SEX, POLITENESS AND

STEREOTYPES

GROUP 5:
1. SAFNA S.L. RUMBIA
2. RACHMATILA BARMAWI
 WOMEN’S LANGUAGE AND CONFIDENCE

 Researches have proved that women, in order to

show their subordinate social status, use different
language structure with men.
 A research of Robin Lakoff, an American linguist,
focused on gender differences to syntax, semantics
and style.
 She claimed that there are a number of linguistic
features that were used more often by women than
men and that they expressed uncertainty and lack of
confidence.
 Features of Women’s Language (Lakoff’s)

 Lexical hedges or fillers (you know, sort of, well, you see)
 Tag questions (she’s very nice, isn’t she?)
 Rising intonation on declaratives (it’s really good)
 ‘Empty’ adjectives (divine, charming, cute)
 Precise colour terms (magenta, aquamarine)
 Intensifiers (just and so, I like him so much)
 ‘Hypercorrect’ grammar (consistent use of standard verb
forms)
 ‘Superpolite’ forms (Will you please close the door?,
euphemisms)
 Avoidance of strong swear words (fudge, my goodness)
 Emphatic stress (it was a brilliant performance)
 INTERACTION

 Interruption
 In same-gender interactions, interruptions were pretty
evenly distributed between speakers.
 In cross-gender interactions, almost all the interruptions
were from males because they want to dominate the
conversation.
 Feedback
 Research on conversational interaction reveals women as
cooperative conversationalists, whereas men tend to be
more competitive and less supportive in conversation.
 Women provide more encouraging feedback to their
conversational partners than men do.
 Example: positive feedback sound (mm and mhm).
 GOSSIP

 Women’s gossip focuses predominantly on

personal experiences and relationships, on personal
problems and feelings.
 Facilitative tags are used frequently
 Frequently provide supportive feedback.
 Men’s gossip, tend to focus on information, facts,
things and activities (sport, cars and possessions)
rather than personal experiences and feelings.
 Long pauses were tolerated.
 Responses with ‘disagree’ frequently or challenge the previous
speaker.
 SEXIST LANGUAGE

 Sexist language encodes stereotyped attitudes to

women and men.
 In principle, the study of sexist language is
concerned with the way language expresses both
negative and positive stereotypes of both women and
men.
 Feminists have claimed that English is a sexist
language.
 There are a number of ways in which it has been
suggested that the English language discriminates
against women.
 SEXIST LANGUAGE

 Animal imagery: The images for women (bitch,

old biddy) considerably less positive than those for
men (stud, wolf).
 Food imagery: The images for women (sugar,
sweetie, honey) is considered insulting because it
focuses on women as sexual objects.
 Morphology: Generally takes the ‘male’ form and
adds a suffix to signal ‘female’ (lion/lioness,
count/countess, hero/heroine, he/she,
male/female). It conveys meaning that women are
deviant, abnormal and subordinate group.