WOMEN ARE MORE POLITE THAN MEN: MYTH OR

REALITY?

Filološko-umetnički fakultet, Kragujevac

Seminarski rad iz predmeta Interkulturalna komunikacija.

Mentor:

prof. dr Jovana Dimitrijević-Savić

Studenti:

Cvetković David 070211

Traživuk Nikola 070199

APSTRAKT

Uvod: U ovom eseju bavićemo se temom koja je često loše shvaćena

i posmatrana kroz maglu stereotipova, tema o kojoj pišemo je

povezanost pola i ljubaznosti ili preciznije, da li su žene

ljubaznije od muškaraca, što je danas opšte verovanje.

Metode: Ispitaćemo da li su prethodna istraživanja, koja su

povezivala muškost sa neljubaznošću a ženstvenost sa učtivošću,

bila tačna. Pokušaćemo da uporedimo podatke i zaključke nekih od

vodećih eksperata i istraživača koji su se bavili ovim pitanjem

da bi zakljućili da li je ovo opšteprihvaćeno verovanje ima

potpoore u naučnim dokazima.

Cilj: Pokušaćemo da otkrijemo da li je moguće doneti nekakav

generalni zaključak zasnovan na činjenicama.

Zaključak: Zaključili smo da je ipak nemoguće generalizovati

kada je ova tema u pitanju i da se ona jedino može ispitivati u

specifičnom kulturološkom kontekstu ( mogu se samo porediti žene

i muškarci sličnih godina, društvene klase, obrazovanja,

nacionalnosti, etničke pripadnosti, itd.), u suprotnom rezultati

su, kao što je pokazalo poređenje istraživanja, krajnje

nepouzdani i bez nekog sigurnog zaključka.

Ključne reči: pol, ljubaznost, stereotipovi, jezik, engleski...

ABSTRACT

Intro: In this essay we will deal with the subject, which is

often misunderstood and seen through the fog of stereotypical

opinions, the subject of politeness related to gender, more

accurately with a common belief that women are more polite than

men.

Method: We will question the way that previous research on

politeness has assumed a stereotypical correlation between

masculinity and impoliteness and femininity and politeness. We

will try to compare the data and conclusions of some experts and

researchers who have dealt with this question in order to

determine whether this common belief has any scientific evidence.

Goal: We will try to see is it actually possible to make any

kind of generalized conclusions about men’s and women’s behavior

based on facts.

Conclusion: We concluded that it is quite impossible to

generalize about this subject, and that it can only be observed

in a specific cultural context (one can only compare men and

women of the same age, social class, education, nationality,

ethnicity, etc.), otherwise, the results, as the comparison of

research has shown, are inconclusive and unreliable.

Key words: gender, politeness, stereotypes, language, English…

To answer the question, are women more polite than men, we

first have to determine what does the term politeness refer to.

There are many definitions of politeness, and we have decided to

concentrate on the following two:

1) Brown & Levinson’s (1987) view of politeness as a redress to

a face threat has been the most influential in politeness

research, and their model of politeness has influenced

almost all of the theoretical and analytical work in this

field. In this view, politeness is used strategically to

achieve specific interactional goals. Speakers behave in a

rational and purposeful way, and because the face of both

interlocutors is constantly at risk in the interaction, both

of them engage in face work in order to maintain each

other’s face. Speakers cannot enhance their own face

directly because face is what others see in the speaker.

Therefore, it is generally in each speaker’s interest to

maintain the faces of their interlocutors in order to

enhance their own face in the view of the others. Brown and

Levinson argue for a pragmatic analysis of politeness which

involves a concentration on the amount of verbal `work'

which individual speakers have to perform in their

utterances to counteract the force of potential threats to

the `face' of the hearer. Face is a term drawn from the

Chinese to describe the self-image which the speaker or

hearer would like to see maintained in the interaction.

Brown and Levinson state that face is something that is

emotionally invested, and that can be lost, maintained or

enhanced, and must be constantly attended to in interaction.

A threat to a person's face is termed a Face Threatening

Act, and they argue that such threats generally require a

mitigating statement or some verbal repair (politeness), or

breakdown of communication will ensue. They analyse

politeness in two broad groups: positive politeness which

anoints the face of the addressee by indicating that in some

respects, S[peaker] wants H[earer]'s wants (e.g. by treating

him/her as a member of an in-group, a friend, a person whose

wants and personality traits are known and liked), and

negative politeness which is essentially avoidance-based and

consist(s) in assurances that the speaker will not interfere

with the addressee's freedom of action. Positive politeness

is thus concerned with demonstrating closeness and

affiliation (for example, compliments) whereas negative

politeness is concerned with distance and formality (for

example, hedges and deference).

