Report - the speech of men and women. Masculine and feminine variants of speech in the Yana language

FEATURES OF SPEECH COMMUNICATION OF MEN AND WOMEN

Afletunova Gulshat Eduardovna

3rd year student, Department of ISE PSTU, RF, Yoshkar-Ola

Email: gulshat. afletunova@ yandex. en

Bogdanov Anton Igorevich

scientific supervisor, Ph.D. f. Sciences, art. teacher, PSTU, RF, Yoshkar-Ola

Modern science shows great interest in the social conditioning of language and speech. Based on many studies, it has been proven that when studying the influence of social characteristics on speech, it is necessary to take into account the gender of a person.

The speech behavior of men and women is built on the basis of historical stereotypes that have been fixed in the language. The existence of differences in the language of different sexes was already characteristic of the languages ​​of primitive times. N.B. Mechkovskaya writes that male and female languages ​​differed primarily in vocabulary. For example, men knew hunting or building vocabulary, and women knew the vocabulary of housekeeping.

Until the 60s, science did not show much interest in the peculiarities of the speech of men and women. For the first time, gender, as a social factor that determines the characteristics of speech development, began to be mentioned in the works of U. Labov, P. Tragill. One of the first works in this area is the book of the American researcher Robin Lakoff "Language and the Place of Woman". This topic "language and gender" has been actively developed recently.

Today, the science of linguistics deals with this problem. Linguistics is the science that studies languages. In the broad sense of the word, linguistics is divided into scientific and practical. Most often, linguistics refers to scientific linguistics.

Speech behavior is a complex phenomenon that is associated with the place of birth of a person and the place of his education, whether it is an ordinary school or, for example, a closed lyceum. The speech behavior of a person is also influenced by the environment in which he communicates, that is, the habitual environment of a person, his upbringing and national characteristics. However, the main factor, undoubtedly, influencing the speech behavior of a person is the fact that he belongs to the male and female principles. As V.N. Telia in one of her works “Women are more characteristic of actual speech acts; they are easier to switch, “change” roles in the act of communication”. Men, on the contrary, switch in the act of communication much harder, and, being carried away by the topic of conversation or dialogue, they stop responding to other remarks that are not related to it.

Scientists began to talk about differences in speech communication between men and women at the end of the 17th century, when they discovered native tribes. The differences in male and female speech are not so significant, they do not always manifest themselves in any speech act, and also do not indicate that gender is the main factor in communication, as was assumed at the initial stage of the development of feminist linguistics. Science has also concluded that each person in different situations exhibits different speech behavior.

Studies have shown that by taking several people of the same sex and age, but with different professional status, one can find differences in their linguistic communication.

The speech behavior of a person in different situations is different. For example, at work or at home, a person has a certain speech behavior, and being in a new and unfamiliar environment, the same person shows a completely different speech behavior.

However, gender linguistics today does not deny that there are certain traits that are peculiar only to men and only to women. For example, women are more characterized by non-conflict and emotionality. The main topics in a woman's conversations are the topics of family, relationships, fashion, parenting, as well as art and literature. In conversation, women are more detailed than men, and often refer to movies, books, and personal experience. It has also been observed that women have more introductory words in conversation than men, and women also use “high words” more often in their speech. Psychologists also highlight such a feature as the presence of exaggerations and generalizations in the language of women. For male speech, accuracy and concreteness are more acceptable. The main topic of conversation for men is the business they are interested in (hunting, fishing, and so on), as well as innovative development and politics. Men often refer to authorities, and, according to psychologists, these authorities are most often men. Men in their speech are often ironic and use professional vocabulary. Their speech is characterized by a huge use of introductory words and the predominance of verbs over other parts of speech. Linguists also argue that the use of obscene words occurs more often in men than in women.

