Women, Men, And Type of Talk

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Women, Men, and Type of Talk: What Makes the Difference?Author(s): Alice F. Freed and Alice GreenwoodSource: Language in Society, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Mar., 1996), pp. 1-26Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4168671

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Language in Society 25, 1-26. Printed in the United States of America

Women, men, and type of talk:What makes the difference?ALICE F. FREED

Linguistics DepartmentMontclair State UniversityUpper Montclair, NJ 07043ALICE GREENWOOD

AT&T Bell LaboratoriesMurray Hill, NJ 07974ABSTRACT

In a study of dyadic conversations between four female and four malepairsof friends, the use of the phraseyou know and questions are exam-ined within three types of discourse. Women and men are found to usethese features with equal frequency; and all speakers, regardless of sexor gender, use them in comparable ways. Although these particulardis-course features have been previously associated with a female speechstyle, the results of this study show that it is the particularrequirementsassociated with the three types of talk that motivate their use, and notthe sex or genderof the individualspeaker.The problemsof generalizingabout the characteristics of female or male speech, outside of a partic-ular conversational context, are discussed; and it is shown that a gen-dered style cannot be adequately defined by counting individual speechvariables removed from the specifics of the talk context. (Gender, ques-tions, tag questions, discourse analysis, conversation analysis)*

The concept of stable and mutually exclusive gendered speech styles,1uniquely associated with women and girls or men and boys, is unfortunatelystill pervasive in the field of linguistics (Tannen 1990b, Labov 1991, Ward-haugh 1992, 1993, Fromkin & Rodman 1993). Many of the stereotyped pre-sumptions commonly presented about female and male speech originatedwith variationiststudies carried out in the 1970s (Labov 1972, Trudgill 1972,Macaulay 1978, Romaine 1978), and emerged from limited data on cross-sexconversation collected in the 1970s and early 1980s (Hirschman 1973, 1994,Zimmerman & West 1975, Fishman 1978, 1980, West & Zimmerman 1983).From recent work on same-sexconversationalexchanges (Coates 1989, 1991,1994, 1996, Eckert 1989, Sheldon 1990, McLemore 1991, Holmes 1993) andwork that focuses on previously understudied populations (Coates & Cam-eron 1989, Goodwin 1990, 1994, Morgan 1991, Hall & O'Donovan 1996), it? 1996 Cambridge University Press 0047-4045/96 $7.50 + .10 1


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WOMEN, MEN, AND TYPE OF TALK

(c) Women and men of the same speech community, speakingin same-sexpairs in the same conversational context, with equal access to the conversa-tional floor, do not differ either in the frequency of the use of you know orin the number of questions uttered.(d) Women and men of the same speech community, speaking in same-sex pairs in comparable settings, not only utter equivalent numbers of youknow and of questions, but use you know and questions to achieve compa-rable discourse goals.(e) It is more accurateto associate a style of speakingwith a particular in-guistictask, or with a specific kind of speakingsituationwithina given socio-cultural context, regardlessof the sex of the individuals participating, thanto attribute a language style to any casually defined group of speakers.DATA AND METHODOLOGYThe data for this studyare from eight dyadic conversations,of approximately35 minutes each, recordedin an experimentalsetting. Students from linguis-tics and women's studies classes at a university in New Jersey were invitedto participate in a study of friendship. The participantswere White, 18-28yearsold, from middle- and working-class backgrounds. Each volunteerwasasked to bring a friend of the same sex (from inside or outside the univer-sity community) to a specified location. The volunteers were informed inadvance that they would be audio- and video-recorded during the study. Inall, 30 conversationswere recorded.We reporthereon conversationsbetweenfour female and four male pairs of friends, roughly matched for age andlength of friendship.To manipulate the talk situation, we divided the conversation into threeparts, each of which had distinctconversationalrequirements.When the par-ticipants arrived, we gave the appearanceof being overwhelmedwith equip-ment problems, and we appealed to them to be patient until we hadeverything in working order. Microphones and a tape recorderwere in fullview on the table at which they were asked to sit. The equipment was run-ning and they were so informed, but we explainedthat the formal part of theproject was not yet underway. We then left them alone and said that wewould return as soon as we were organized, encouragingthem to relax andto enjoy the doughnuts and juice that we had provided. We label this por-tion of the conversation the SPONTANEOUS talk portion because the speakersthemselves, not the researchers,dictated the interaction and controlled theconversational material. They sat at the table, waiting for us to officiallybegin, and chatted about matters unrelated to our project or to any otherassigned topic.After 10 minutes we returned, apologized for the delay, and told the par-ticipantsthat we were readyto proceed. We explainedthat, rather than inter-Language in Society 25:1 (1996) 3