2) Sara Mills (2003) says that politeness is not a property of

utterances; it is rather a set of practices or strategies

which communities of practice develop, affirm, and contest.

Thus, politeness should be seen as a set of strategies or

verbal habits which someone sets as a norm for themselves or

which others judge as the norm for them, as well as being a

socially constructed norm within particular communities of

practice. Politeness requirements vary by situation and

there is no overall imperative to be polite to others; we

can be impolite too. An important element in the assessment

of an act as polite is judging whether an utterance is

appropriate or not, either in relation to the perceived

norms of the situation, the community of practice or the

perceived norms of the society as a whole. There is a great

deal of flexibility in these norms and the potential for

misunderstandings and misapprehension of politeness is

large. For example, a woman university lecturer may use mild

swear words and a range of informal expressions to set a

seminar group at ease and create an atmosphere of

informality and openness, (that is paying positive

politeness to the face needs of the group) but this may be

interpreted by some of the group members as impolite,

ingratiating or patronising, if they have particular views

of the language which is appropriate to staff members or to

what they consider a relatively formal setting such as the

seminar. While there may be a stereotypical, white, middle-

class (and largely female) idea of what politeness is, it is

not widely shared (although it is extremely influential in

the literature on politeness). ‘For some women, this

stereotype may be important, but for others it may be

something which they actively resist and reject’. Politeness

‘is clearly a resource which interactants use to structure

their relations with others, and they are able to be self-

reflexive about their own and others’ use of politeness and

impoliteness’.

Also, there is the distinction between negative and positive

politeness. Positive politeness is solidarity oriented and it

emphasizes shared attitudes and values. When a boss suggests that

a subordinate should use the first name to her, this is positive

politeness move, expressing solidarity and minimizing status

differences. Negative politeness pays people respect and avoids

intruding on them and it is expressed by indirect directives.

Negative politeness involves expressing oneself appropriately in

terms of social distance and respecting status differences.

Now, there are some authors who support the common belief

that women are more polite than men. Robin Lakoff, a professor at

the University of California, agrees with this in her book

“Language and Woman’s Place” (1975), explaining the language

which is used by women (with hedges, super polite forms...) as

more polite than the one used by men. She claims that women’s

language is conditioned by women’s subordinate position in our

society, and sees it as their expression of conformity set by it.

She argued that women were using language which reinforced their

subordinate status; they were “colluding in their own

subordination” by the way they spoke. Lakoff adopts the position

that men are more dominant and women lack power, and identified a

number of linguistic features which she claimed were used more

often by women than by men, and which, in her opinion, expressed

uncertainty and lack of confidence. These features are:

- Lexical hedges or filters, e.g. you know, sort of, well, you see.

- Tag questions, e.g. she’s very nice, isn’t she?

- Rising intonation on declaratives, e.g. it’s really good?

- ‘Empty’ adjectives, e.g. divine, charming, cute.

- Precise colour terms, e.g. magneta, aquamarine

- Intensifiers such as just and so, e.g. I like him so much.

- ‘Hypercorrect’ grammar, e.g. consistent use of standard verb

forms.

- ‘Superpolite’ forms, e.g. indirect requests, euphemisms.

- Avoidance of strong swear words, e.g. fudge, my goodness.

- Emphatic stress, e.g. it was a BRILLIANT performance.

She points out that one consequence is that “women’s

language” is usually discussed in relationship to “men’s

language”. “Women’s language” is the marked variety; “men’s

language” is the unmarked variety, the norm.

