B- Are you gonna take me ta [err
A-[shoppin on Sat er day
The participant has completed the speech using syntactic and semantic monitoring. The male has over lapped the speech while the female is still speaking.
Overlaps are instances of slight over anticipation by the next speaker: (overlapping the last word, of the current speaker). Zimmerman and West examined irregularities in the transcribed conversation these are points in the conversation where turn taking did not follow the smooth pattern. They found profound differences between the conversations involving two speakers of the same sex and those involving one speaker of each sex. The two sorts of irregularity they identified are called overlaps and interruption.
In the transcript I am analysing, the woman use’s many hedges, such as ‘I s’ppose, possibly, y’know, sort of and perhaps’; these express the speakers certainty or uncertainty about the proposition under discussion.
This may be because women are less confident in asserting themselves.
The woman in this conversation also uses many fillers such as, hmm, ur, err, mm, etc to convey to the speaker that she is still interested and is involved in the conversation.
The male uses more taboo style of speech and is more informal e.g. ‘damn and oh crap’. Lakoff (1975) also claims that men use stronger expletives (damn, shit) than women (on dear, goodness).
Critics have suggested that women speak more than males but in a mixed-sex conversation the male seems to be more involved and do most of the speaking than then female.
Mean number of utterance = number of words
Number of turns
Participant A = 94
- = 6.714
Participant B = 109
16 = 6.812
The use of minimal responses is in showing that use them more and at appropriate moments. When men do use minimal responses, these are often delayed they also tend to pause more often, a tactic which undermines the current speaker and reinforces male dominance.
As the participant have contrasting views, the conversation tended to be competitive rather than co-operative, and there is little evidence of supportive feed back.
Adjacency pairs such as: - A: she’s coming around next mornin B: possibly noon to – This shows that the women is adding extra information to make the conversation more interesting.
From this we can see that participant B has more power over the conversation, it can also be seen that participant B structures the conversation by asking questions and speaking more often. Participant B is a female; therefore it has been proven that females talk more than males.
Bibliography
Jenny Coates – gender and language