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ALICE F. FREED AND ALICE GREENWOOD

view them separately, we wanted them to talk together about the nature offriendship between women as compared to friendship between men. Weattempted to be as casual as possible in giving our instructions, hoping tomitigate the speakers' self-consciousness. We call this the CONSIDERED talkportion because the speakers were focused on a particular topic, assigned bythe researchers.After 15 more minutes we interrupted the conversations, thanked bothspeakers, and asked each one to fill out an anonymous demographic ques-tionnaire and a form granting us permission to use the taped conversations.Because the documents had to be filled out individually, no talk wasrequired. However, there was usually a good deal of conversation. It wasapparent that the pairsof friends believedthat their task was completed; theyproceeded to talk to each other in an informal and relaxed manner. Theymade jokes about the questions, read them aloud to each other, sometimescollaborated on their answers to the questions, and engaged in general com-mentaryabout filling out the forms. This section, which lasted 6-10 minutes,provided us with an opportunity to observe COLLABORATIVE talk.This approach had several important methodological advantages for thetype of analysis that was undertaken.The researchdesign allowed us to ana-lyze the pragmatic expression you know and the use of questions in the lan-guage of 16 individuals, in three different types of speech where both therelationshipbetween the interlocutorsand the settingremained constant. Fur-thermore, this experimental design ensured that comparable speech sampleswere analyzed for women and men. Holmes warns (1986:12)that "any com-parison of the number of forms used by each sex clearlyneeds to control fordifferentialopportunitiesfor producingsuch forms,"a point frequentlyover-looked in earlier research. Our approach guaranteed like access to speechproduction for all female and male participants.YOU KNOWThe expression you know has often been described as a female hedgingdevice, and interpretedas a markerof both insecurity and of powerlessness(Lakoff 1975, Fishman 1978, 1980, O'Barr & Atkins 1980, Ostman 1981,Coates 1986). For example, Fishman 1980reported that, in the conversationsthat she studied of three heterosexual couples, women's frequent and dispro-portionate use of you know signaled both the subordination of the femalespeakers in the conversations and the heavy conversational workload thatthey carried. At the time that Coates' first edition of Women, men and lan-guage was published (1986), researcherswere still making assumptions aboutwomen's speech based in part on evidence from such mixed-sex conversa-tional data. Thus you know was included in the list of gendered speech char-acteristics typical of women and not of men. In her review of the literature,4 Language in Society 25:1 (1996)


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Coates pointed out that "A statement like It was, you know, really interest-ing is considered less assertive than its unhedged version It was really inter-esting" (1986:102). She also reported that the frequent occurrence of youknow revealed "malfunction in turn taking" (102). However, in the secondedition of the book (1993), these comments were revised to reflect the impor-tance of examining linguistic forms in context. Our data show that impor-tant information about the discourse function of you know in conversationis masked if it is analyzed as a single pragmatic device, isolated from its fullconversational context.Our corpus consists of 612 instances of you know,2 from approximately4' hours of informal conversation between eight pairs of same-sex friends;compare this to the mere 104 instances of you know in 11 hours of intimateconversation between the three heterosexual couples reported by Fishman1980. This large difference between our data and Fishman's corroborates theobservation made by Holmes (1986:14) of an increase in the frequency ofoccurrence of you know in same-sex interaction as compared to mixed-sexinteraction. In addition, this contrast in the frequency of you know mayresult from the type of discourse; i.e., casual conversation between friendsmay elicit a greateruse of this expression than intimate talk between couples.A comprehensive analysis of the distribution of you know in our datareveals the following:(a) Every speaker in the sample, female and male, used this expressioneight or more times in 35 minutes of conversation.(b) In everyconversational dyad, one member of the pair used the expres-sion more frequently than the other.(c) The frequency of occurrence of you know varied widely with the typeof talk of the three differcnt segments of the conversations studied.(d) All speakersin the sample, female and male, varied their usage of youknow in identical ways, in accordance with the three different types of talk.

Table 1 shows the number of occurrences of you know in the speech ofeach participant,and compares it to the frequencyof occurrenceof this formin the speech of that individual's conversational partner. The total numberof occurrences of you know in the eight female and male conversations out-lined in Table 1 are almost identical. Out of the total 612 tokens of youknow, women used the form 310 times, and men 302 times.3 The totalsshow that every member of these female and male pairs of friends used thisexpression - and that, in each pair, one speaker used the form more oftenthan the other. For example, in female dyad 3, Speaker A used this expres-sion 37 times, which represents 70% of the total occurrences of you knowin that conversation. The number was more than double that of her inter-locutor, who used you know only 16 times. Similarly, in male pair 8, youknow occurred 20 times in the speech of Speaker A; again, this was moreLanguage in Society 25:1 (1996) 5


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TABLE 1. Totals and percentages of you knowby pair and by sexFemale Male

1. A: 36 B: 138 = 174 5. A: 11 B: 41 = 52(21o) (79%) (21%Vo) (79%)2. A: 8 B: 25 = 33 6. A: 38 B: 60 = 98(24%) (76%) (39%) (61%)3. A: 37 B: 16= 53 7. A: 71 B: 53 = 124(70%) (30%) (57%) (43%)4. A: 18 B: 32 = 50 8. A: 20 B: 8 = 28

