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Gender and Discourse Deborah Tannen (Professor of Linguistics, Professor of Linguistics, Georgetown University)

Gender and Discourse By Deborah Tannen (Professor of Linguistics, Professor of Linguistics, Georgetown University)

Summary

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.

Gender and Discourse Summary

Gender and Discourse by Deborah Tannen (Professor of Linguistics, Professor of Linguistics, Georgetown University)

Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand has been on the New York Times Best Seller list for more than three years (in cloth and paper) 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 an internationally known and highly respected scholar in the field of linguistics, she has now become widely known for her work on how language both reflects and perpetuates the relationships between men and women. 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 five of her scholarly essays-which provide a theoretical backdrop to her bestselling 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 analyses 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 leads inflexibly to 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 25 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.

Gender and Discourse Reviews

sets a standard for contemporary work on gender and discourse analysis...the empirical studies and critical reviews Tannen has collected (half of which are published here for the first time) cogently explain why we can no longer be satisfied with facile generalizations about differences between men's and women's discourse. * Discourse and Society *
if one does not have the five articles already copied from the original sources, this is a worthwhile book, especially now that it has been released in paperback * Salvatore Attardo, Youngstown State University, Discourse & Society, Vol. 8(3) 1997 *

About Deborah Tannen (Professor of Linguistics, Professor of Linguistics, Georgetown University)

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, and Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends.

Additional information

GOR001899392
9780195089752
0195089758
Gender and Discourse by Deborah Tannen (Professor of Linguistics, Professor of Linguistics, Georgetown University)
Used - Very Good
Hardback
Oxford University Press Inc
1994-10-13
216
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - Gender and Discourse