard than men. that was sound great but when the women answers some question they also give the reason different with a man they just gave a simple answer without any kind of reason.

B. FEATURES OF WOMAN LANGUAGE

In sociolinguistics, language and gender have a very close relationship. They are: lexical hedges or fillers, tag questions, rising intonation on declaratives, empty adjectives, precise colour terms, intensifiers, hypercorrect grammar, superpolite forms, avoidance of strong swear words and the last is emphatic stress.

Traditionally, both men and woman will speak the same language in the same society. However, there must be some differences between the language of men and women. There are ten different kinds of feature of “women’s language”, and there are some reasons for these features.

Women like to use lexical hedges and fillers. Lexical hedges are used to weaken the strength of an assertion, for example “it’s sort of a beautiful dress!”. Fillers refer to some meaningless words that women always use, such as “you see , this is how it going’.Women also like to use tag questions, for example “he is very handsome, isn’t it?”Women like to use rising question intonation on declaratives, such as “he’s really nice?” Women like to use empty adjectives, examples are ‘charming, lovely, sweet’ etc.Women like to use precise color terms, they may talk about colors like aquamarine magenta etc.Women like to use intensifiers, such as ‘He treat me so sweet’. Women like to use ‘Hypercorrect Grammar’; they will talk like “between you and me”. Women like to use superpolite forms, such as “would you please…?”Women will avoid the use of strong swear words, e.g. fudge, my goodness. Women like to use emphatic stress to strengthen the strength of an assertion, e.g. “He’s a really handsome!”

women use hedging devices to express uncertainty, and they use boosting and intensifying devices to persuade their addressee to take them seriously and to make the others pay more attention to them. Therefore, the use of hedges and boosters reflect women are lack of confidence.

C. INTERRACTION

There are many features of interaction which differentiate the talk of women and men: interruption behavior and conversational feedback.

1. Interruptions

In the same sex-interactions, interruptions were pretty evenly distributed between speakers. In cross-sex interactions almost all the interruptions were from male. It has been found that men interrupt others more than women do. Men interrupt more, challenge, dispute, and ignore more, try to control what topics are discussed, and are inclined to make categorical statements. Women are evidently socialized from early childhood to expect to be interrupted. Consequently, they generally give up the floor with little or no protest.

2. Feedback

Another aspect of the picture of women as cooperative conversationalists is the evidence that women provide more encouraging feedback to their conversational partner than men do. In cross-sex conversation, women ask more question than men, encourage others to speak, use more signal like mhmm to encourage other to continue speaking, use more instant of you and we, and do not protest as much as men when they are interrupted. The mhmm a woman uses quite frequently means only “I’m listening”, whereas the mhmm a man uses, but much less frequently, tends to mean “I’m agreeing”.

Explanation

In a interesting range of this research, it is quite clearly gender rather than occupational status, social class, or some other social factor, which most adequately accounts for the interactional patterns described. Women doctors were consistently interrupted by their patient, while male doctors most of the interrupting in their consultations. A study of women in business organizations showed that women bosses did not dominate the interactions. Male dominated regardless of whether they were boss or subordinate. The societally subordinate position of women reflected in this patterns has more to do whit gender that role or occupation. For this data at least, women’s subordinate position in male-dominated society seems the most obvious explanatory factor.

Women’s cooperative conversational strategies, however, may be explained better by looking at the influence of context and patterns of socialization. The norms for women’s talk may be the norms for small group interaction in private context, where the goals of the interaction are solidarity stressing-maintaining good social relations. Agreement is sought and disagreement avoided. By contrast, the norms for male interaction seem to be those of public referentially oriented interaction. The public model is more likely than agreement and confirmation of the statement of others. Speakers compete for the floor and for attention, and wittiness, even at other’ expense is highly valued. These patterns seem to characterize men’s talk even in private contexts, as will be illustrated bellow.

The differences between women and men in ways of interacting may be the result of different socialization and acculturation patterns. If we learn ways of talking mainly in single sex peer groups, then the patterns we learn likely to be sex-specific. And the kids of miscommunication which undoubtedly occurs between women and men may well attributable to the different expectations each sex has of the function of the interaction, and the ways it is appropriately conducted. Some of these differences will be illustrated in the next section.