Dominance theory

The Dominance Gender Theory is that the male in the conversation is more likely to have control of what is being said as it is thought that the males use the English language and it is theirs as women’s language is just a route of this due to their position in society politically, therefore the man would have more power in the unbalanced discussion. This could be by interrupting more when interacting with females, using more imperative sentences than the women who is likely to be more pragmatic and also the women using more hedges such as ‘kind of,’ ‘a little,’ as well as tag questions.

Zimmerman and West analysed mix sex conversations and found that in 11 different conversations men interrupted 46 times in contrast to women only interrupting twice. However, the small sample of 11 conversations shows that there could have been one very dominant male character who interrupted much more than any other person that they analysed.

Geoffrey Beattie however argues that interruptions do not always just show dominance but can be for different reasons such as a disagreement, more information to give forward, or simply being interested in the subject being spoken of. Beattie also recorded mix sex conversations, totalling to 10 hours’ worth of discussion, a lot more than Zimmerman and West used, and found that men interrupted only slightly more by 0.3 than women.

 Robin Lakoff’s theory is that the men generally used more hypercorrect grammar and were to be funnier than women and that women hedged more, used tag questions, apologised, paraphrased and used more intensifiers.

 Techniques associated with these ways of speaking:

For men:

·         More interruptions

·         More imperative sentences

·         More paraphrasing

·         Less likely to hedge

·         Less likely to tag questions

For women:

·         More likely to hedge

·         More likely to tag questions

·         More intensifiers

·         More likely to use pragmatic understanding

·         Less likely to interrupt

·         Less imperative sentences

 Examples of these techniques in spoken texts:

A is a male

B is a female

A: How would’ja like to go to a movie later on tonight?

B: Huh?=

A: A movie y’know like a like (.) a flick?

B: Yeah I uh know what a movie is (8) it’s just that=

A: You don’t know me well enough?

The male uses direct questions to the point that he can become quite challenging in his last question, already guessing what she is about to say it becomes quite rude as he is rejected.

How these techniques can be applied to real written texts:

In this advert they use the intensifier ‘a little’ which is suggested by Robin Lakoff to be used by women throughout their speech much more commonly than men. 

Bibliography

http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/lang/gender.htm#dominance

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1107296

Transcript: http://www.stanford.edu/~eckert/PDF/zimmermanwest1975.pdf

Women’s advert: http://www.morallymarketed.com/case-studies/bobbi-brown-marketing-true-beauty/