Robin Lakoff believes
that women use many techniques in their speech that are deficient to men's
speech. These include, fillers, hedges, intensifiers, hypercorrect grammar and
tag questions.
Although I do agree
that women use these techniques I feel that they're not necessarily making
women deficient to men.
Take intensifiers for
example, if someone says 'This bread is very tasty' and another says 'This
bread is tasty', does one person sound weaker than the other? I'd say no. One
person is going in to more detail about the bread and although the sentences
are nearly the same, the sentence that uses 'very' is more interesting and
shows more feelings towards the taste.
I believe tag
questions are another thing that isn’t necessarily deficient in the way a
female speaks also, I think tag questions are used to involve the other person
into the conversation that they are having, and I believe they are used to be
polite.
Zimmerman & West's
dominance theory is similar to Robin Lakoff's deficit theory but focus' on the
way men speak instead of women. They say men dominate a conversation by using
more interruptions, this, according to Zimmerman & West, is a sign of
dominance over women. I’d say though, that this is a sign of rudeness, and
makes them deficient in something such as a job interview as a conversation is
supposed to bounce back and forward and if it doesn’t people feel
uncomfortable.
Deborah Tannen’s
difference theory is the theory I most agree with. Men and women are certainly
different in their speech but I think dependant on the situation either can be
more dominant or deficient.
Deborah Tannen also
says that women talk more about feelings and men more facts, I definitely agree
with this due to noticing this in real life, I don’t know whether I’d believe this was due
to nature or nurture though.
Another reason I
believe Deborah Tannen’s theory the most is due to the study she took, it was a
lot more recent and a lot more people took part so the study was definitely
more reliable than Zimmerman & West and Robin Lakoff’s studies which took
part in 1975.
