Introduction
Conversation may be viewed as the way individuals socialize, as well as the method they form and maintain connections. It is an important element of our daily life, and how we use language determines how we are seen. It is thus interesting to study language use in order to say a little about culture overall, and this is the idea underneath communication theory, a sociolinguistic and sociological form of analysis that seek to address questionnaire about how we use language in a variety situation through thorough analysis of discussions. The purpose of this study is to discuss potential distinctions in how men and women reply lots of questions in news and current events interview sessions. In 13 encounters, the research looks at the use of hedging language and limited reply, different techniques for refusing replies, and unfavorable references of other politicians and people to see whether there are any variations between male and female respondents. The following topics are addressed in this article: Are there any variations in language use between men and women in an interview context, and if so, how can these disparities be tried to explain?
Literature Review
With the broad expansion of feminist work in many academic domains, it is not unexpected that the link between language variation has gotten a lot of attention in recent years. Researches have concentrated on everything from distinct syntactic and semantic, phonetic, or lexicogrammatically forms of language to elements of communication theory, such as topic nomination and regulate, disruptions, and other interpersonal communication features, in a try to go further than “folk linguistic” presumptions about how men and women use dialect (the presumption that women are “friendly and chatty,” for instance). While some studies have concentrated solely on the description of disparities, others have attempted to demonstrate how linguistic differences both represent and replicate social differences (Coates, 2015).
Some researches, nevertheless, have taken a different route, focusing on how same-sex groups develop particular sorts of interaction rather than on power in made by mixing encounters. Maltz and Borker (1982) constructed lists of what they defined as men’s and women’s linguistic traits in typical research of this sort. They contended that these interaction standards were learned in same-sex groups rather than mixed-sex ones, and that the problem therefore is one of (sub-)cultural misinterpretation rather than socioeconomic injustice. Much of this study has centered on parallels between, say, men’s competitive conversational tone and women’s collaborative conversational approach (Giudice, 2015).
The research is based on an examination of 13 interactions with British politicians conducted for the BBC One show The Andrew Marr Show in 2013 and 2014. The data utilized for analysis are interview extracts and records, and the research use conversational analytical methods to thoroughly investigate the replies in connection to communicative occurrences and approaches.
Analysis
Verbosity:
Despite the stereotype that women speak more than males, research have proven that it is the other way round (Swacker 1975). In practically every setting, males speak more than women. This does not appear to be the case when evaluating the interviews used in this study. Female interviewers talk 68 percent of the entire interview time on average in this interview environment, when there are relatively few gaps, i.e., there is virtually always someone speaking. For male interviewees, the number is 59 percent. This implies that women will spend more time answering questions than males, or that the interviewer will allow them more time. In The Andrew Marr Show conversations, women are more verbose than males.
Male interviewees’ interviews were usually lengthier. The average interview duration for males was 15 minutes and 28 seconds, whilst the average initial interview for female interviewers was 8 minutes and 14 seconds, suggesting that men can and do speak more than women.
Hedging
According to research, women employ more hedging terms than males. As previously stated, hedges are grammatical constructs intended to indicate ambiguity or to decrease the effect of a statement. The interviews contained 297 hedging formulations. The phrase had for use in a setting where it did reflect some doubt or hesitancy, i.e., when the speaker could’ve used a phrase even without hedge and the utterances would have given the same knowledge. In the recording, Harriet Hartman says, and I repeat, “well, I hope they’ll listen to the reasoning and be (0.3) very much in support of it.” What is crucial, I believe, is that parliamentarians will agree on the selection.”
In the instance above, Harriet Hartman is discussing modifications in Labour Party member policies and employs the hedging word I suppose, which was the most often used hedge identified in the recordings, to diminish the effect of her statement. Women utilized 116 of the total 297 hedging phrases discovered, while men used 181. In these surveys, there is no significant difference in the incidence of hedges between men and women, yet there appears to be a far wider spectrum of usage amongst female respondents.
Designing Answers
In terms of gender disparities, we can see that women answer almost as many questions as they resist, and outwardly resist nearly as many questions as they silently resist. Men, on the other hand, respond fewer questions than women and discreetly refuse more queries than they publicly resist. Even though males were asked 24 more questions than women, women had more outwardly resistive responses. Although the data demonstrate considerable disparities between men and women, it is equally important to highlight that there are many individual variances between the two gender groups.
WOMEN | Answering | Overturning | Covert |
YES/NO Questions | 31 | 16 | 20 |
Other Questions | 3 | 5 | 3 |
Total | 34(43%) | 21(27%) | 23(30%) |
MEN | Answering | Overturning | Covert |
YES/NO Questions | 31 | 13 | 36 |
Other Questions | 7 | 3 | 11 |
Total | 38(38%) | 16(16%) | 47(46%) |
Rachel Reeves, for instance, exhibits little overt opposition yet prefers to oppose most queries posed secretly. Natalie Bennett, on the other hand, readily answers practically all of her queries. When women openly oppose queries, they tend to point out weaknesses in the inquiries or clear up misconceptions about the topic of the query. This allows them to remain silent while not answering the queries. Here are instances, the first of which Natalie Bennett discusses environmental stewardship:
JL: Which is more important, income development (0.3) or environmental protection?