Differences in speech behavior between men and women are also reflected in the stories they tell. Men talk mainly about themselves and it is he who emerges victorious from any situation. Women, on the contrary, talk more about others than about themselves, and also often talk not about their “heroic deeds”, but about their own stupidity, for example, about how they forgot the keys to the house and slammed the door, or how instead of document took out an unnecessary piece of paper.

The style of conversation between men and women also has its own characteristics. So, for example, men very often question the authority of his interlocutor and are more willing to enter into conflicts. As noted above, women have less conflicts and more often avoid the possibility of open “battle” in a conversation. Men are more willing to speak in an unfamiliar circle and feel more comfortable, while women, on the contrary, feel comfortable when talking in a narrower circle of their loved ones. Men, according to linguists, before starting to speak, think in detail about everything that was heard from the interlocutor and only after that they formulate an answer and say it. In women, everything happens exactly the opposite. A woman first speaks, demonstrating her inner process of thinking about what was said, and only in the process of speech does she discover exactly what she wants to say.

As noted by A.Yu. Belyaeva in her article, women's speech is also characterized by the use of elementary signals of attention such as "aha". In the speech of women, there are often examples of the use of words with the meaning of uncertainty about the truth of what they are talking about. These can be modal words like “like”, “probably”, “in my opinion”. The speech of men differs from that of women in that they quite often use the adverbs probably “or” and “probably” in the sense of “undoubtedly, rightly, exactly.” But in most cases, men use modal words for absolute certainty that their own opinion is correct.

Male speech is also characterized by the influence of such a factor as a profession. Men widely use professional terminology in casual communication. Women, on the contrary, try to use a simpler and more understandable language for their interlocutor, in order to be “on an equal footing” with the interlocutor.

It can be concluded that the speech behavior of men and women is directly opposite. Men are usually immersed in the course of their thoughts, and if they are carried away by conversation, they do not react to the environment. A woman, on the other hand, conducts a conversation more openly, sensitively reacts to the whole environment.

In the modern world, the social roles of men and women are aligned. Language is only one of the aspects through which a person expresses his gender in this world. A woman to a greater extent accompanies her demands with various forms of politeness and the so-called formal restraints. For a man in a conversation, the most important task is, first of all, to assert his own leading positions and compete in establishing leading status roles. Studies show that men, when they talk to each other, very rarely interrupt each other during the dialogue. But at the same time, when they talk to women, the amount of interruption increases dramatically and becomes a general trend in the conversation.

When men talk to men, they tend to very rarely question each other's competence. At the same time, when a woman decides to show her competence in the presence of a man, the man perceives this as a challenge, as aggression on the part of the woman, and seeks to suppress her.

The nature of communication between men and women depends on a large number of different factors, the study of which is still ongoing. Linguistics is an evolving science, as the social roles of men and women also change over time.

Bibliography:

1. Zemskaya E.A., Kitaigorodskaya M.A., Rozanova N.N. Features of male and female speech // Russian language in its functioning. Ed. E.A. Zemskoy and D.N. Shmelev. M.: Nauka, 1993. - S. 90-136.
2. Kirilina A.V. Gender: linguistic aspects. M.: Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1999. - 189 p.
3. West K., Zimmerman D. Creating gender (doing gender) // Gender notebooks. Issue. 1. St. Petersburg, 1997. - S. 94-124.

Differences in the language of women and men
The topic of "language and gender" has recently been actively developed in linguistics. One of the first works in this area is the book by American researcher Robin Lakoff(Robin Lakoff)"Language and place of woman"("Language and Woman's Place", 1975) . According to Lakoff, there are the following main differences between the female version of the language and the male one:

1. women use more "empty" evaluative adjectives (eg "cute");

2. women use interrogative forms where men use affirmative ones;

3. women are more likely to use polite forms;

4. women are more likely to use forms expressing uncertainty (“you know”, “it seems to me”, “probably”, “maybe”)

5. women are more likely to use enhancers (“so cute”, “charming”);

6. women are more likely to use hypercorrect grammar.

