Dominance and accommodation in the conversational behaviours of same- and mixed-gender dyads

Abstract

Among the first writers to posit a relationship between the language women use and their social condition was the linguist Robin Lakoff (1975; see also Key, 1973, who defined a ‘female register’ that serves as a marker for women’s subordinate social status and reinforces the attributions of dependency, incompetence and timidity that are part of the female stereotype. From this perspective, differences in male and female speech are a reflection of the general dominance of males in society, a view that has been termed the ma/e dominance ~y~~~~~~~~ (Thorne and Henley, 1975). Although Lakoff’s observations were not based on systematic examination of actual speech corpora, there is evidence to indicate that some of the characteristics of the hypothesized female register are differentials distributed in male and female speech, at least in some situations (Crosby and Nyquist, 1977; Smith, 1985; Ruke-Dravina, 1952; but see also Brouwer et at., 1979).