According to Zimmerman and West through research in 1975 Male and female attitudes derive from their childhood and is usually influenced by their single sex peer groups. Through this research they discovered that boy’s games tend to be very competitive and girl’s games were more co-operative. This may explain why later in life women tend to be more co-operative and talk about feelings whereas men talk more about sport. So, if we follow this research, it should explain some of the stereotypes that are associated with the different genders.
Firstly, one of the most obvious and easily explained ones, has got to be that women talk about feelings, relationships and personal problems whereas men talk about ‘things’, factual objects and subjects, e.g. sports and cars. Both of these are directly linked to what girls and boys do in the playground, women are used to sharing their thoughts so grow up and continue that and boys are competitive so are going to talk about sport as there are teams which means they still get to compete with each other later in life.
Another stereotype that all of us hear every day, either being told about it or actually noticing it happening is that women talk more than men. Of course this is what we as men perceive to be true hearing our wives, mothers and girlfriends on the phone all day, but as proved by Fishman in 1990 men supposedly men talk twice as much as women. Now this to men and women I feel would be quite surprising even when telling my mother and aunts they are all so shocked by this. Even in their opinion they think it is the other way around, and of course men think this to, but if you think about I can begin to see why this is true because of the face that men are always out at the pubs, footy matches, and are business men so on the phone all day whereas women are seen as housewives. Obviously if Fishman did another lot of research now I believe the results will be a lot different as there are less and less housewives and more working women.
Another famous contributor to the study of language was Erving Goffman and he came up with Face Theory and Face Threatening Acts (FTA’S). The face theories are based upon the everyday use of language in which we feel obliged without knowing to challenge someone’s face. Everyone will have a negative face and a positive face. Negative face represents the desire to feel unimpeded, i.e. the freedom from feeling imposed upon by the interaction. Positive face represents the desire to feel approved of, i.e. to maintain a positive and consistent self-image during the interaction. The ways in which these are shown are through our FTA’s in which there are four. They are “A bald FTA”, i.e. ‘close your mouth you fat swine’. Next is a “FTA using positive politeness”, i.e. ‘You have such beautiful teeth. I wish I did not see them when you eat’. The third is a “FTA using negative politeness”, i.e. ‘I Know you are very hungry and that steak is a bit tough, but I would appreciate it if you would chew with your mouth closed’. Lastly is the “Indirect FTA”, i.e. ‘I wonder how far a person’s lips stretch yet remain closed when eating’. All of these are examples of the FTA’s something that we do not think about but just do it every day.
As we seen a lot of our behavior as an adult seems to have deprived from our personality, which I believe has developed from what we have done as a child, with the friends we choose to have and how our family is around us. As we have all heard thousands of times, our minds are like sponges at that age so therefore what we do early in life affects later in life, physically but also mentally.
