Indirectness: A gender study of flouting Grice's maxims

Abstract

There is a popular belief that women's speech is more indirect than men's speech. However, there has been little empirical evidence to support this claim. Moreover, indirectness is often treated as a unitary concept, when in fact there are several types of indirect speech. Presented here is a completed study exploring the relationship between gender and indirectness, focusing on one type of indirectness, what Grice (1975) refers to as flouting the maxims of conversatio. Results of this study indicate that the men flout more than the women do in the situations examined. Finding empirical evidence that men speak more indirectly than women do in certain situations confronts a societal myth that the reverse is tru. Within Sperber and Wilson's (1986) theory of indirectness, which has a cognitive rather than a social basis, one would be less likely to expect social variables to interact with degrees of indirectness. The results of my study show that there are differences in the degree to which men and women flout the Gricean maxims, thus providing evidence supporting a theory with a social component.