Good Article Review About Reading Questions Over 1982 Maltz And Borker “A Cultural Approach To Male-Female Miscommunication”

1. Maltz and Broker explain the distinctions in interactional style of men and women focusing not on the differences in the social power or in the personalities of men and women, but on cultural distinctions between them in conceptions of friendly interaction, rules of regarding it and in interpretation and perception of a notion of conversation. These differences come from the experience in different kinds of conversations and interactions since our childhood that help us to learn and form some set of rules appropriate for various contexts.
2. The research of Gumperz was brought up because the work of Harding do not answer the question of what happens if and when men and women, possessing different subcultural rules for speaking, try to interact with each other? Gumperz states that miscommunication occurs when speakers of different speech cultures interact and it is a result of distinctions of conversational inference, speakers’ intentions and the cues of signaling speech acts. Lakoff’s approach was directed to sex roles and their influence on interaction between men and women.
3. Girls learn trough communication how to create and maintain relationships of closeness and equality, to criticize others in acceptable ways, and to interpret accurately the speech of other girls. Boys in their place use speech in order to claim their position of dominance, to attract and maintain an audience, and to assert themselves when others speak.
4. Study of women's rap groups by KalCik's, Hirschman's study of students and the research work on black women made by Abrahams's; men among urban blacks (Abrahams; Hannerz), rural Newfoundlanders (Bauman; Faris), and urban blue-collar whites (LeMasters; Philipsen) were looked at to establish these differences.

Women, Men and Standard English.

1. Standard English is a concept that refers to any form of the English language, including grammar, vocabulary and spelling adopted as a national standard in English-speaking countries.
2. Male and female groups as a rule the whole their life are engaged in different types of activities. That is why their behavior and speech are different in some sort of situations and conversations are different. Women due to their upbringing are tend to act and sound more prestige.
3. Usually, men through their interaction with people try to assert their power and dominance, so they use language as a tool. In order to stand their ground, to give commands they use for example vulgarisms, tell anecdotes and jokes, more than women.

Parts 1 and 2

1) The linguistic variables are rhoticity and nonrhoticity. That is a pronunciation of a sound [r] and its dropping (in a New York accent), particularly in a phrase ‘fourth floor’. William Labov wondered whether this phenomenon together with ‘prestige borrowing’ might be evidenced in language of people from different social classes.
2) The observer effect is a principle used in physics that states that the act of observing an object necessarily changes it. Labov, instead of interviewing people, decided to do it as a “rapid and anonymous” interaction. He was asking questions in the stores in order to hear a particular answer.
3) This term was introduced by a sociologist C. Wright Mills in his book White Collar. It is based on the researches made among the American middle classes, who, according to the author, are tend to borrow prestige (statues) while communicating with the people of a higher class or statues. This tendency was considered by the author so strong, so he believed it can be applied to all social contacts and features of the work-place.
4) The term ‘linguistic insecurity’ was motivated by the back and forth movement between dropping an R and not dropping an R depending on the situation.
5) Rhoticity is a classic example of “change from above”. It is a change, the speakers are aware of, it is above the level of their consciousness.
6) ‘Overt prestige’ is an optional pronouncing of the letter R, when speaker tries to speak more carefully. ‘Covert prestige’ is the slight alteration of the way one speaks in order to identify himself as authentically part of a local community. Some New Yorkers usually drop their R’s with the purpose to convey how authentic and kind of local of a New Yorker they are.

Schilling-Estes “American English dialect variation and gender”

Labov (1990) articulates three supposedly general observations about the relationship
between gender and language variation and change as the following principles: 1) For stable sociolinguistic variables, men use a higher frequency of nonstandard forms than women. 1a) In change from above, women favor the incoming prestige forms more than men. 2) In change from below, women are most often the innovators.
Gender paradox: “Women conform more closely than men to sociolinguistic norms that are overtly prescribed [i.e., to standard forms, whether stable or incoming], but conform less than men when they are not [i.e., in the case of innovative forms that have not yet been socially evaluated by wider society].” (Labov 2001)
2. It is hard to follow women’s linguistic behavior, as female language is different in different social classes, with female-male differences in usage levels for prestige variants being greatest in social class groups located in the middle of the hierarchy than at either end. In addition, female-male distinctions are quite different in various speech styles.
3. Eckert found that gender effects could be quite different in the different social groups. In addition, she found different effects for different linguistic features, most of which were vocalic features involved in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. The girls in the burnout group showed higher usage levels than burnout boys, while jock girls showed lower usage levels than jock boys.

Tannen “The relativity of linguistic strategies”

1. Indirectness – A daughter wants to go to a party and her mother says: “Do whatever you want!” the mother applies that she doesn’t want her daughter to go there.
Interruption – “Lucy told me that she saw a great pair of purple shoes on the discount and I thought, maybe we can afford.” “GOAL! GOOOAL! Finally!!! Have you seen it?! Marvelous!!!”

Amount of talk (silence vs. volubility) – “Honey, are you mad at me?”

Silence.
“Darling, I acted like a real jerk, I am really sorry.”
Silence.
“Sweetie, let’s go and buy you that dress you wanted, as a display of my love and apology.”
“OK, I will be ready in a minute!!!”
Verbal aggression – “You are unbearable!”
“I will rip your head off if you won’t shut up in this very minute!”
3. It means that a linguistic strategy can bear two meanings at the same time – the meaning of solidarity and the meaning of power.