Gender oppositions manifest themselves in different ways in the languages ​​of the world. An attempt to systematize them was made, for example, in the work of J. Scherzer(Sherzer, 1995); Note that the following types are not mutually exclusive.

1. Mandatory distinctions on the basis of male/female in the language.

We are talking about the obligatory distinction between two variants of the same language - male and female (most often this distinction is noticeable at the phonetic and / or morphological levels). One of the most famous examples is the language of the island Caribs in Central America. When Europeans first found themselves in the Lesser Antilles, they noticed that men and women speak “different languages”: part of the vocabulary (roots) was different, as well as several grammatical indicators. When referring to a man, the “male version” was always used, when referring to a woman, “female”. Reports from the 17th century note that the violation of established norms was considered a serious crime.

To explain this and similar phenomena, thetaboo hypothesis. When men went on the warpath, they may have been instructed to use a certain set of "male" words. At the same time, women and children were forbidden to pronounce some words that could “warn enemies”, “attract spirits” or “scare away prey”, otherwise luck would have turned away from warriors and hunters. The taboo factor could have influenced the differentiation of language depending on gender. This hypothesis in relation to the Caribs is not confirmed (although not directly refuted) by historical facts, but it finds quite a lot of typological parallels.

An example of a language in which the taboo system is the causeemergence of gender differences , - Zulu. A Zulu married woman could not pronounce the names of her husband's father and brothers aloud. In some cases, she was forbidden to pronounce sounds that could somehow be associated with taboo names, that is, a woman did not have the right to pronounce any, even the most common word, if it contained a characteristic sound included in the names of male relatives. Such a system of taboos could well lead to the emergence of different variants of the language, separated by gender.

Another example of gender differentiation ispersonal pronoun systems . So, in Russian, English and many other languages, differentiation based on gender is manifested in pronouns only in the 3rd person and only in the singular: he - she, but they;he, she, but they. In French, this differentiation is also found in the plural:ils - elles. In Finnish and in the 3rd person singular, the personal pronoun is not differentiated by gender:han. In some languages, the pronouns of the 2nd and 1st person are also differentiated by gender: for example, in Thai, in a polite conversation of people with equal status, a man will say about himselfphom, and the woman dichan.

2. Different speech styles for men and women .

In this case, style is understood as a complex of linguistic features - phonetic, rhythmic, intonational, morphological, syntactic, lexical, which are associated with male or female speech behavior. Women can speak faster or slower, more or less, more figuratively or more simply than men. Women can "swallow" endings while men can't, or vice versa. Women (or, respectively, men) can speak with a special intonation, etc.

It should be noted that, as is often the case, cultural norms imprinted in the minds of members of society may not coincide with actual practice. With regard to the problem under consideration, it is not so important whether such differences in the speech of men and women actually exist in a particular society; more importantly, in this societythere is a belief that women and men speak differently . For example, native Russian speakers might say that women speak more and faster than men - but this will not necessarily be confirmed statistically.

3. Different principles of organization of speech behavior .

Studies have shown that men and women behave differently during a conversation, use language differently during a conversation. In such studies, the number of “distractions” from the main topic of the conversation, the transition from one topic to another, unexpected appeals to another interlocutor, interrupting the interlocutor, etc. are usually calculated. This also includes differences in the frequency of use of certain linguistic features. The use of certain phonetic, morphological, syntactic and lexical features in male and female speech, according to statistical analysis, turns out to be significant (at the same time, unlike the situation described in the previous paragraph, members of the society can be sure that "everyone speaks the same way").

Thus, it has been established that English-speaking women tend to ask questions, maintain a dialogue, express solidarity with the interlocutor, often stimulate, support the conversation in the form of minimal answers (cf. Russian interjections of this type - “mmm”, “uh-huh " etc.). Men, on the contrary, often interrupt the interlocutor, tend to disagree with their partner, ignore the statements of the interlocutors, control the topic of conversation more tightly, and are prone to direct expression of opinion. Women avoid open rivalry in dialogue at the level of speech (their rivalry is usually more hidden), they wait for signs of approval and support in the form of nods, interjections, they themselves show signs of interest and attention. The roots of these differences lie in the dissimilarity of upbringing, the basic guidelines for the behavior of boys and girls.