Lakoff’s claim was refuted by William O'Barr and Bowman

Atkins (1980) whose study looked at courtroom cases and

witnesses' speech. They studied language variation in a specific

institutional context – the American trial courtroom – and the

topic of their study were sex-related differences. Their findings

challenge Lakoff's view of women's language. In researching what

they describe as “powerless language”, they show that language

differences are based on situation-specific authority or power

and not gender. O'Barr and Atkins studied courtroom cases for 30

months, observing a broad spectrum of witnesses. They examined

the witnesses for the ten basic speech differences between men

and women that Robin Lakoff proposed. They used three men and

three women to prove their point. The first man and woman both

spoke with a high frequency of "women's language" components. The

woman was a 68-year old housewife, and the man drove an

ambulance. In comparison to woman and man #3 – a doctor and a

policeman, respectively, who both testified as expert witnesses –

they show that the first pair of witnesses experience less power

in their jobs and lives. O'Barr and Atkins found that pair #2

fell between pairs 1 and 3 in frequency of hedges and tag

questions in their speech. O'Barr and Atkins concluded from their

study that the quoted speech patterns were “neither

characteristic of all women nor limited only to women”. The women

who used the lowest frequency of “women's language” traits had an

unusually high status (according to the researchers). They were

well-educated professionals with middle class backgrounds. A

corresponding pattern was noted among the men who spoke with a

low frequency of women's language traits. O'Barr and Atkins

concluded that the differences that Lakoff supported are not

necessarily the result of being a woman, but of being powerless.

As one of the main reasons for women being more polite than

men, Deborah Tannen, states the belief that men grow up in a

world in which conversation is competitive - they seek to achieve

the upper hand or to prevent others from dominating them. For

women, however, talking is often a way to gain confirmation and

support for their ideas. Men see the world as a place where

people try to gain status and keep it. Women see the world as a

network of connections seeking support and consensus. Women often

think in terms of closeness and support, and struggle to preserve

intimacy. Men, concerned with status, tend to focus more on

independence. These traits can lead women and men to different

views of the same situation.

But Judith Baxter, a researcher, refutes this claim. She

recorded a group of 14-15 year old school pupils, who were told

to imagine a plane crash and rank some items in importance for

survival. One of the discussion groups was a male group, and the

other was a female group.

From this discussion she found that Group A holds a lot of

competition, as one of the members creates conflict almost

straight away, and continues to repeatedly challenge the others,

arguing the sunglasses are not needed. Group B interaction is

more cooperative, and conflict is avoided. Surely this would lead

us to think Group A was the boys, and group B was the girls.

However this is not the case as in fact Group A was the girls and

Group B was the boys, and in this way the research contrasts the

theory of Deborah Tannen.

In previously shown examples we dealt with a more rigid view

of the entire gender politeness phenomena. While not necessarily

disagreeing with the above type of findings, some do not support

the essentialist view behind them. Instead, and in line with

recent social constructionist research on gender (e.g. Cameron

1998; Bucholtz 1999; Mills 2002), it is acknowledged that there

are benefits to a more flexible approach to the study of gender

and linguistic politeness. Such an approach both avoids

oversimplifications resulting from viewing men and women as

dichotomous and homogenous groups and regards gender and

linguistic politeness as constructs that interact in complex ways

with factors such as culture, age, race, and specific communities

of practice .

We will describe a research that is in accordance with above

mentioned approach of putting everything in context and not

trying to generalize about such a complex matter as gender

politeness. The research was done by Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, University

of Wales, Swansea and Patricia Bou-Franch, University of Valencia (2003). We

have chosen this study because :

1. Their study of requesting behavior by British and

Spanish male and female undergraduates accounts for the role of

situational context, power relations and social distance between

interlocutors, as well as their age and public identities as

members of a specific communities of practice (university

undergraduates).

2. Their goals were to describe the whole range of

requesting patterns that arise in our data, and to point to

connections between these and particular facets of individuals’

identities, with gender being just one of these facets.

They paid considerable attention to the various strategies

that speakers deploy when performing the speech act of

requesting. This is because the degree of imposition that making

a request places upon one’s interlocutor(s) has been seen to be

subject to cross-gender and cross-linguistic/cultural variation

in terms of use and interpretation. Wanting to address this they

employed one such test as a suitable tool for obtaining a large

amount of data from male and female Spanish and British

undergraduates (aged 19-25). The data was analyzed and treated

not as authentic speech/discourse but as reflecting informants’

perceptions and beliefs about appropriate linguistic behaviour in

the performance of requests in different situations controlled

for power and social distance. Thus, theirs is a pragmatic

approach that attempts to account for these perceptions and

beliefs, which are included in the “assumptions about social

roles, positions, rights and obligations [that] are part of the

(usually unstated) background knowledge that is routinely brought

to bear on the interpretation of utterances” (Cameron 1998: 445)

In their study they examine a range of requests used by

university undergraduates from two European universities in a

variety of situational contexts. In doing so, they aimed to

capture (some of) the factors that may play a role in their being

labelled as polite or not polite.

