Most people modify their ways of speaking, writing, texting, and e-mailing, and so on, according to the people with whom they are communicating. This fascinating book asks why we 'accommodate' to others in this way, and explores the various social consequences arising from it.
Review of La Realización de Quejas en la Conversación Femenina y Masculina
AUTHOR: A. Virginia Acuña Ferreira TITLE: La realización de quejas en la conversación femenina y masculina SUBTITLE: Diferencias y semejanzas en el habla cotidiana de las mujeres y los hombres SERIES TITLE: LINCOM Studies in Semantics. Vol. 04 PUBLISHER: LINCOM YEAR: 2011
Zahir Mumin, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY)
SUMMARY
Acuña Ferreira analyzes the informal speech characteristics of men and women’s complaints about the behavior of third persons in order to differentiate between prescriptive speech (i.e. stereotypical assumptions about speech trends) and descriptive speech (i.e. real-life speech tendencies). She contends that speech style is one of the most predominant factors that distinguishes women’s speech from men’s speech. Acuña Ferreira aims to dispel stereotypical opinions about common characteristics of women’s speech (i.e. euphemistic) and provide more empirical notoriety to prominent traits of men’s speech (i.e. aggressive). The author expounds the analyses of speech style by arguing that men and women’s dynamics of social interaction embody strong traces of solidarity against third persons. The book comprises an introduction, six chapters, and an appendix which highlights important transcription conventions. The Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2 investigate theoretical issues that encompass the relationship between language and gender. Chapters 3 through 6 apply these issues to transcription analyses of women and men’s speech. The author uses pseudonyms throughout the book to protect the anonymity of research participants.
Chapter 1 reviews prior research studies correlating language and gender in order to investigate the polarization of discourse interaction between men and women. The author argues that social stratification of data, language sexism, and pragmatic functions of speech style illuminate social and gender inequalities between males and females. Acuña Ferreira defends her argument regarding social stratification of data by highlighting Douglas-Cowie’s (1978) findings dealing with a community in North Ireland. These findings show that socially stratifying women according to their husband or father’s occupation and socially stratifying men according to their actual occupation may confound the interpretation of data. This is because the stratification of data asymmetrically favors males’ occupations without considering females’ occupations. Acuña Ferreira also buttresses the language sexism aspect of this argument through analysis of Calero Fernández’s (1999) “dualismos aparentes” (“apparent dualisms,” p.18) -- words that change meaning through a change in gender, i.e. “pupilo/pupila” (“male pupil/ female prostitute,” p.18) -- in order to demonstrate that general language use unjustly derogates women in relation to men. Acuña Ferreira supplements this language sexism analysis with an examination of the referential and affective pragmatic functions of speech styles for men (referential) and women (affective) in order to manifest the stereotypical conceptualization of the active/competitive male and the passive/courteous female.
Chapter 2 explores the constructivist approach to analyzing women and men’s discourse interaction, which includes conversations amongst women, amongst men, and between men and women. The author defines the constructivist approach -- the reaffirmation of gender identity and sociocultural opposition between the lifestyles of men and women -- in order to argue that this approach is more insightful than the approaches of domination (i.e. emphasis on gender inequalities) and difference (i.e. elucidation of stereotypical speech style dissimilarities). Acuña Ferreira asserts that these two latter approaches excessively illuminate gender differences in relation to women and men’s speech trends. She underpins this constructivist approach argument by juxtaposing males and females as interlocutors and comparing stereotypical masculine and feminine discourse characteristics such as competitiveness and individualism (masculine) and cooperativeness and insecurity (feminine). These juxtapositions and comparisons show that constructivist analyses encompass females’ ability to express masculine gender identity and males’ ability to express feminine gender identity through the employment of opposing stereotypical discourse strategies. These discourse strategies are used to exhibit masculine and feminine discourse characteristics.
