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Gender and Discourse

Author: Deborah Tannen  

Features Tannen's newest essay: The Sex-Class-Linked Framing of Talk and Work

Tannen collects five of her published essays on gender and language, which provide a background as well as a response to her bestselling You Just Don't Understand (1990). She adds an introduction that discusses the surprising reactions to that book and explains how these essays deal with the questions raised by the book's critics.

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Summary

Features Tannen's newest essay: The Sex-Class-Linked Framing of Talk and Work

Tannen collects five of her published essays on gender and language, which provide a background as well as a response to her bestselling You Just Don't Understand (1990). She adds an introduction that discusses the surprising reactions to that book and explains how these essays deal with the questions raised by the book's critics.

Read more

Description

Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand spent nearly four years (in cloth and paper) on The New York Times Best Seller list and has sold over a million and a half copies. Clearly, Tannen's insights into how and why women and men so often misunderstand each other when they talk has touched a nerve. For years a highly respected scholar in the field of linguistics, she has now become widely known for her work on how conversational style differencesassociated with gender affect relationships. Her life work has demonstrated how close and intelligent analysis of conversation can reveal the extraordinary complexities of social relationships--including relationshipsbetween men and women. Now, in Gender and Discourse, Tannen has gathered together six of her scholarly essays, including her newest and previously unpublished work in which language and gender are examined through the lens of "sex-class-linked" patterns, rather than "sex-linked" patterns. These essays provide a theoretical backdrop to her best-selling books--and an informative introduction which discusses her field of linguistics, describes the research methods shetypically uses, and addresses the controversies surrounding her field as well as some misunderstandings of her work. (She argues, for instance, that her cultural approach to gender differences does not deny thatmen dominate women in society, nor does it ascribe gender differences to women's "essential nature.") The essays themselves cover a wide range of topics. In one, she analyzes a number of conversational strategies--such as interruption, topic raising, indirection, and silence--and shows that, contrary to much work on language and gender, no strategy exclusively expresses dominance or submissiveness in conversation--interruption (or overlap) can be supportive, silence and indirection can be usedto control. It is the interactional context, the participants' individual styles, and the interaction of their styles, Tannen shows, that result in the balance of power. She also provides a fascinatinganalysis of four groups of males and females (second-, sixth-, and tenth-grade students, and twenty-five year olds) conversing with their best friends, and she includes an early article co-authored with Robin Lakoff that presents a theory of conversational strategy, illustrated by analysis of dialogue in Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Readers interested in the theoretical framework behind Tannen's work will find this volume fascinating. It will be sure tointerest anyone curious about the crucial yet often unnoticed role that language and gender play in our daily lives.

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Critic Reviews

“"Tannen's work provides a clear, precise, complete analysis of verbal andnonverbal communication, based on scientific evidence. Gender and Discourse isprobably her best yet."--Mark Hickson, University of Alabama atBirmingham”

"A clear and cogent synthesis of important research in linguistics discourse analysis and gender studies."--Bennett Rafoth, Indiana University of Pennsylvania"Excellent book....The topic of genderlects simply cannot be approached without reference to Tannen, and this book gathers together some of her most impressive findings."--bridget Drinka, University of Texas at San Antonio"I...found the contents to be lucidly written and to have extremely significant relevance to interdisciplinary communications studies."--Harold Battersby, SUNY-Geneseo"A very interesting and useful book. I like the organization. It's up-to-date and thought-provoking."--Barbara Abbott, Michign State University"Great for use in a communication and gender course."--Judith Barnes, San Jose State University"Deborah Tannen is the archangel of clarity....She makes the art of listening less scary and more fascinating than any other sociolinguist or therapist writing today."--Los Angeles Times"Tannen explains the scholarly underpinnings of her bestseller You Just Don't Understand>"--The Washington Post"A useful thematic compilation for larger public and all academic libraries."--Library Journal"A mature and inspiring synthesis of rigorous method and humanistic as well as scientific goals."--Paul Friedrich, author of The Language Parallax"Tannen brings together five studies that bear on dominance vs. culture as interpretations of gender difference in languages, and frames the studies with an introduction addressing the debate. All concerned with the issue will need to address what she says."--Dell Hymes, author of Foundations in Sociolinguistics"Tannen's work provides a clear, precise, complete analysis of verbal and nonverbal communication, based on scientific evidence. Gender and Discourse is probably her best yet."--Mark Hickson, University of Alabama at Birmingham"A significant contribution to teaching about gender difference in communication. These highly readable chapters provide much valuable information for raising students' awareness."--Clifford E. Wexler, Columbia-Green Community College

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About the Author

Deborah Tannen is University Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She is the author of the best-selling You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse, That's Not What I Meant: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Your Relations With Others, Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends, and mostrecently, Talking From 9 to 5: Women and Men in the Workplace: Language, Sex, and Power.

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More on this Book

Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand spent nearly four years (in cloth and paper) on The New York Times Best Seller list and has sold over a million and a half copies. Clearly, Tannen's insights into how and why women and men so often misunderstand each other when they talk has touched a nerve. For years a highly respected scholar in the field of linguistics, she has now become widely known for her work on how conversational style differences associated with gender affect relationships. Her life work has demonstrated how close and intelligent analysis of conversation can reveal the extraordinary complexities of social relationships--including relationships between men and women. Now, in Gender and Discourse, Tannen has gathered together six of her scholarly essays, including her newest and previously unpublished work in which language and gender are examined through the lens of "sex-class-linked" patterns, rather than "sex-linked" patterns. These essays provide a theoretical backdrop to her best-selling books--and an informative introduction which discusses her field of linguistics, describes the research methods she typically uses, and addresses the controversies surrounding her field as well as some misunderstandings of her work. (She argues, for instance, that her cultural approach to gender differences does not deny that men dominate women in society, nor does it ascribe gender differences to women's "essential nature.") The essays themselves cover a wide range of topics. In one, she analyzes a number of conversational strategies--such as interruption, topic raising, indirection, and silence--and shows that, contrary to much work on language and gender, no strategy exclusively expresses dominance or submissiveness in conversation--interruption (or overlap) can be supportive, silence and indirection can be used to control. It is the interactional context, the participants' individual styles, and the interaction of their styles, Tannen shows, that result in the balance of power. She also provides a fascinating analysis of four groups of males and females (second-, sixth-, and tenth-grade students, and twenty-five year olds) conversing with their best friends, and she includes an early article co-authored with Robin Lakoff that presents a theory of conversational strategy, illustrated by analysis of dialogue in Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Readers interested in the theoretical framework behind Tannen's work will find this volume fascinating. It will be sure to interest anyone curious about the crucial yet often unnoticed role that language and gender play in our daily lives.

Read more

Product Details

Publisher
Oxford University Press Inc
Published
22nd February 1996
Pages
240
ISBN
9780195101249

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