Communicating Gender in Context Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS)
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Communicating Gender in Context Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS) Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within language sciences. Editor Andreas H. Jucker University of Zurich, English Department Plattenstrasse 47, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] Associate Editors Jacob L. Mey Herman Parret Jef Verschueren University of Southern Belgian National Science Belgian National Science Denmark Foundation, Universities of Foundation, Louvain and Antwerp University of Antwerp Editorial Board Shoshana Blum-Kulka Susan C. Herring Emanuel A. Schegloff Hebrew University of Indiana University University of California at Los Jerusalem Masako K. Hiraga Angeles Jean Caron St.Paul’s (Rikkyo) University Deborah Schiffrin Université de Poitiers David Holdcroft Georgetown University Robyn Carston University of Leeds Paul Osamu Takahara University College London Sachiko Ide Kobe City University of Bruce Fraser Japan Women’s University Foreign Studies Boston University Catherine Kerbrat- Sandra A. Thompson Thorstein Fretheim Orecchioni University of California at Santa Barbara University of Trondheim University of Lyon 2 John C. Heritage Claudia de Lemos Teun A. van Dijk Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona University of California at Los University of Campinas, Brazil Angeles Marina Sbisà Richard J. Watts University of Berne University of Trieste Volume 42 Communicating Gender in Context Edited by Helga Kotthoff and Ruth Wodak Communicating Gender in Context Edited by Helga Kotthoff University of Konstanz Ruth Wodak University of Vienna John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 8 American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Communicating Gender in Context / edited by Helga Kotthoff and Ruth Wodak. p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 42) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Communication--Sex differences. 2. Grammar, Comparative and general-- Gender. 3. Discourse analysis--Social aspects. I. Kotthoff, Helga. II. Wodak, Ruth, 1950–. III. Series. P96.S48C57 1997 306.44--dc21 97-6143 isbn 978 90 272 5055 3 (Eur.) / 978 1 55619 804 5 (US) (Hb; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8974 2 (eb) © 1997 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa PREFACE v Contents Preface vii Helga Kotthoff and Ruth Wodak I. SYMBOLS AND RULES 1 Making men out of people. The MAN principle in translating 3 genderless forms Friederike Braun “Male person” vs. “Everything that is not a male person”. Gender and sex in Polish 31 Bärbel Miemitz Gender, grammar, and the space in between 51 Suzanne Romaine II. CONVERSATIONAL FEATURES, CODES AND ACTIVITIES 77 The interplay between interruptions and preference organization in con- versation. New perspectives on a classic topic of gender research 79 Ulrike Ahrens Is Spain different? Observations on male-female communicative styles in a Spanish group discussion 107 Christine Bierbach The interactional achievement of expert status. Creating asymmetries by “Teaching Conversational Lectures” in TV discussions 139 Helga Kotthoff Complaint stories. Constructing emotional reciprocity among women 179 Susanne Günthner Women and men in the academic discourse community 219 Britt-Louise Gunnarsson vi CONTENTS Communicating gender in two languages 249 Jenny Cheshire and Penelope Gardner-Chloros III. A RANGE OF FEMININITIES 283 Competing discourses of femininity 285 Jennifer Coates Race, gender and academic leadership 315 Philomena Essed “I know, we won’t revolutionize the world with it, but..”: Styles of female leadership in institutions 335 Ruth Wodak Do’s and don’ts. Gender representations in a political debate 371 Brigitte Felderer The relevance of fundamental frequency contour for interruptions: A case study of political discussion in Austria 401 Sylvia Moosmüller Index 423 PREFACE vii Preface Helga Kotthoff and Ruth Wodak 1. Gender in context Although the amount of feminist literature has greatly expanded, as well in the fields of linguistics and discourse analysis (cf. Penfield 1987; Schoenthal 1992; Tannen 1993, 1994, Peyer/Groth 1996, etc.), the European debate about grammar, communication, and gender is hardly known in the English- speaking world.1 Gender is much more central, for example, in Germanic, Romance, and Slav ic languages, forming an essential part of the lexical, syntactic, and morphologi cal structure. “It is nearly impossible to engage in conversa- tion in Polish with out constantly referring to one’s own sex and that of the interlo cutor by means of special grammatical morphemes. The same holds true when a third party be comes the subject of discussion: information about the person’s sex is repeatedly provided by means of grammatical structures,” writes Miemitz in this book. Non-sexist language reforms are very complex in such cases. One aim of this book is to direct attention to gender complex- ities which up to now have seldom been dealt with. The general purpose of all the articles presented here is to contextualize statements about gender and arrangements between the sexes within a cultural, situational, or institutional framework. The articles in Communicating Gender in Context examine sociolinguis- tic, grammatical and communicative gender patterns. Linguistic processes are analyzed in which gender is used as a relevant category in text and context. All scholars presented here share a view of language which sees it in connec- tion to society. The discourse analysts contributing to this volume de scribe style diffe rences within the framework of interaction analysis, but ex plain viii HELGA KOTTHOFF AND RUTH WODAK the power of ways of speaking within a broader political framework, in the sense of Bourdieu (1979). They demonstrate subtle contextual differences in the speech behavior of men and women which often, but not always, produce situational rankings of the sexes. They show that the category of gender plays an important role in conversation, but do not underestimate the fact that speech behavior is not always the same in every context. The articles do not assume that certain communicative style or code features consistently characte rize one sex or the other; instead they maintain that, in certain contexts, linguistic style features are used to express social relations which also characterize gender relations (see the discussion on the categories of “sex” and “gender” in Dietzen 1992, Eckert 1989, Labov 1992, Chambers 1993). Today, complex approaches to the communication of gender are advo- cated, starting from an interrelationship of diverse factors which exert influ- ence on conversation: asymmetrical societal power relationships between the sexes, a gender-oriented division of labor, differential socialization and the subcul tural interaction strategies which develop in its course, ideal images of femin inity and masculinity transmitted by the mass media, traditional gender ideo logies and a self communicatively positioning her/himself in this context, continuously interacting with the environment (Bilden 1991, Kotthoff 1996). Furthermore, assertive, self-confident communicative behavior on the part of women is no guarantee that they will thereby obtain the same opportunities as men. In fact, the production of symmetry/asym metry occurs on various levels, which do not necessarily always coincide. There is, for example, an extensive literature showing that boys and girls learn diffe rent verbal and nonverbal behavior forms in their mainly same- sex child ren’s and youth groups and at school (summarized among others in Wo dak/Schulz 1986, Enders-Dragässer 1989, Goodwin 1990, Günthner/ Kotthoff 1991, Swann 1992, Thorne 1993, Kotthoff 1994). It is still hard to say where con versational differences originate. Psychoanalytic, linguistic, and sociological approaches must be combined to produce explanations. Com- municative style dif ferences also play a role for adults in many situations (Maltz/Borker 1982, Tannen 1994, 1996). But there is evidence that both sexes gen erally know a large va riety of styles which they can use to create specific contexts and relationships. Let’s have a look at one example of speech activities (directives). Good win (1990: 116 ff.) writes: PREFACE ix Both boys and girls make use of directives to coordinate behavior in task activities. However, they construct these actions in quite different ways. By selecting alternative ways of formatting directive moves and responding to them, and by distributing rights to perform directives differently, the two groups build alternative forms of social organization. Boys’ directives are formatted as imperatives from superordinates to subordi nates, or as requests, generally upward in rank. Among the girls, however, all participants use the same actions reciprocally with each other. The party issuing the direc- tive includes herself as one of the agents in the action to be performed, and avoids using strategies which