P. Tradgil (Trudgill, 1995)shows which pronunciations men and women in English-speaking countries choose according to the prestige / non-prestige parameter. On average, there is a steady trend towardswomen choose a more prestigious pronunciation . Obviously, this is also related to the stereotypes of female and male behavior that exist in this culture.

D. Tannen (Tannen, 1982)gives data on an experiment she conducted to reveal the propensity of three groups (Americans, American Greeks, Greeks from Greece) and two genders to interpret speech as direct (having a direct, unambiguous meaning) or indirect (having a second, additional meaning). The subjects were given the following task.

The text was given: a married couple is talking:

Wife: John is having a party. You want to go?
Husband: OK (good).
Wife: I'll call and say we'll be there.

Based on this conversation, check one of the two sentences that you think explains what the husband really meant when he said OK (okay):

A: The wife wants to go there, since she asks. I'm going to please her.
B: My wife asks if I want to go there. I would like to say yes.

What in the words of the wife and husband makes you choose one of the proposed options? What would a wife or husband have to say for you to choose another option?

The experiment showed that differences in ethnic groups exist.

Thus, American women are much more likely than American men to look for a second meaning in the words of the interlocutor.

4. Language choice by men and women in multilingual and bilingual situations .

Men and women behave differently in situations of multilingualism and bilingualism. Men are more actively involved in bilingualism - due to their activity in trade, hunting, and other activities that force them to leave the house. So, in the border region of Austria, where part of the population is bilingual and where there are both men and women who speak both German and Hungarian, men prefer the Hungarian language, and women prefer German as a more prestigious language.(Gal, 1978).

5. Gender distribution of "genres" and roles in the conversation .

J. Scherzer (Sherzer, 1995)notes that among the Kuna Indians living in Panama, purely male genres are all kinds of public speaking, telling tribal myths, magical chants; female genres - singing lullabies, crying.

6. Choice by men and women of different models of speech behavior .

Malagasy society is often cited as an example, in which there are two such models - direct and indirect speech. Direct speech is more characteristic of women and is used in commercial relations, in which women are mainly involved there. Indirect speech is associated with public speaking, i.e. with politics, other areas where social activity is manifested, which is mainly characteristic of men.

This is the situation with the implementation of the male/female feature in different languages. This implies that society assigns different social roles to men and women. However, these roles can change over time, with language changes usually lagging behind changes in social roles. When social roles or social stereotypes come into conflict with linguistic norms, people begin to deliberately break the language formulas that orient a person to stereotypes based on gender differentiation and gender discrimination. Hence the "expulsion" of the actually desemantized suffix -manin words likechairman(chairman) and turning it intochair person. Hence the "complex pronouns" adopted in today's written norm of the English language in cases like"When a child acquires a language, he/she (option: s/he) first learns only one variety of it" (lit. "When a child learns a language, he/she first learns only one version of it") - or even the use of the pronoun in such casesshe.

So, men and women speak differently, and these options do not depend on the situation: there are almost no “female situations” and “male situations” when the same person would choose one or another option at will. A woman speaks differently than a man, and the listener is able to distinguish the speech of women from the speech of men not only by the timbre of the voice. This becomes especially noticeable when the rules are broken (cf. typical characters in comedy films - men speaking "like a woman", and vice versa).

An analysis of the functioning of various languages ​​indicates thatwomen tend to be more conservative in their speech practice than men: usually all innovations enter the language through male speech. As a consequence, the feminine forms are usually older in origin than the masculine ones: language changes occur primarily in the speech of men. So, in the Chukchi language, in some dialects, intervocalic consonants are preserved in the speech of women, but regularly drop out in the speech of men: the masculine version isankh "aat, - female version -ank'anat 'these' .