(36%) (64%) (71%) (29%)Total 310 Total 302

than double the eight occurrences of the form in his partner'sspeech. Thesenumbersshow that, in informal dyadic conversation, it is not unusual for oneconversational partner to use you know more than the other.When Fishman 1978, 1980 found an imbalance in the use of you know incross-sex conversations, she attributed it to the imbalance in power betweenthe speakers. Because her studies found that women used you know signifi-cantly more than men, she interpretedyou know as a linguistic signal of theinterpersonal powerlessness of the women. However, in the conversationsunder study here, where there is no overt (or societal) power differential be-tween the participants, an imbalance is nonetheless found in the use of youknow. Given the limited knowledge that we have about the speakers' friend-ship, it is unwise to speculate about the interpersonal function of the greaternumber of you knows in the speech of one member of each pair. This imbal-ance may reflect greaterinvolvement or conversational effort on the part ofone speaker over the other - or more simply, may reflect a personal speak-ing style of one of the participants.Yet it is clear that a specific linguistic phe-nomenon or communicative feature, in this case the imbalance betweenspeakers in the use of you know, cannot be explained outside the full com-municative context in which it occurs, and cannot be generalized from onecontext to another.In addition to analyzing the number of occurrences of you know by indi-vidual speaker and by sex of speaker, we examined the distribution of youknow across the three distinct parts of the conversations. We found that astriking 546 instances, or 89% of the total occurrences, occurred in Part II,rising from 56 instances (or 907o)n Part I. Only 10 examples (2%) of youknow occur in Part III of the conversations. When adjusted for the time dif-ferences between the three parts of the conversations, 13'07of the instances6 Language in Society 25:1 (1996)


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LegendP ati:56youbns80 PathI:46you&s

patIIaI : you *s60

PadI:CIrdTalk (1 mh.)Part: ptbneoTalk1O in.) PadII:ollaborativealk6-10in.)FIGURE 1: Distribution of you know by type of talk, adjusted for time.

of you know are seen to occur in Part I, 84%1on Part II, and 2% in Part III;see Figure 1.Women and men were nearly identical in the number and distribution ofyou know, with both groups showing an extraordinaryincrease in the usageof you know in Part II; see Figure 2. Since the fluctuation in use is so dra-matic for all eight dyads, regardlessof the sex or genderof speaker, it is clearthat associating this form with female speakers (or with males for that mat-ter) is incorrect. Rather, these data lead us away from generalities whichfocus on categories of sex or gender, and toward a conclusion grounded indiscourserequirements:women and men speaking in same-sex pairs respondto the differences in the talk situation in exactly the same way. The onlychange that takes place in the speaking situation in going from Part I toPart II is the requirements of the talk itself. Thus it is the demands of thisparticular talk situation, in which the participants respond to an assignedtopic - plus the constraints associated with this particulartopic - that elicitthis verbal behavior. It is not the sex or gender of the speakers, or the natureof their personalrelationshipoutside this setting, that explainstheir increaseduse of you know in the CONSIDERED section of the interaction.For researcherswho have moved away from a reliance on genderedspeechstyles as explanations for linguistic choices, there is now general agreementthat you know is a hearer-orientedexpression, providing the speaker with aLanguage in Society 25:1 (1996) 7


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ALICE F. FREED AND ALICE GREENWOOD100

LegendFern*E|

801

m-EParII:orsidredall15min.)Part:Spontneousalk10 in.) PadlIl:ollaborativealk6.10 i.)

FIGURE 2: Distribution of you know by type of talk and by sex.

means of checking for shared background information (Ostman 1981,Holmes 1986, Schiffrin 1987). However, its various conversational functionsare much broaderthan this; they are succinctlysummarizedby Holmes 1986,1993, who provides a thorough and nuanced analysis of the form. She con-cludes that there is no single function that corresponds to the use of youknow, nor is there one gendered group that uses it more than another.Rather, all instances of you know "tie participants' turns together," "func-tion as verbal fillers," and "allude ... to the relevant knowledge of theaddressee in the context of [the] utterance"(1986:16). Beyond this, Holmescontends that you know is a signal of both speaker confidence and speakeruncertainty.She concludes: "Thereis no doubt about the fact thatyou knowmay be used primarily to appeal to the addressee for reassurance. It mayequally be used, however, as an 'intimacy signal' and as a positive politenessstrategy, expressing solidarity by generously attributing relevant knowledgeto the addressee"(1986:18). Chafe & Danielewicz (1987:105-6) assert (usingOstman 1981 to confirm their point) that you know is an "obvious measureof involvement with [one's] audience." Their study documents the presenceof you know in informal conversation, and its absence from formal speech,casual letter-writing, and formal lectures. The data presented here supportthese claims, and offer a discourse-basedanalysisof what may triggerthe useof you know in friendly same-sex conversation.In the examples to be presented,taken from the speechof both female and8 Language in Society 25:1 (1996)


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male pairs, you know can be seen as a device that effectively connects thespeaker to the hearer. This interactive function seemed to vary little from oneconversational segment to another; what changed was the frequency ofoccurrence - brought about, we believe, by the participants' need to workin concert to produce a discussion on an externally assigned topic of conver-sation. This communicative behavior, manifested by both the women andmen in the sample, appears to reflect the speaker's desire for mutual orien-tation, especially in the CONSIDERED talk segment.These examples, which are representative of the sorts of utterances thatoccurred in all the conversations, show that, after an utterance containingyou know by one speaker, the other speaker often follows with an explicityeah, just like ... , ora clear continuation of the topic initiated by the otherspeakerin the immediatelypreceding utterance. (All these examples are takenfrom Part II of the conversations.)(1) Female pairA: Like it's not, I wouldn't call it bonding, but it's like, I don't know. It's more like prov-ing yourselves to each other.B: Yeah.A: It's their type of bonding, you know.B: Sure, I agree.A: Like the competition of it.

B: Um hum. I mean, if anybody's bonding, it would be two females who were chattingover coffee about real life problems, you know.A: Yeah.(2) Female pairA: um, I know. It's good. I don't know. It's different like there's a lot of kinds of friend-ships, you know, likeB: like when I talk to my best friend Jen, it's interesting. Because the two of us, youknow, we can talk about guys, we can talk about stuff that's going on in our life,we can talk about, you know, soaps and school. It's, you know, it's just somethingI can, I feel like I can relate more to her than I do toA: anyone else.(3) Male pairA: Right, no but I mean, like say we were talking about sex, right? They would be moresensitive to each other's feelings and the guys would just like, hey, look what I didtoday, you know.B: Brag about it more.A: Yeah and you know the guys take it like, they won't take it as serious as the girlswould.B: Yeah.(4) Male pairA: Two people I know of, two guys that, you know if I don't talk to them for two years,I could call them up and you know it wouldB: it would still be the sameA: no big deal.B: Yeah.A: We're still friends. It doesn't matter if you don't keep in touch all the time. It doesn'tmatter this; it doesn't matter that. And that's, that's kind of you know like myfriend Mike. You know. He's lived in town. There's no reason I, I justB: Yeah.A: We just haven't gotten together for a long time.

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You know is thus a tool that works to reinforce mutual involvement in theconversation, whether as an expression of speaker certainty or uncertainty,and assists in the joint productionof conversation.It is therefore understand-able that 897o of the occurrences of you know in the data reported on heretake place in Part II of the conversations, where the speakers are most self-consciously engaged in talkingto one another. In this segment, speaker turnsare longer, phatic communication through question use increases, and agreater amount of attention to a single topic is evident. It appearsthat bothfemale and male speakers are using you know to maintain close contact withone another as they attempt to jointly construct a reply to an assigned topicof conversation. It is the task at hand, the imposed face-to-face encounter -and perhaps the nature of the subject itself, a discussion of friendship -which best explains the frequent occurrence and the function of you knowin these conversations. Thus a discourse-based analysis, unlike previouslyproposed explanations for the frequency of you know in the speech ofwomen (gender, sex, hesitancy, or conversational workload), provides anadequate explanation for the findings reported here.THE USE OF QUESTIONS

Question use is another linguisticdevice which has been stereotypicallyasso-ciated with the conversationalstyle of women. Lakoff 1975, among the firstto claim that women used more questions than men, declared that womenuse tag questions as a hedging device, and that women have a greater ten-dency to use rising intonation on declaratives, thereby turning their state-ments into questions. As withyou know, this usage was interpretedas a signof women's hesitancyand societalpowerlessness.Lakoff's claims, which werenot based on empirical data, inspired a significant amount of researchthatproduced conflicting conclusions about tag and other question usage (Dubois& Crouch 1975, Brouwer et al. 1979, O'Barr & Atkins 1980, Holmes 1984a,Preisler 1986, Cameron et al. 1989, Coates 1989).In other important researchthat subsequentlyformed the basis for widelyaccepted beliefs about women's question-asking behavior, Fishman 1978,1980 found that, in naturallyoccurring conversations between three hetero-sexual couples, women asked many more questions than men. As with youknow, she interpretedthis usage as evidence of the disproportionateconver-sational workload carriedby women when interactingwith men. The differ-ential use of questions by women and men has continued to be a muchdiscussed topic, fueled most recently by Tannen's (1990b) assertions aboutwomen and men's different communicative styles, where question-asking isseen as part of women's cooperative speaking style and as a device for shar-ing the floor.10 Language in Society 25:1 (1996)


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Despite the limited data on question use by women and men and thepaucity of definitive empirical evidence to support one of these three inter-pretations over the others - hesitancy, conversational workload, or cooper-ativeness - many linguists still accept the claim that, as a part of a femalespeaking style, women ask more questions than men. Our treatmentof ques-tions demonstrates, to the contrary, "the absolute necessity of consideringforms in their linguistic and social context, not in general, and suggest that[researchers]should regard multifunctionality as the unmarked case" (Cam-eron et al. 1989:77). We believe that questions constitute another discoursephenomenon that has been incorrectly associated with gender, and has beeninaccurately assumed to serve one invariant communicative function for aparticular group of speakers.Our corpus consists of 787 questions uttered by the 16 different speakersin the eight 35-minuteconversations described earlier. We used syntactic andintonational criteriato identify utterances as questions. Six types of questionswere found in the corpus:(a) Yes/no questions characterizedby simple subject-auxiliary inversion;these included reduced yes/no questions where the auxiliary is deleted andalternative questions.(b) WH-questions.(c) Full declaratives and other syntactic phrases with a final phrase rise.(d) Tag questions, including both canonical (or auxiliary) tags, e.g. Theydidn't hit you, did they? and invariant(or lexical) tags, e.g. That's whereyoulived, right?(e) WH-questions, followed by a phrase with a final rise in tag position,e.g. What's today's date? the 25th?, sometimes called "WH-questionsplusguess" constructions (Norrick 1992).(f) Questionsof the formHow/ What about ..., e.g. What about whenwomen get older, like when they get married and stuff?A detailed analysis of the distribution of questions reveals the following:(a) Every speaker in this sample asked 25 questions or more during thethree parts of this conversation.(b) In five out of the eight conversational pairs, one member of the dyadused questions more often than the other.(c) The frequency of occurrence of questions varied with the type of talkof the three different segments of the conversations studied.(d) All speakers varied their usage of questions in comparable ways andin accordance with the different types of talk.One of our goals in studying same-sex pairs of friends was to investigatehow questions are used when sex was controlled for, and to examine whether

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TABLE2. Totals and percentages of questionsby pair and by sexFemale Male

1. A: 26 B: 45 = 71 5. A: 54 B: 65 = 119(37Wo) (63Wo) (45%0) (55%)2. A: 84 B: 41 = 125 6. A: 43 B: 38 = 81(67%) (33%) (53%) (47%)3. A: 58 B: 64 = 122 7. A: 27 B: 52 = 79(48%) (52%) (34%) (66%)4. A: 27 B: 59= 86 8. A: 65 B: 39= 104

(31%) (69%) (63%) (37%)Total 404 Total 383

question-asking is, as previously claimed, predominantly a characteristicofwomen's style. It is therefore worth noting the frequency of occurrence ofquestions in these conversational dyads. Table 2 shows the number of ques-tions utteredby each participantand by each conversationalpair, and it pro-vides the combined total used by women and by men. Questions occur ineach of the eight conversations, and they are used by every speaker. Thefemale pairs used between 71 and 125 questions each; the male pairs askedfrom 79 to 119 questions. The women used a total of 404 questions and themen uttered 383 questions. These figures indicate that question-asking can-not be generalized as being more characteristic of women's conversationalstyle than men's.4The numbers in Table 2 also show that, in five of the pairs (three femaleand two male), one speaker uses questions more often than the other. Forexample, in female pairs 2 and 4, and in male pair 7, one speaker uses ap-proximately double the number of questions than the other; in female pair1 and male pair 8, one speakerasks nearlyone-thirdmore questions than theother. These data suggest that, in informal same-sex dyadic conversation, itmay be common for one conversational partner to use more questions thanthe other, and that this is not a communicative practice unique to women incross-sex conversations. Since our data show that one member of a conver-sational pair frequently asks more questions, and because an imbalanceoccurs in both female and male dyads, neither sex nor gender differences canbe responsible for the imbalance. Once again, these data confirm our con-tention that it is misleading to assert correspondences between a large het-erogeneous category of people (e.g. all women or all men) and a complexdiscourse feature, such as question use.Note also that past researchwould predict that, in dyadic conversations,a large number of questions by one speaker would be coupled with a large12 Languagen Society25:1 (1996)


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1X0Legend

* Parti:28Ques0f80 Partl: 59Questions[II Pat II:00Questions

2060

PatI: afdlTalk 15 iin.)Part:ptneousakOmin.) ParII:MokTa k(6-1l0min.)FIGURE 3: Distributions of questions by type of talk, adjusted for time.

number of you knows by that same speaker, based on the assumption thatthe speaker was displaying a particularly female style, a powerless style(O'Barr & Atkins 1980), or a cooperative style. However, this generalizationis contradicted by the data presented here. We find that, in only four of theconversations (2 female and 2 male) does the speaker who uses more youknows also ask a greater number of questions. In the other four dyads, thespeakerwho uses the greaternumberof you knows eitherasks approximatelythe same number of questions as the other speaker, or fewer.Examining the distribution of questions across the three parts of the con-versation (spontaneous, considered, and collaborative), we found within eachpart, just as with you know, that male and female speakers all followed thesame pattern. Our results show a non-random distribution, with 4207o f allthe questions occurring in Part I, 3307o n Part II, and 25% in Part III.5That is, the first, spontaneous talk portion of the interaction produced manymore questions than either of the other two parts. The distribution, adjustedfor time, is 45%on Part I, 2401on Part II, and 3107on Part III; see Figure 3.Our data again establish that neither sex nor gender is a salient variable inthese conversations, and that discourse requirementsunderlie the use of par-ticular linguistic forms. Speakers adapt the number and functional type ofquestions they ask to the demands of the particularconversational situation.The same general patternsare followed by all eight pairs, with women andmen adjustingtheir question use in strikinglysimilarways. The rate of ques-Language in Society 25:1 (1996) 13


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1X--LegendFeniae

80-g Male

40-

20

PitI: osideredak15n.)Pat :p uUSTaIk1On.) P III:btoe aIk6Omh)FIGURE 4: Distribution of questions by type of talk and by sex.

tioning, adjusted for time, is greater for both women and men in Part I ofthe conversation,and the lowest in Part II. Consistent with the patternfoundfor you know, these data show that women and men speaking in same-sexpairs respond to the differences in the talk situation in exactly the same way;see Figure4. Once again, the only change in the speaking situation, betweenone part of the conversation and the others, is the requirementsof the talkitself. It is these requirements that govern the frequency of occurrence ofquestions. We conclude that, unless conversational participantsare observedin several different talk situations, with other variablescontrolled, assertionsabout characteristics of their speaking style are suspect.Not only did the rate of questioning change in the same way for all speak-ers in the three parts of the conversation, but the functional type of ques-tions being asked differed as well. Each section of the conversation had adistinct distribution of questioncategories.Our earlier work (Freed & Green-wood 1992, Greenwood & Freed 1992, Freed 1994) describes in detail howeach question in our corpus was separately identified, and then categorizedalong an information continuum. Questions were found to fall into fourbroad categories- dependingon their functional use within the conversation,and on the type of informationsought or conveyed by the speaker.Our anal-ysis makes it apparent that previousresearch which casually groups all ques-14 Language in Society 25:1 (1996)


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tions, as if they were a single invariant discourse phenomenon, should bere-evaluated.Treatingquestions as equivalent and identical in conversationalfunction fails to reveal the complexity and diverse pragmatic use of theseforms.For the purposes of this analysis, questions which sought factual informa-tion about the world or about the lives of the speakers were designatedEXTERNALquestions. These questions asked about information that was exter-nal to the conversational setting and/or was outside of the circumstances ofthe conversation. They included invitations, factual queries, and deictic infor-mation questions; e.g. What is today's date?, Do you want to go to the mov-ies tonight?, Did you watch 90210 last night?, Have you heard from her?Questions which solicited information about the current and ongoing con-versation were labeled TALKquestions. These were questions which asked forclarification, confirmation, or repetition of something said in the conversa-tion. Included here were questions like Oh, he's remarried?, What did yousay? You mean you asked him out?, Really? This category overlaps withwhat Schegloff et al. 1977 call "other-initiated repairs."Questions which seemed designed to continue the conversationalflow werelabeled RELATIONAL questions because they usually had as their basis theshared relationship and shared knowledge that existed between the speakers;e.g., Do you remember my math teacher?, Why do you think they did that?,So what do you talk about?, Do you know what I mean?, Do you knowanother thing I was going to say? Questions designated elsewhere as "con-versational maintenance" questions (Maltz & Borker 1982) fall into thiscategory.Finally, questions which contained information already known to thespeaker, through which the speakerconveyed (ratherthan sought) informa-tion to the hearer, were categorized as EXPRESSIVE STYLEquestions. Theseincluded didactic questions, rhetorical questions, questions used for humor,self-directed questions, and questions used in reported speech; e.g., What'sshe going to do about it anyway?, Why'd I say that?, Who knows?, andShould we sing? (looking at the tape recorder).Figure 5 shows that the types of questionsasked were different in each partof the conversation. In Part I, when the speakers were talking about topicswhich they themselves chose, there is a preponderance of EXTERNAL ques-tions, 350o, and relatively few RELATIONALquestions, 130Wo.he distributionis quite different in Part II, in which we asked the speakers to focus on thetopic that we assigned. In this part, the numberof EXTERNALquestions dropsto 8Wo,whereas the numberof RELATIONAL questions rises to 45%. Questionswhich refer to the TALKitself also drop from 28% in Part I to 80/o n Part II.The number of EXPRESSWVESTYLEquestions rises from 24% in Part I to 39%in Part II. In Part III, when the speakers were filling out a questionnaire,we find still another pattern of distribution of question types: here the num-Language in Society 25:1 (1996) 15


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Legend

Palak CnsdreTak(1.

80 EdtiQuen

40 - _

20-~0__~

Paq1:ms TalkI5min.)Padl:p ,n TalkI0min.) Pad11:olborabvealk6.O in.)FIGURE 5: Distribution of question types by type of talk, all speakers.

ber of EXTERNAL questions rises to a high of 54% - more than half of all thequestionsasked in this section of the conversation- and the RELATIONAL ques-tions drop to 9'70.Again, EXPRESSIVE STYLE questions make up 26% of thequestions used. In fact, the use of such questions, through which speakersconvey rather than seek information (see Freed 1994), remains the most con-stant throughout the three parts of the conversation.The following are examples of the sorts of questions that most frequentlyoccurred in each of the three parts. We present one exchange from a femalepair and one exchange from a male pair to illustrate each of the major func-tional categories of questions for each part of the conversation.

TALK questions (underlined),which providedthe speakerswith the oppor-tunity to confirm or verify the preceding utterance of the other speaker orclarify what the other speaker meant, occurred most frequently in Part I.(5) Male pairA: I heard she's a flight attendant.B: Oh, is that what she is? Okay. I know it was, had something to do with the airlines.A: That's what Schultz said. He said he probably never sees her.B: She speaks French and he speaks German.A: Fred speaks German?

16 Language in Society 25:1 (1996)


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(6) Female pairA: If we could get a ride to Somerset, I could like definitely drop you at Newark.B: Newark, not Newark. New Brunswick.A: Well, likeB: Yeah. Somerset's right near New Brunswick?A: I'm right up the street from Rutgers. My aunt's trying to get me to move down thereso bad, She's like, "Why don't you transfer?"B: Really?A: Move into this building. She pays. Harrison Towers on Eastern Ave.B: Oh oh oh my god. You're on Eastern Ave? That's right there. Holy shit.

RELATIONALuestions, whereby speakers engage one another throughphatic questioning, by focusing one another's attention, or by requestingelaboration of a statement, occurred most frequently in Part II.(7) Female pairA: You know, it's weird. Remember the night that John went down to talk to Kevin?B: Oh yeah.A: They never, I don't think they ever met each other. Maybe for five minutes, they meteach other once.B: They've said hello before.A: Yeah, and that night, John came back with a total feeling of like Kevin. You knowwhat I mean? Like Kevin opened up to him? But only with alcohol.B: Oh yeah.(8) Male pairA: Well, that's male bonding, you know.B: It's male bonding.A: It's like what what is the equivalent? I meanB: Is there a female equivalent?A: If she had sisters, is there a way that like, girls punch each other and get on each otherand like, you know, hit each other?B: I doubt it.

EXPRESSIVESTYLEquestions are the other functional category that occurredwith considerablefrequencyin Part II. These are questions that typically didnot elicit answers, but were used by speakers to convey information of theirown to the hearers. Again, these include rhetorical questions, self-directedquestions, and questions from reported speech.(9) Male pairA: Yeah, it's like, wh ... where where do these irrational fears come from? I mean, youknow, like you have to think, does, uh, society say, well, this is going to happen?You know and men can just go out and grab any woman they want if they'reunprotected or you know.B: Yeah, wellA: Is that the culture we live in?(10) Female pairA: Oh, um, I don't know cause I have guy friends that are un- that are not relationshipsB: not sexual re-A: They're not sexual in nature.B: Um hum.A: But it, you know, it is hard though cause I mean, you won't, like, you know, youwonder, you know, do they like me more than a friend? Are they friends withme cause, you know, they want something more?

B: Do you feel like that? That ...Language in Society 25:1 (1996) 17


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LegendExrnaluestons

E S1leQuesbons

PatI:onsideredalk15min.)Pad: pontneousalk10min.) PadlI:otIabrativeak610 in.)FIGURE 7: Distribution of question types by type of talk, male speakers.

and men (Goodwin 1980, Maltz & Borker 1982, Tannen 1990b). Women, itis thought, are socialized to actively engage their conversational partners,whereas men have been taught to display their verbal uniqueness. The slightdifferences between question-asking style that we observe may well resultfrom the fact that, in our gender-differentiated society, men typically findthemselvesin the sort of talk situationswhich elicit RELATIONAL uestions lessoften than many women; instead, they are in settings which encourage themto express their individuality.6 We wish to emphasize, however, that thecomparable use of questions by this group of women and men when speak-ing in identical talk situations is of prime importance, and that the similari-ties between the four pairs of women and the four pairs of men are morestriking than any differences.CONCLUSION

Our investigation of you know and of the use of questions in conversationsbetween same-sex pairs of friends has substantiated the need to re-evaluatesome of the principal categories of analysis that have been previously20 Language in Society 25:1 (1996)


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accepted in language and gender studies. In particular, these data demon-strate that a gendered conversational style cannot be defined by countingindividual linguistic forms without regard to situated context: the contextitself, the task undertaken, the topic, and other discourse variables may beresponsible for the forms that occur. Moreover, we have shown that, if sin-gle linguistic forms like you know or broad categories like questions aretreated as unidimensional forms - related to a single, predetermined func-tion - the result is linguistically and socially simplistic, and therefore uninfor-mative. Our findings on the distribution of you know and the use ofquestions in same-sex friendly dyadic conversation show that it is the specificrequirements associated with the talk situation that are responsible for elic-iting or suppressing specific discourse forms, not the sex or gender of thespeakers, or some abstract notion about the relationship between the speak-ers, or their group membership. It is the demands of the conversational tasksthat control the type of speech used by these women and men.Interestingly,in the conversations analyzed for this study, both the femaleand male speakers (paired by friendship) engage in a conversationalstyle rem-iniscent of what Coates 1989, 1991 calls cooperative speech (see also Holmes1993, Coates 1996). As Coates explains, "at the heart of co-operativeness isa view of speakers collaborating in the production of text" (1989:118). Shecharacterizes his mannerof speakingas being markedby mutual topic devel-opment, frequent use of minimal responses, frequent instances of simulta-neous speech, and the interactive use of devices such as you know. In Coates'work, this communicative style is specifically described as characteristic ofinformal conversations between female friends.Although the present study did not undertake an analysis of all the fea-tures to which Coates 1989 referred, the findings related to the use of ques-tions and of you know indicate that the manner of speaking described ascooperative can be appropriately applied to both the women and men whoparticipated in this study. The conversational tasks presented to the speak-ers essentially required them "to collaborate in the production of a text"(Coates 1989:118). Thus, when considering speaking styles (whether coop-erative or powerless), we need to guard against overgeneralization.We arguethat it is wrong to characterize all women and no men as powerless or inse-cure speakers, and that it is equally wrong to portrayall women and no menas engaging in cooperative talk.The findings of the work presented here clearly indicate that the type oftalk, not the sex or gender of the speaker, motivates and thus explains thelanguage forms that occur in the speech of the female and male pairs stud-ied. We might ask, however, whether the effect of the type of talk is moreapparentunder these controlled conditions than in everyday naturallyoccur-ring discourse. There is no question that, in our gender-differentiated soci-ety, women and men are often encouraged to engage in different activitiesLanguage in Society 25:1 (1996) 21


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and to be involved in distinct practices; as a result, women and men may notroutinelyparticipate n equivalenttypes of discourse. That is, we have no rea-son to doubt that some differencesin the everydayspeechof women and menmay result from distinct socialization practices for girls and boys, and fromvarious gender-assignedactivities;women may engage in cooperative talk ina wider range of settings than men. Yet we believe that, just as the commu-nicative style of women has been overly stereotyped as cooperative, so toothe verbal style of men has been overgeneralized as competitive and lackingin cooperativeness. We are not convinced that the sort of verbal behaviorfound in these conversations is absent from men's natural speech, and wecontinue to object to the characterization of women and/or men as havingdistinct conversational styles, when these differences are generalized to allwomen and all men in all contexts and situations. As Eckert has argued(1989:253):

gender does not have a uniform effect on linguisticbehavior for the com-munity as a whole, across variables, or for that matter for any individual.Gender, like ethnicityand class and indeed age, is a social constructionandmay enter into any of a variety of interactions with other social phenom-ena. And although sociolinguists have had some success in perceiving thesocial practice that constitutes class, they have yet to think of gender interms of social practice.

It is our hope that the conclusions from this study will motivate researchersin sociolinguistics, particularly n language and genderstudies, to direct theirwork away from simple correlations between linguistic form and communi-cative function, away from dependence on global binary categorizations ofhuman beings, and toward a more nuanced analysis of gender and its inter-action with other linguistic and social phenomena.

NOTES* Earlier versions of this article were presented at the American Association of Applied Lin-guistics in Seattle (1992), in Atlanta (1993), and at the 1992 BerkeleyWomenand LanguageCon-ference. We thank the director of the Psychoeducational Center at Montclair State Universityfor allowing us to use their facilities for taping these conversations. We also thank Marc Freed-Finnegan for technical computer assistance.l In this article we have not attempted to resolve the important conceptual distinctionbetween "sex" and "gender."As the termgender has become the commonly accepted one in lan-guage and gender research, we have used gender when referringto speech styles thought to beassociated with women and men. We use the term sex to refer to the biological categories ofwomen and men; and we use both terms in cases where the distinction is blurred. This usageis intended to alert our readers to the fact that the issue remains unresolved.2 For the purposes of this analysis, we considered only those instances of you know whichoccurredas separateand intonationallydiscrete units. We did not count as instancesof you knowthe initial part of such reducedyes/no questions as You know whereI'm going? (from Do youknow whereI'm going?) or You know what?(from Do you know what?). In this we differ from

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the analysis proposed by Schiffrin 1987, who considers both sorts of occurrences of you knowtogether. In our view, these forms are syntactically and functionally dissimilar.3 In female pair 1, Speaker B uses more cases of you know than any other woman or man.In fact, this one speaker, who utters you know 138 times in 35 minutes, accounts for 45% ofall instances of you know uttered by the eight female speakerscombined. The next highestoccur-rence of you know is the speech of a man, speaker A from pair 7, who uses the form 71 times.Consider the strikingly different conclusions that would be drawn if a different female pair,matchedfor age and length of friendship,were substitutedfor pair 1. In another such pair, whichwe designate as la, one woman uses 10 instances of you know, and the other uses 61. If we sub-stituted this female pair for pair 1, the combined number of occurrences of you know for alleight pairs would come to 510 instances of you know, instead of 612; women would be shownto use the form 207 (not 310) times, and men 302 times. Based on this other set of numbers,we concluded in an earlier study (Freed & Greenwood 1993) that men used you know one-thirdmore often than women. At that time, we stated that our findings were consistentwith the num-bers reported by Holmes 1986, who found that, in same-sex samples, men used you know twiceas often as women.4When we first reported on this analysis of questions in 1992 (Freed & Greenwood 1992,Greenwood & Freed 1992), we found that the total number of questions asked by women wasslightly higher than those asked by men. Our numbers were then based on inclusion of femalepair la described in note 3. It was our impression that one woman in this pair skewed the results,because she used 133 questions, which was 49 more questions that the next highest questioner.(The range of questions for all other speakers was 27 to 84 per individual.) As we have stated,when we examined and compared the speech of this pair with that of female pair 1, matchedfor age and length of friendship, we found that the occurrence of questions in 1 was consistentwith that of all the other dyads. However, one of the women in 1 used an unusually high num-ber of you knows. We were obliged to choose between these two female pairs, each of whichincluded one individualwhose speech was markedly diosyncratic.We chose to reporton 1 ratherthan la, because la would have forced conclusions that were not clearly substantiated by theother speakers.5 If the number of questions asked in these conversations occurred in a random distribution(adjusted for the different length of time of each segment), we would expect 30%0 o occur inPart I, 4407 in Part II, and 26%on Part III.6 There is a considerable literature (Aries 1976, Edelsky 1981, Tannen 1990a, Bischoping1993, Johnstone 1993) that explores sex differences in conversational topic choice. The discus-sion goes beyond the scope of this article, but may be related to the issue raised here.

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Women, Men, And Type of Talk