Learning with English

LI Xi
(School of Foreign Languages, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China)
Abstract: Men and women behave differently in applying the Politeness Principle. The fact can be shown in using slang, humor, approbation, sympathy and using euphemism. By comparing the gender-related differences in discourse from the four factors above, the paper focuses on the chief differences between men and women in speech behavior, and interprets the possible causes for the existence of such differences from the culture aspect.
Key words: gender differences; speech behavior; Politeness Principle; culture

Wife: “Put down that paper and listen to me!”
Husband: “I am listening to you.”
Wife: “No, you aren’t!”

This conversation happens between nearly all husbands and wives. Wives always think their husbands who are reading newspapers don’t pay attention to what they say. And the related idea is that their husbands don’t care about them. While in fact, their husbands do know what the wives said. But they express it in a way that is different from the wives. In our daily life, we can find that men and women behave differently in verbal communication, and these differences always cause misunderstanding and even fierce conflict. If people know how the differences happen and why they happen, men and women can better understand each other. In performing Politeness Principle, men and women behave differently in using slang, humor, expressing approbation, sympathy and using euphemism. Applying some theories of culture, we can explain some of these differences.

1. Gender-related Speech Behavior and Politeness Principle
In communication, speakers always hope to earn the respect from the counterparts. So speakers, according to the circumstance, need to use appropriate strategies to express politeness and obtain the best communicative effect. This is the fundamental content of the Politeness Principle. In Principles of Pragmatics, Leech (1983) concluded that the Politeness Principle includes six maxims: Tact maxim, Generosity maxim, Approbation maxim, Modesty maxim, Agreement maxim, Sympathy maxim.
Based on the maxims above, speakers try to shorten the psychological distance between each other and
consider the places of the counterparts to achieve the effect of praising the other partner and restraining oneself in the wording. At the same time, saving the speaker’s face is also an important part in the communication, so saving the faces of both sides in a conversation is the essence of Politeness Principle. Men and women behave differently in performing Politeness Principle. In general, women perform better in

LI Xi (1982- ), female, graduate student of School of Foreign Languages, Harbin Institute of Technology; research field: intercultural communication. Gender Differences in Speech Behavior
18 applying Politeness Principle. The fact can be observed from the following four aspects: using slang, humor, expressing approbation, sympathy and using euphemism.
1.1 Using slang
Slang includes swearing, vulgarism and jargon. When choosing a word, women tend to choose those without rhetoric, while men prefer not only neutral words but also words with low rhetorical style, such as vulgarism,
swearing and high rhetorical style words, such as terminology in politics and technology. So compared with women, men have a larger scope in choosing words to express their ideas.
Jespersen (1922) points out that women avoid swearing and dirty words instinctively, and their expression is refined, reserved and indirect. Coats (1986) also agrees that “women prefer polite words”. Compared with women, men use more swearing. The social gender identity considers impoliteness and not sticks to small points are the features of macro image. This notion encourages men to use slang. The fact that in English speaking countries, men prefer to pronounce nonstandard phonemes is an example.
The constitution of group is a factor that directly affects the use of slang. Here a form that was based on
Gomm’s experiment in1981 can show this.

Table 1 Incident of swearing in single sex and mixed groups
Single sex groups Mixed groups Total
Men 21 4 25
Women 7 2 9

From this table, we can find that swearing often happens in single sex group. In a mixed group, the use of swearing declines rapidly. That means in a mixed sex group, people behave more politely and intend to give others a better impression of their language image.

1.2 Humor
Humor is a kind of message whose ingenuity or verbal skill or incongruity has the power to evoke laughter. Before the new women’s movement began to discover female marginalization in language and speech (Lakoff, 1973), studies in sociology and psychoanalysis had documented that actively produced humor was harder to combine with female role expectations than with male ones (Coser, 1960). In humorous presentations, experiences are conversationally structured in such a way that people can laugh about them together. They contribute to entertainment and relaxation; but precisely because they want to amuse people they can covertly introduce serious matters so that the group is enabled to assure itself of similar experiences, values and perspectives. Negative experiences can be narratively presented in such a way that real relations are reversed in the humorous anecdote. For example, the powerful are exposed as fools, losers as the true victors, etc. In using this way, men can express that they despise others. Topics which are partly taboo, such as envy or certain physical problems can be dealt with allusively.
There are several reasons to explain why in speech behavior, men practice more humor than women. Firstly, social norms consider the part that practice humor should dominate the conversation. Men are always placed as the dominator, so man should be humorous. This stereotype hinders the development of humor of women.
Secondly, at the beginning of this paper, we have shown that women have relatively smaller scope in
choosing words in speech behavior. So it is difficult for women to deconstruct the routine of language, which is exactly the essence of humor. And when women do use humor in their speech, empirical and experimental Gender Differences in Speech Behavior 19 research show in various ways that women’s humor at their own expense is more strongly developed than men’s (Stocking & Zillmann, 1983; Pizzini, 1991).
Thirdly, in patriarchal gender norms, women’s powerless behavior is favored instead of powerful. Since
almost no female role is positively evaluated in society, women presumably develop greater role distance than men; this could affect their humor style.