Some researchers defend the point of view according to which people cannot be considered as speech prototypes of their gender group and one should rather talk not about female and male speech, but about the degree of “femininity” and the degree of “masculinity” in the speech of an individual. Sociolinguistic research involves working with socio-demographic categories, but these categories themselves should be treated with caution. Socio-demographic categories can easily turn out to be a myth, a prejudice, or a mistake, so even such seemingly obvious categories as gender should not be used uncritically. Quite the opposite: research should be directed to the very process of constructing these categories: these categories are constantly being constructed, created and recreated by the members of the group themselves, and they are created to a large extent precisely in the process of speech interaction.

The conditional name of lexical preferences and some other features of the use of the language, depending on the gender of the speaker. Sexual differentiation of speech has become known since the 17th century, when new native tribes were discovered, in which quite significant differences in speech were observed depending on the gender of the speaker. First of all, this concerned women, since their speech behavior was regulated more than men's, so the so-called "female languages" were initially discussed in the scientific description. Differences most often appear in vocabulary, but can extend to other phenomena, as, for example, in Japanese. Sets of modal-expressive particles, forms of politeness, etc., differ. In European languages, there are also some differences in the use of the language, but they are not universal, but manifest themselves in the form of trends. Initially, speech differences were explained by the nature of women and men, that is, they were considered constant factors. In the 1960s, with the development of sociolinguistics, the probabilistic nature of differences was established.

During the period of active feminist criticism of the language (70s - early 80s of the XX century), linguists insisted on the existence of intentionalism, i.e. conscious maintenance by men of their superiority through speech behavior - the length of speech segments, the frequency of interruptions, speaking simultaneously with the interlocutor , control over the topics of communication, etc. This did not take into account the high importance of social structures (schools, churches, armies, etc.), which assume the maintenance of male superiority and free the individual from the need to constantly reproduce it in all situations. Along with intentionalism, at this stage of research, the factor of sex was given excessive importance. West and Zimmerman argue that the construction by an individual of their gender identity (doing gender) is a permanent process that permeates all the actions of individuals. Further study of communication showed that situations and contexts in which gender does not play a significant role are very common, therefore it is necessary to take into account the factor of "gender neutrality" (Hirschauer), since there is no reason to attach more importance to gender than to the factor of age, ethnicity and social affiliation, the level of education, profession, etc. Along with the term doing gender, the term undoing gender has also been proposed for the analysis of speech behavior for situations where the gender of the communicants is not significant. Modern research shows that these parameters interact in most cases, so it is very difficult to determine where the influence of one ends and the influence of the other begins. During this period, quantitative methods of research also prevailed, the most popular of which were the calculation of the duration of speech segments, the frequency of interrupting the interlocutor and changing the topics of the dialogue. However, apart from the context and situation of communication, these characteristics cannot be considered indicative and acquire significance only in interaction with other phenomena that depend on the cultural traditions of a given society. The question today is not how men or women speak, but how, with the help of what speech means, tactics and strategies they create certain contexts. Next, you need to explore the parameters of these contexts and their impact on the success of communication.

In the late 80s and early 90s, the hypothesis of "gender subcultures" arose, dating back to the work of Gumperz on the study of intercultural communication, as well as to earlier works on ethnology, ethnography, cultural history (Borneman, Mead). In the works of Maltz and Borker (Maltz, Borker) and Tannen (Tannen) the principle of intercultural communication is extended to gender relations.

In this case, the focus was on the processes of socialization. The socialization of the individual was seen as the assignment to him of a certain subculture, which is characterized by special speech practices that are different in the male and female environment. In childhood and adolescence, people revolve mainly in same-sex groups, forming subcultures and assimilating their speech etiquette, which, according to the supporters of the hypothesis, leads to misunderstanding and speech conflicts in adulthood, which are equated with intercultural ones.

