Gender and discourse

Synopsis

Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand has been on the New York TimesBest Seller list for more than three years (in cloth and paper) and has soldover a million and a half copies. Clearly, Tannen's insights into how and whywomen and men so often misunderstand each other when they talk has touched anerve. For years an internationally known and highly respected scholar in thefield of linguistics, she has now become widely known for her work on howlanguage both reflects and perpetuates the relationships between men and women.Her life work has demonstrated how close and intelligent analysis ofconversation can reveal the extraordinary complexities of socialrelationships--including relationships between men and women.Now, in Gender and Discourse, Tannen has gathered together five of herscholarly essays--which provide a theoretical backdrop to her bestsellingbooks--and an informative introduction which discusses her field of linguistics,describes the research methods she typically uses, and addresses thecontroversies surrounding her field as well as some misunderstandings of herwork. (She argues, for instance, that her cultural approach to genderdifferences does not deny that men dominate women in society, nor does itascribe gender differences to women's "essential nature.") The essays themselvescover a wide range of topics. In one, she analyzes a number of conversationalstrategies--such as interruption, topic raising, indirection, and silence--andshows that, contrary to much work on language and gender, no strategy leadsinflexibly to dominance or submissiveness in conversation--interruption (oroverlap) can be supportive, silence and indirection can be used to control. Itis the interactional context, the participants' individual styles, and theinteraction of their styles, Tannen shows, that result in the balance of power.She also provides a fascinating analysis of four groups of males and females(second-, sixth-, and tenth-grade students, and 25 year olds) conversing withtheir best friends, and she includes an early article co-authored with RobinLakoff that presents a theory of conversational strategy, illustrated byanalysis of dialogue in Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage.Readers interested in the theoretical framework behind Tannen's work willfind this volume fascinating. It will be sure to interest anyone curious aboutthe crucial yet often unnoticed role that language and gender play in our dailylives.