Using the discourse completion tests ( DCT ) as their

elicitation procedure, the processed and analyzed 793 requests .

The request were made in six different situations where the

variables power and social distance were controlled. The

instructions of the DCT aimed at eliciting the first pair part of

a request in situations with which our Spanish and British

university undergraduate subjects could identify themselves

easily. The six situations were :

*P- stands for power relations and SD for social distance.

Sit 1: BOOKSHOP (+P, +SD). You want to ask the shop assistant in

a bookshop to show you where the science fiction section is.

Sit 2. PUB (+P, -SD). At the pub you usually go to, you want to

ask a barman you know very well for a coke.

Sit 3. BORROWING A PEN (=P, +SD). It’s enrolment week and you are

queuing to hand in your last set of forms. You’ve forgotten to

sign one of the forms and haven’t got a

pen with you. You want to ask a student you don’t know, who is

also queuing, to lend you a pen.

Sit 4. BORROWING NOTES (=P, -SD). You want to ask a good friend

of yours to let you borrow their notes from a class that you have

missed.

Sit 5. DAD’S CAR (-P, -SD). You want to ask your father for

permission to use his car.

Sit 6. LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION (-P,+SD). You want to ask your

English lecturer to write a letter of recommendation for your

application for a course in a British University.

Requests were analyzed mainly following Blum-

Kulkaetal’s(1989) methodology. These authors divide requests into

three main parts: alerters, head acts and supportive moves, with

the head act being the only core part.

We will not bother you with further data about their methodology

anymore as we think the data provided is sufficient for the idea

of the project, so we will go on to results of their research.

The first optional category of requests is known as the alerter.

This includes (in)formal attention getters and greetings, naming

strategies and terms of endearment. Alerters constitute the

opening move of the request sequence and, besides gaining the

hearer’s attention, they mark the transition from a state of

nontalk to a state of talk. Consequently, they may constitute the

first contact between co-participants and this makes them a rich

site for interpersonal work.

On the whole, their findings showed no significant differences

in female and male use of alerters in the two language groups

although several gender-related similarities and differences can

be highlighted in relation to particular situations.

The Peninsular Spanish corpus

Some cross-gender differences could be observed. One of

these was that men (36%) were found to make more requests with no

alerters than women (29.66%). This greater lack of opening

elements in the male data or, put it differently, the fact that

women used more alerters, can be interpreted in line with

previous psychological research which shows that men are

generally more direct and more concerned with autonomy and

seeking independence than women. Women, for their part, have been

seen to be more concerned with making connections and seeking

involvement (Holmes 1995: 7), and this may well explain why in

British corpus they made more use of these interpersonally loaded

devices.

A further gender difference in the Spanish corpus was

found in relation to the second favorite type of alerter, i.e.,

formal attention getters. Overall, men used these formal

attention getters more frequently than women. However, gender

differences became evident vis-à-vis the type of formal attention

getter favoured in individual situations. As an example, in Sit.

1 (+P +SD) nearly 50 % of the attention getters used by men were

of the apologizing type(disculpe,perdone), whilst women only used

apologizing formulas in 10% of the total number of formal

attention getters. Their preferred formal attention getter was

the deference showing formula por favor.

Also, in choosing positively polite attention getters, the data

again showed a gender difference with regard to the selection of

type of alerter. Informal attention getters, such as eh, oye and

nicknames, were present in the male corpus but were absent in the

female corpus. Female subjects favoured the use of first names,

endearment terms and informal greetings.

In conclusion, a global assessment of the use of alerters in

the Peninsular Spanish corpus revealed that, irrespective of

gender, participants frequently used involvement strategies,

possibly confirming that Spanish is a positively politeness-

oriented culture. Different types of alerters were preferred by

male and female speakers depending on the specific situation but,

in general, women used just a bit more alerters and more alerters

of the informal type than men did.

The British English corpus

Overall gender similarities outweighed differences in the

use of alerters for the British English corpus. As in the

Peninsular Spanish corpus, however, men and women differed with

regard to choice of attention getter for certain situations.

Specifically, in Sits 1, 3 and 6, where there was social distance

between speaker and hearer, women used formal attention getters,

such as excuse me, three times as often as they used informal

ones like hi and hello. Men, for their part, exhibited a more even

distribution pattern, with formal attention getters accounting

for 60 % and informal ones for 40% of the total. There was a

difference in use of endearment terms, especially in P+

situations as Sit 1 and 2.