The hypothesis of gender subcultures led to the emergence of the concept of genderlect - a permanent set of features of male and female speech. However, the works of recent years show more and more clearly that it is wrong to talk about genderlect (Samel, Kotthoff). The role of the subcultural factor in this case is greatly exaggerated. The differences in male and female speech are not so significant, they do not manifest themselves in any speech act and do not indicate that gender is a determining factor in communication, as was assumed at the initial stage of the development of feminist linguistics. It has also been established that the same person in different communicative situations also exhibits different speech behavior, which is called code switching. The study of the communication of people of the same sex, but of different social and professional status, also revealed a number of differences. So, the speech behavior of any person at home and at work, in a familiar and new environment, is different. At the same time, today science does not deny the existence of some stylistic features that are predominantly male or predominantly female within a clearly defined situation of communication. At the same time, it is believed that they arise under the influence of both sociocultural (for example, the use of swearing by women is more condemned than male abuse), as well as biological and hormonal factors (see Hypothesis of Functional Asymmetry of the Brain). The expansion of gender studies beyond the framework of influential European languages ​​and the development of linguoculturology made it possible to obtain data that also testify to the cultural conditioning of male and female speech. The most promising and reasonable direction in the study of male and female speech is currently considered to be the study of the strategies and tactics of the speech behavior of men and women in various communicative situations, with the obligatory consideration of the cultural tradition of a given society. There is also a widespread point of view that women use more diminutive suffixes and polite forms, more often call a communication partner by name, and generally use more contact-establishing speech actions. Works on the study of male and female associations also give reason to assume some differences in the male and female associative picture of the world (see Images of a man and a woman in linguistic consciousness). The reasons for the differences currently remain a debatable issue, in the discussion of which the bio- and socio-deterministic points of view collide.

Men's and women's languages ​​(English)

Literature:

Zemskaya E. A., Kitaigorodskaya M. A., Rozanova N. N. Features of male and female speech // Russian language in its functioning. Edited by E. A. Zemskaya and D. N. Shmelev. M.: Nauka, 1993. S. 90-136.

Kirilina A. V. Gender: linguistic aspects. Moscow: Institute of Sociology RAS, 1999. 189 p.

West K., Zimmerman D. Creating gender (doing gender) // Gender notebooks. Issue. 1. St. Petersburg, 1997. S. 94-124.

Borneman Ernst. Das Patriarchy. Ursprung und Zukunft unseres Gesellschaftssystems. Frankfurt a. Main, 1991 (zuerst 1971).

Gal S. Between speech and silence: The problematics of research on language and gender // Papers in Pragmatics. 1989. No. 3. V.1. P. 1-38.

Gluck Helmut. Der Mythos von den Frauensprachen. In: OBST (Osnabrücker Beiträge zur Sprachtheotie). 1979. Beiheft 3, pp. 60-95.

Gumperz John J. Discours Strategies. Cambridge, 1982.

Hirschauer St. Dekonstruktion und rekonstruktion. Pladöyer für die Erforschung des Bekannten // Feministische Studien. 1993. No. 2. S. 55-68.

Kotthoff H. Die Geschlechter in der Gesprächsforschung. Hierarchien, Teorien, Ideologien // Der Deutschunterricht, 1996. N 1. S. 9-15.

Maltz D. N., Borker R. A. Mißverständnisse zwischen Männern und Frauen - kulturell betrachtet // Günthner, Kotthoff (Hrsg) Von fremden Sttimmen. Weibliches und männliches Sprechen im Kulturvergleich. Frankfurt am Main, 1991. S. 52-74.

Male and female: a study of sexes in a changing world. New York: Morrow, 1949.

Samel Ingrid. Einführung in die feministische Sprachwissenschaft. Berlin, 1995.

Tannen Debora. Du cannst mich einfach nicht verstehen. Warum Männer und Frauen aneinender vorbeireden. Hamburg, 1991.

"Male and feminine speech" in books

Chapter 8 MALE AND WOMEN'S SPEECH