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Pamela Fishman conducted an experiment and involved listening to
fifty-two hours of pre-recorded conversations between young American couples.
Five out of the six subjects were attending graduate school; all subjects were
either feminists or sympathetic to the women’s movement, were white, between
the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Fishman listened to recordings and
concentrated on two characteristics common in women’s dialect, including tag
questions for example ”you know?”
Fishman begins by examining the use of tag questions being asked and
states that women frequently use tag questions ‘isn’t it?’ or ‘couldn’t we?’
following a thought or suggestion. For females questions are an effective
method of beginning and maintaining conversations with males. Fishman argues
that women use questions to gain conversational power rather than from lack of
conversational awareness. She claims that questioning is required for females
when speaking with males; men often do not respond to a declarative statement
or will only respond minimally.
Fishman also analyzes the frequent use of the phrase ”you know” used by
women. ”You know” is an attention-getting device to discover if the
conversational partner is listening. When ”you know” is combined with a pause,
she realized that the woman is inviting the listener to respond. When little or
no response is heard from the male the pause is internalized by the speaker and
she will continue the conversation. With her study she found that women in her
study used four times as many yes/no and tag questions as the men. But she was
adamant that this was not because women were more uncertain and tentative as
Lakoff suggested but because women are the ones generally trying to keep the
conversation going. Fishman therefore concludes again that women’s style of
communicating is not from lack of social training, but to the inferior social
position of women.
Results
I believe that women hedge and use more tag questions than men for a
variety of reasons. I believe that men sometimes let women dominate the
conversation because they think that their input to a conversation will either
bore the woman or not relevant to the conversation. Therefore this leaves it to
the woman to keep the conversation going. I also believe that as the
man’s input to a conversation is minimal, the woman feels the need to reassure
herself that the man is listening and not just speaking to herself. As if the
woman does not hedge and ask tag questions the man may not have any input to
the conversation at all in which the woman would feel she is talking to
herself.