Some previous research in Anglo cultures (Holmes 1995) say

that men use more endearment terms then women do in mixed-sex

interactions, and irrespective of whether or not there is social

distance between the interlocutors In those cases where there is

social distance, this aspect of men’s behavior has been

interpreted as an example of their tendency to assert power over,

even patronize , women. Although the results of British corpus

certainly showed that men used more endearment terms than women,

particularly in Sit. 2, they interpret this behavior as neither

power-asserting nor patronizing . This was because in Sit. 2, not

only were the interlocutors well-known to one another (-SD) but

the context of interaction was relaxed and notably informal (a

pub). So they therefore argue that the use of terms of endearment

here was a positive politeness strategy. A term of endearment like ‘mate’,

or ‘sweetie’, shifts the focus of the request away from its

imposition on the hearer’s negative face (asking someone to do

something for you), and towards the friendly relation existing

between interlocutors. Given the relatively low frequency of

terms of endearment in the female corpus for this situation, were

the women in British English corpus insensitive to their

interlocutors’ positive face needs? Were this to be the case, it

would contradict mainstream research for Anglo cultures that has

found women to be more sensitive than men to the face needs of

their interlocutors. In order to understand better this

apparently contradictory finding in British English corpus, they

examined in detail how each of the terms of endearment was

embedded in its respective request and considered also those

requests in which no term of endearment had been used. In doing

so, we noticed that women’s requests used more frequently the

politeness marker please (80.5%) than men’s (60%). In fact, the

use of terms of endearment was one of a series of other ‘less

conventionally polite’, or more informal, devices for which men

in this situation opted, instead of the conventionally polite

formula please.

In sum, the results of the British corpus showed that men and

women used a similar number of alerters in their requests across

the six situations but that there were differences with regard to

the type of alerters being used in particular in +P, +SD

situations.

The research also looked into Request strategies undergraduates

used when requesting something, regarding to their directness .

Taking all six situations together, both men and women in

Peninsular Spanish and British English corpora used mainly direct

strategies in their requests, thus indicating that cultural

behaviour may be a stronger factor than gender in this particular

aspect of the formulation of requests. We will end the

description of this research with the quotation of their

conclusion:

“ Informants’ perceptions in the six situations of our DCT did not corroborate

Holmes’ (1992) conclusions to the effect that female interactional style is always

cooperative and facilitative whereas male style is always more competitive and verbally

aggressive. We therefore agree with Mills (2002) in questioning “the way that previous

research on politeness has assumed a stereotypical correlation between masculinity

and impoliteness and femininity and politeness”. In our data, (i) both gender groups

were oriented towards politeness; and (ii) both gender groups showed similarities and

differences in their perceptions regarding the expression of solidarity and deference.

Consequently, although politeness devices were sometimes qualitatively and

quantitatively different in our data, men and women in our study were politeness-

oriented. “

A thorough review of the literature by James and Drakich

(1993) showed inconsistency in the findings when fifty-six

studies of talk either within or between genders were examined.

So, we want to say that it is very difficult, if not impossible,

to make any generalizations about politeness in relation to

gender. Everything depends on the context and the structure of

the social interaction within which gender differences are

observed.

Bibliogrfija:

Brown, P.; Levinson, S. (1987) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, London: Cambridge University Press.

Dury, Gotti, Dossena (2006) English Historical Linguistics 2006, volume II, Lexical and Semantic Change, Philadelphia: John Benjamin’s Publishing Company.

James, D. & Drakich, J. (1993) Understanding Gender Differences

in Amount of Talks: a critical review of research in Tannen. D.,

(1993) Gender and conversational interaction, (pp.281-312), New York:

Oxford University Press.

Lakoff, R. (1975) Language and Woman’s Place, London: Cambridge University Press

Lorenzo-Dus, N.; Bou-Franch, P. (2003) GENDER AND POLITENESS: Spanish and British Undergraduates’ Perceptions of Appropriate Requests, Valencia: Universitat de València.

Mills, S., (2003) Gender and Politeness, London: Cambridge

University Press

O’Barr, W.; Atkins, B., (1980) Women's Language' or 'Powerless Language, Oxford University Press.

Tannen, D., (1990) You Just Don't Understand, New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Wardhaugh, R., (2006) An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.