1.3 Approbation and sympathy
According to Brown and Levinson (1978), human beings have two basic emotional needs in communication:
negative face wants and positive face wants. In conversation, sympathizing other’s plight and approbating other’s achievements are effective ways to save both negative and positive face. People can easily find approbation and sympathy in women’s speech.
Researchers find that women can satisfy the counterparts’ face more than men and more politely. They are more sensitive to those words that may make others lose face, so they prefer using such words as “may, might, could, perhaps, possibly” to show their politeness. In a conversation, women pay more attention to the emotion of the counterpart, and they try best to use verbal and nonverbal actions to save other’s face, expressing strong sympathy (ZHAO, 2003).
On the other hand, women show more generosity in praising others’ achievements. Adjectives such as
“divine, lovely, adorable”, adverbs, and interjections that express positive estimate can easily be found in women’s speech. Of course, men also praise others. They pay more attention to the others’ social accomplishment, such as career, study and wit, while women praise more on others’ life accomplishment, such as appearance and clothes. The different contents of praise reflect the different social roles between men and women. Here is a statistics on the compliment between and within male and female, from which we can find some features of the compliment. It shows that female compliment others more often.

Table 2 Holmes’ analysis on 484 compliment sentences
Compliment within the same sex Compliment between male and female
Female–Female Male–Male Male–Female Female–Male
51% 9% 23.1% 16.5%

According to Holmes, the reason why women seldom compliment men is that they are afraid that the
compliment will lead to misunderstanding.

1.4 Euphemism
Euphemism originates from “taboo”. Here we consider it as a way of speaking that use another word to
signify the signified word in order to avoid the embarrassment. Using euphemism is a way to maintain Politeness Principle. Because of the special psychological feature of women, they favor euphemism much more than men in speech behavior. This phenomenon happens in many cultures. For example, in one of Chinese ethnic group, Hui, men and women use different words to express having a bath. Men can say, “I will wash myself”, while women will say it indirectly: “I will wash my hair.” In English, those words that are related to sex will be replaced by “go to bed, sleep together, have relation, lie with somebody”; if a woman wants to go to toilet, she will prefer “I will
spend a penny”, “I want to wash my hand” or “I want to powder my nose” rather than “I want to go to WC”. Euphemism is of great relationship with gender roles. When people meet the situation that does not match the gender role, they will use euphemism. For example, men talk about sex without hesitation, but women seldom talk Gender Differences in Speech Behavior 20 about this topic, and if they really mention this topic, they will use euphemism. On the contrary, when men talk about “facial service”, a traditional field which women are familiar with, they will use the word “facial treatment”
instead.

2. The Interpretation of the Differences from the Culture Aspect
Many scholars (Maltz, D.N. & Borker, R.A., 1982; JIA, 1997) use culture to interpret why there are different speech behaviors between men and women. Based on the researches on sociology and psychology, they propose that the differences between men’s and women’s speech behaviors are caused by their respective communication
subcultures.
During the process of growing, in most of the time, boys and girls only communicate with their respective genders, but seldom communicate with out-group members. Boys usually have more friends than girls, while the friendships between girls’ are more stable. Boys’ games are of competitive and many participants from various ages. So the hierarchy in boys group is emphasized. Their language is aggressive, debatable and ordered in order to gain the control place in the game. On the contrary, girls tend to cooperate with each other. Their status in a conversation is equal. And their language is used to chat and build a good relationship. The respective communication groups during their childhood cause the life-long different speech behavior. When boys and girls are grown-up, they operate in two very different social worlds. Men are in an ongoing contest, competing with everyone by displaying their competence and skill. Why don’t men ask for directions when lost? Because it puts them in a you-know-more-than-I-do position. Women are cautious but persistently seek intimacy; they want emotional support, cooperation, and praise. There isn’t even a reason for them to be not polite to others. Given these different orientations, it is no wonder the sexes have trouble communicating!
When women hear a new or different idea, they set their doubts and disbelief aside and tune in carefully to what the person is saying; they try to see it from the other person’s viewpoint. Women try to understand the other person’s opinion as completely and deeply as possible; they cognitively “go with them”, wanting to hear the person’s views and understand why they think in this way. Women seek to make sense of the new idea, to grasp how it can be seen as accurate and useful. This is certainly a “way of knowing” and could be called the “believing approach”. It involves empathizing with the speaker to cooperatively assimilate the truth together, i.e., cooperating. Women effectively use this same listening style when someone has a personal problem. Contrast this with a common male approach: When someone expresses a new idea or one a male doesn’t
agree with, he immediately starts arguing in his head. He tries to stay unbiased and coolly impersonal, if he can, but he questions the validity of everything—“How do you know that?” “Is that logical?” “How reliably was that measured?” “Aren’t some other experimental approaches or control conditions needed?” “Aren’t there exceptions or other explanations or conclusions possible?” “What are this person’s motives and biases?” This is critical thinking; it is the essence of the scientific method; it can be called an adversarial or “doubting approach”. To some extent, the gender differences in communication patterns are also related to power. When people are strangers, they expect less competence from women than from men. But if women are known to have prior experience or expertise related to the task, or if women are assigned leadership roles, then women show greatly increased verbal behaviors in mixed-sex groups. They will use more powerful words than being superpolite. A study of witnesses in a superior court found that educated professionals who have high social status were less likely to use “powerless language”, regardless of gender. Thus, differences are linked to power, and are Gender Differences in Speech Behavior 21 context-specific. Differences are socially created and therefore may be socially altered. Some studies have found that talking time is related both to gender because men spend more time talking than women and to organizational power because the more powerful spend more time talking than the less powerful.

3. Conclusion
In speech behavior, women tend to obey the Politeness Principle. They seldom use slang and humor. But in their speech, they express more approbation, sympathy and use more euphemism than men. These phenomena can be interpreted by their living in respective communication subcultures. In their childhood, boys and girls’ language have been shaped by their games, friendship and social expectations. After they become adults, men and women play different social roles. Those all make the differences of men and women’s speech behavior.