Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/97093
Title: Different genders, different communication styles? Patterns of interaction between Maltese couples in Malta
Other Titles: A sea for encounters : essays towards a postcolonial commonwealth
Authors: Sciriha, Lydia
Keywords: Language and languages
Sociolinguistics -- Malta
Oral communication -- Malta
Conversation
Colloquial language
Conversation analysis
Issue Date: 2009
Publisher: Rodopi
Citation: Sciriha, L. (2009). Different genders, different communication styles? Patterns of interaction between Maltese couples in Malta. In S. Borg Barthet (Ed.), A sea for encounters : essays towards a postcolonial commonwealth (pp. 365-378). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Abstract: Sociolinguistic research by Lakoff (1975), Tannen (1984, 1991, 1992, 1994), Zimmerman and West (1977), Maltz and Barker (1982), Fishman (1983), Smith (1985), Coates (1986), and Johnson (1997) has revealed that there are distinguishing characteristics in the speech of males and females that result in two conversational styles. These sociolinguistic studies have focused on some of the salient traits that characterize the speech of men and women such as minimal positive responses: namely, 'um, humm' or 'yes' and the use of the pronoun 'you' which females use to include the other person in the conversational dyad. Other aspects include the tendency for females to reveal unce11ainty in their speech through the use of question tags and hedges, and by leaving sentences unfinished. On the other end of the continuum, interruptions and directness characterize male speech. In view of these cross-gender characteristics, linguists have come up with two different approaches to gender discourse: the dominant approach and the difference approach. Whereas the dominant approach views male talk traits, such as interruptions, as a reflection of male domination in society, the difference approach considers the disparities in male and female speech as resulting from the two genders' inhabiting two different subcultures, thereby having somewhat different conversational styles. The empirical data for the research cited above was obtained in the UK, the USA, and New Zealand. This essay is an attempt to discover whether such male/female characteristics also surface in the naturally occurring conversations of couples in Malta, a tiny island in the middle of the Mediterranean sea, with a population of slightly more than one-third of a million.
URI: https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/97093
ISBN: 9789042027640
Appears in Collections:Scholarly Works - FacArtEng

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