Gender and Discourse

by Deborah Tannen

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in Gender and Discourse , Tannen has gathered together six of her scholarly essays, including her newest and previously unpublished work in which language and gender are examined through the lens of "sex-class-linked" patterns, rather than "sex-linked" patterns.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.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction, Academic, Gender Studies, Feminism, Communication, Research

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Deborah Tannen is best known as the author of You Just Don't Understand, which was on The New York Times Best Seller list for nearly four years years, including eight months as No. 1, and has been translated into 29 languages. It was also on best seller lists in Brazil, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, and Hong Kong. This is the book that brought gender differences in communication style to the forefront of public awareness. Her book Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work , a New York Times Business Best Seller, does for the workplace what the earlier book did for women and men talking at home. She has also made a training video, Talking 9 to 5. Her book, The Argument Culture, received the Common Ground Book Award. Her book, I Only Say This Because I Love You: Talking to Your Parents, Partner, Sibs, and Kids When You're All Adults, received a Books for a Better Life Award. Her latest book, You're Wearing THAT?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation, was recently published in paperback by Ballantine; it spent ten weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List after its initial publication in 2006.

Deborah Tannen is a frequent guest on television and radio news and information shows. In connection with You're Wearing THAT? she appeared on 20/20, Good Morning America, the Today Show, the Rachael Ray Talk Show, the CBS Early Show, and on NPR's Morning Edition and the Diane Rehm show. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 48 Hours, CBS News, ABC World News Tonight, Oprah, CNN, Larry King, Hardball, Nightline, and NPR are among the major television and radio shows on which Dr. Tannen has appeared in connection with previous books. She has been featured in and written for most major newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, USA Today, People, The Washington Post, and The Harvard Business Review.

Dr. Tannen has lectured all over the world. Her audiences have included corporations such as Corning, Chevron, Motorola, Rolm (Siemens), McKinsey and Co., and Delta, as well as the Board of Trustees of The Wharton School and a gathering of United States senators and their spouses. Combining the results of years of research and observation with videotaped real-life footage of office interaction, Dr. Tannen gives her audiences a new framework for understanding what happens in conversations both in the workplace and at home.

In addition to her linguistic research and writing, Dr. Tannen has published poetry, short stories, and personal essays. Her first play, "An Act of Devotion," is included in The Best American Short Plays: 1993-1994. It was produced, together with her play "Sisters," by Horizons Theatre in Arlington, Virginia in 1995.

Deborah Tannen is on the linguistics department faculty at Georgetown University, where she is one of only two in the College of Arts and Sciences who hold the distinguished rank of University Professor. She has been McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University, and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California, following a term in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She has published twenty-one books and over 100 articles and is the recipient of five honorary doctorates. Dr. Tannen is a member of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation Board and the Board of Horizons Theatre.

Reviews

[Maayan Roth · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is much less about gender than I thought, and more of a sampling of Tannen's sociolinguistic research that happened to have a gender component. A few of the essays were interesting, but overall, I finished the book unclear about the author's overall thesis.

[Jacob Siegel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good book. It helped me put a lot of things into perspective. I understand the differences between men and women more closely and I also understand the dangers of assigning everyone a gender role just because of the way that they talk. Just because people are expected to talk this way to other people does not mean that's not the only way that they should talk to that way. Things are definitely not as simple as Deborah Tannen make it out to be. I'll have to agree with Senta Prommel-Trottz on a number of issues.

It's not that more men don't get how to converse with women. A lot of them know how to do it but they just want it to sleep with women. What we should be appalled at is the amount of objectification of women going on by Hollywood placing women in more and more uncomfortable roles making them act in strange ways. That's not saying we don't want attractive women in Hollywood pictures but that's not so much the problem. the problem is that Hollywood shapes what is attractive and what isn't and there have been studies that have showed that women who sees these images in the media feel like they have to live up to them.

Women are also barred from other services such as getting bank loans, they are not allowed to serve in the infantry in the military, and they are not allowed to do a number of other things. The new media, the internet age, and social media have allowed women to only recently get back into the public sphere where before they were barred or silenced.

It is more than just a gender gap or cultural gap. While there are many things that are different between men and women not it is clear that there are other non-theoretical constructs that deal more with the issue of hierarchy than just simple language.

Guys could really learn a thing or two from women and try to stop being so dominating all the time. But, I don't know if even that would help. It would be hard for many of the people in the status-quo to lose their authoritarian personality and let women do what they want to do.

So, that being said, I've learned a lot about how women interact, how I can learn to interact better with women, and what I can do to understand my own role as a guy and what society thinks of me. Lots of things need to change before we can make any progress with communication between the sexes before it can get better. And those are not just things on an interpersonal level. But on an institutional and societal one as well.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of scholarly articles Deborah Tannen wrote over a couple of decades about different aspects of gender in discourse. One of the more interesting analyses is of the play Scenes from a Marriage, in which she (with Robin Lakoff) dissect the criss-crossing styles of Johan and Marianne as their marriage dissolves. Many of the other analyses are represented in her other books, but this one demonstrates the methods more rigorously.

[Lydia Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do English language if you couldn't already tell.

[kt · Rating 3 out of 5]

uni reading

[Shaziakd · Rating 4 out of 5]

an eye opener

[Sandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting essay on Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage!