Language and Woman's Place by Lakoff Robin Tolmach; Bucholtz Mary;

Author:Lakoff, Robin Tolmach; Bucholtz, Mary;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2004-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

PART II: CONCEPTS

5

Power, Lady, and Linguistic Politeness in Language and Woman’s Place

JANET HOLMES

Robin Lakoff is undoubtedly the linguist who has most profoundly influenced the direction of language and gender research worldwide—most especially perhaps in its infancy, with her groundbreaking article (1973) and book Language and Woman’s Place (LWP) (1975). But even thirty years later, as this volume testifies, she continues to contribute insightfully and incisively to the field. LWP addressed two fundamental dimensions of the interaction of language and gender, namely the language used by and about women, dimensions which have continued to attract the attention of researchers and which have increasingly been regarded as simply different facets of one issue—the role of language in the construction of gender identity (see Holmes 2001).

Lakoff’s provocative claims about the ways in which American women spoke compared to men generated a huge amount of quantitative research in the late 1970s and early 1980s—for the most part, interestingly, by nonlinguists. Sociologists, psychologists, and researchers in communication and many related areas of social science embraced with enthusiasm Lakoff’s hypotheses (which she offered as a “goad to further research” [LWP 40], little realizing how successfully they would serve this function). These researchers diligently counted women’s and men’s uses of a range of specific linguistic forms, some of which Lakoff had provided as examples, but many of which she had never mentioned.

When the dust settled, a number of sociolinguists and discourse analysts stepped in and identified a number of misunderstandings about the nature of language which underlay and invalidated much of the bean-counting research (see, e.g., Aries 1996; Crawford 1995; Holmes 1984, 1995; Talbot 1998). Most important, they pointed out that Lakoff’s hypotheses about a range of superficially distinct linguistic forms (such as stress, tag questions, and modal adverbs) were unified by an underlying analysis of two basic pragmatic functions (namely, hedging and boosting), while by contrast the disparate linguistic forms that became the focus of quantification (typically lexical items easily identified by a computer program that ignored their different meanings) had no such claims to coherence. Moreover, Lakoff’s comments on the relevance of social context were honored more in the breach than the observance. Indeed, many early researchers completely overlooked the fact that the underlying coherence of LWP as a whole was grounded in a fundamental political argument about power and politeness.

Lakoff’s reflections on politeness were published several years before those of Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), and she anticipated their influential theory of politeness in a number of interesting ways. First, Lakoff posed the crucial question facing those interested in analyzing meaning in contexts of use (pragmatics) as opposed to meaning in the abstract (semantics)—namely, in everyday real interaction, why don’t people follow Grice’s (1975) “Rules of Conversation”? “Why not always speak logically, directly, and to the point?” (LWP 93). One reason, she proposed, was concern for the rules of politeness. Lakoff’s three rules of politeness have obvious parallels with Brown and Levinson’s concepts of negative and positive politeness:

1. Formality: keep aloof.

2. Deference: give options.

3. Camaraderie: show sympathy.

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