NB: This is a completely false contradiction since what we need to do is make investments like (0.4) house insulation and renewable energy.
In the second, Harriet Harman responds to a question regarding Labour Party trade unionists:
- TH and AM The activists are m m surer to appear in undoubtedly (0.4) then that> is going to shift the labour party more towards a trade union orientation, it’s sort of (0.3) night following day isn’t it?
- HH, I’m not sure what you mean by ey trade union orientation.
In the first case, Bennett rejects the inquiry as a whole and indicates that she has been unable to answer it because of its dichotomous structure, whereas Harman criticizes both the structure of Marr’s inquiry and the issue itself, as she leverages his phrasing and his words versus his.
Minimal Response
The investigation has included the use of minimum reaction, i.e. extralinguistic elements that convey faith in the current speaker, in addition to the results reported above. According to prior research (Strodtbeck & Mann 1956), women utilize less minimum reaction than males and in more diversified ways. All through the interview sessions, all female IEs employ both verbal or nonverbal limited responses to the interviewer’s questions, primarily by noddings, but also by saying yeah or I agree. Male IEs usually seldom nod to convey agreement or approval, and only David Cameron employs verbal limited answer to show agreement, like in the instance below:
- AM I-If I travel to America, I get to have a scrap of paper that I have to rip off part of so that they know I’m leaving again.
- DC, yes h.
- No, we do not have that system.
The distinctions discovered in the investigation reveal that women feel more obligated to keep the discussion going by urging the IR to constantly talk until he is done. That isn’t always the case, since female IEs may not always nod or remark when the IR is speaking, and frequently disrupt the IR, but there is a greater inclination among women to shield the other person’s unfavorable face, demonstrating that women are more preoccupied with courtesy than males.
Conclusion
This research looked into probable discrepancies in how female and male panellists answered queries on the BBC One show The Andrew Marr Show. The goal was to examine various elements of responding queries in a media interview and find difference between groups using conversation analysis. First and foremost, it was discovered that much more males were questioned in the program throughout the time range employed for interviewing selection, and the bulk of the lengthier conversations were conducted with men. However, it was shown that female interviewees consume a larger percentage of overall interview time. They talk for an average of 68 percent of the overall interview time, compared to 59 percent for men.
The research looked at individual interviews and videos to look for hedging gestures, minimum reaction, and resisting strategies. There was no substantial difference in the use of hedging indicating ambiguity between the 2 categories, nor was there any variation in the types of hedges employed. One thing that was discovered is that men exhibit more assurance than women. Minimal reaction was observed in both verbal or nonverbal forms, while female interviewers provided considerably more input, particularly nonverbal response such as smiling, which was virtually never observed in men respondents.
Several outcomes were discovered while looking at response resistant, i.e., if and how the respondents did not reply the questions raised. To begin, it was discovered that the great majority of queries were yes/no in nature. Furthermore, it was shown that respondents refused nearly two-thirds of all queries, a finding that contradicted earlier research. Furthermore, men answered easier questions than women and utilized hidden opposition more frequently than women. Female respondents tended to utilize overt resistance, that is, bringing out their opposition or articulating why an answer could be provided. This suggests that women are much more preoccupied with civility in a conversational setting than their male counterparts.
Furthermore, the study that looked at the tactic of shifting blame, which was achieved in the study via negative comments of other organizations or political individuals. This method was somewhat prevalent, but substantially more typically adopted by male respondents; males accounted for more than two-thirds of all unfavorable references. This data was reviewed again, this time with an emphasis on courtesy, and the judgment was reached that women, in order to care about their own appearance, appreciate other people’s faces to a larger amount.
Lastly, while there were numerous individual disparities among the respondents, the study’s findings do indicate to a pattern in linguistic variation use amongst men and women in news interview situations. Future research should explore more closely at the sorts of questions that IEs prefer to avoid, both explicitly and surreptitiously, to identify probable distinctions and a more complex explanations for these variations. Furthermore, it would be interesting to examine if the trends discovered in this study involving a News Interview-situation can be noticed in other interview circumstances.
Reference
Maltz, D.N. and R.A. Borker (1982). “A cultural approach to male-female miscommunication.”
Coates, J. (2015). Women, men and language: A sociolinguistic account of gender differences in language. Routledge.
Del Giudice, M. (2015). Gender differences in personality and social behavior.
Swacker, M. (1975). The sex of the speaker as a sociolinguistic variable. Language and sex: Difference and dominance, 76-83.
Strodtbeck, F. L., & Mann, R. D. (1956). Sex role differentiation in jury deliberations. Sociometry, 19(1), 3-11.T