Pamela Fishman conducted an experiment that involved
listening to fifty-two hours of pre-recorded conversations between a series of
young American couples.
Five out of the six subjects were attending graduate school;
all subjects were either feminists or sympathetic to the women’s movement. They
were white, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five.
Fishman listened to recordings and concentrated on two
characteristics common in women’s dialect, including tag questions for example
”you know?”. Fishman begins by examining the use of tag questions being asked
and states that women frequently use tag questions following a thought or
suggestion. She believed that for women, questions are an effective method of
beginning and maintaining conversations with men.
Fishman argues that women use questions to gain
conversational power rather than from lack of conversational awareness. She
claims that questioning is required for females when speaking with males; men
often do not respond to a declarative statement or will only respond minimally.
Fishman also analyses the frequent use of the noun phrase
”you know” used by women. ”You know” is an attention-getting device to discover
if their partner is listening. When ”you
know” is combined with a pause, she realised that the woman is inviting the
listener to respond.
When little or no response is heard from the male, the pause
is internalised by the speaker and she will continue into the conversation.
With her study, she found that women in her study used four times as many
yes/no and tag questions as the men.
But she was adamant that this was not because women were
more uncertain and tentative as Lakoff suggested but because women are the ones
generally trying to keep the conversation going.
Pamela Fishman concludes
that women are represented as having more power in a conversation as they tend
to have more use of tag questions and conversational shitwork, which allows
women to maintain control. Additionally, she argues that women’s style of
communicating is not from lack of social training, but to the inferior social
position of women.
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