Are Men Really Challenging in Conversation? Exploring Gender Stereotype in Everyday Talk

Abstract

Past studies of gender talk (for instance, Holmes, 2006) have mostly found that women tend to be collaborative while men tend to be challenging in everyday communication. This picture of gender stereotypes suggests that people hold strong views about gender behavior and which can have negative influences in the interactions if these stereotypes are not representative of the actual linguistic behavior of men and women. This study, therefore, aims to investigate the reliability of those stereotypes by investigating the actual use of collaborative strategies by men in particular. The data was collected in Australian and all participants are young male native speakers of English. This study adopts both qualitative and quantitative analysis. It particularly focuses on examining three collaborative features in conversation: one utterance construction (Learner, 2004), one utterance expansion (Lerner, 1991) and repetition (Tannen, 2007). For the quantitative analysis, male participants of this study showed the total of 52 cases of the three collaborative features in 12 conversations. This result suggests an indication of a possible trend, providing evidence for the possibility of the three collaborative features in conversation by men. For the qualitative analysis, Discourse Analysis to discuss how men deliver collaborative features in conversation. The results of the qualitative approach show that men in this study delivered several types of the three collaborative features in their talk. At the conference, the author discusses how men’s stereotype is constructed in everyday conversation.



Author Information
Yoshihiko Yamamoto, Ritsumeikan University, Japan

Paper Information
Conference: ACP2015
Stream: Linguistics

This paper is part of the ACP2015 Conference Proceedings (View)
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Posted by James Alexander Gordon