SEX PREFERIANTAL DIFFERENTIATION
This phenomenon in reflected in
this relative with which, men and women use the same lexical items or other
linguistic features. If, as is often asserted, female English speakers use
words such as lovely and nice more often than do male speakers, we can claim
that English speakers exhibit sex-preferential differentiation. Women have also
been shown to possess a greater variety of specific color terms than men in the
North American society. If this is true, it is probably due to the task
traditionally performed by women. There is no evidence to show that women have
more acute color perception than do men. Men are reputed to possess large
lexicons in areas associated with traditional male activities (such as
particular occupations and sport). These examples may appear stereotypical, but
they do reflect the sometime subtle, sometimes blatant, differences between the
activities of members of the two sexes. It is not the language that is exist
but the attitudes of its speakers.
Other differences between men’s
and women’s language in North American society are seen in women’s more
frequent use of politeness formulas. There are a number of ways in which
request (or commands) can be mitigated in English. Instead of simple saying to someone
open the window! We might say please open the window! Would you
please open the window! Could you open the window! Would you mind opening the
window? Do you fid it stuffy in here! And so on. These are all less direct
ways of requesting than the straightforward command and, it is claimed, would
like more likely be employed by women. Since we are discussing sex-preferential
usage here, we must emphasis that all of the above ways of phrasing a request
are available to all speakers but, it is asserted, are not equally selected by
male and female speakers.
In other areas, studies
have shown that women accompany speech by smiling more often do men. Smiling is
an example of paralanguage as it may accompany speech but is not a part of the
stream of speech. Other investigations have demonstrated that men in north
American society apparently interrupt the speech of women more than do women
that of men. Apparently, women more often than men use a conversational device
termed the ingressive affirmative, the somewhat inhaled yeah heard from
speakers of British and Canadian English.