Chapter 3 assesses the effectiveness of metadiscursive strategies and metapragmatic discourse techniques used to narrow the spatial-temporal gap between narrative events (i.e. the communicative contexts of a story) and narrated events (i.e. narrations of the original actions of a story) of complaint stories about the comportment of third persons. The author outlines Labov’s and Waletzky’s (1967) narrative structure model “resumen, orientación, complicación, evaluación, resolución y coda” (“summary, orientation, complication, evaluation, resolution, and ending,” p. 57) and explicates directly referenced discourse in order to claim that the employment of present and past narratives and perfective and imperfective actions help first person narrators/protagonists accomplish two main objectives: captivating the attention of second party audiences; and denouncing the unacceptable behavior of third persons/antagonists. Acuña Ferreira substantiates this claim by highlighting an example of a complaint story about a shoe salesman who inconsistently changes the prices of shoes:
27 [Carlos] ocho mil pesetas}^ [Carlos] eight thousand pesetas}^
28 [Isa] dije yo [Isa] I said
29 {[f] o sea ^ {[very strong voice volume] that means ^
30 que el otro día me pedías siete mil^ so the other day you asked me for seven thousand^
31 <1> (one-second pause)
32 y ahora me pides ocho mil?}^^ and now you ask me for eight thousand?}^^ (p. 59)
Line 27 shows Carlos’ response to Isa’s previous request (in the present tense) for the sale price of a pair of shoes which are usually priced at seven thousand pesetas. The author argues that the changes from the preterit tense/perfective action (Line 28) to the imperfect tense/imperfective action (Line 30) to the present tense (Line 32) align with the orientation and complication stages of the aforementioned narrative structure model (see above). Orientation foreshadows complication by describing a completed action “dije yo” (“I said,” p. 59) in the first person. Complication physically inserts the protagonist (Isa) inside the narrated story and clashes the protagonist’s dialogue with that of the antagonist (Carlos). In this example, the author clearly shows that the interactional dynamics of Isa’s present and past narratives, namely, the strategic use of the present and past verb tenses within the communicative context of the narrated story, represent directly referenced discourse because second party audiences exposed to the narration become persuaded by the oral depiction of reconstructed facts and the condemnation of inappropriate behavior.
Chapter 4 examines how women and men construct stories in order to vehemently express moral censure towards the repulsive behavior of third persons. The author analyses discourse strategies such as detailed descriptions, exemplary narratives, and reasoning practices to elucidate first person speakers’/protagonists’ desire to impede any second party’s (the audience) possible justification of “immoral” behavior exhibited by third person antagonists portrayed in complaint stories. Acuña Ferreira resorts to Drew’s (1998) investigation of moral censure to argue that detailed descriptions extensively delineate protagonists’ moral innocence and antagonists’ immoral culpability in order to persuade and convince second parties to concur with protagonists’ point of view. This detailed descriptions argument complements Acuña Ferreira’s exemplary narratives argument, which expands on the former argument through examination of protagonist speakers’ interactive functioning within the stories they construct. For example, the author furnishes an exemplary narrative in which Isa (the protagonist) simultaneously functions interactively with Ana (the second party) and with the third person (the antagonist), whose behavior Isa morally censures. Isa’s initial dialogue with Ana denounces the antagonist as an uneducated person who gossips too much. Then, Isa creates a second dialogue in which she orally portrays the antagonist’s voice in a conversation between Isa and the antagonist while Ana is a second party interlocutor:
408 [the antagonist]: qué te voy a deci:r > what am I going to tell you >
409 tu hermana:: your sister
410 y carina estévez se enfada- and Carina Estévez is mad-
411 están enfadados?}= are they mad?}= (pp. 98-99)
Through this example, the author emphasizes how Isa’s focalization of the antagonist and explicit censure of the antagonist’s unacceptable behavior persuades Ana to favor Isa’s morality perspective. The author reminds readers that the antagonist probes Isa for confidential information about her family members in order to later disclose this information to other people. In addition to exemplary narratives, Acuña Ferreira provides transcription examples to support the frequent use of reasoning practices strategies -- discourse interaction developed without an original story -- which enhance the disapproval of immoral behavior of third parties (third persons).
Chapter 5 furnishes a linguistic analysis of male and female speakers’ purposeful intensification of emotions used to gain moral support from second party interlocutors and magnify behavioral transgressions of third persons in different contexts of discourse interaction. Acuña Ferreira defines important theoretical terminology, such as emotional communication (i.e. actions triggered by non-conscious affective states), cognitive communication (i.e. actions activated by conscious affective states), and emotive communication (i.e. actions influenced by subconscious affective states). She contends that male and female speakers often exhibit speech characteristics of emotive communication, a combination of emotional and cognitive communication characteristics, because these speakers are able to exercise a sufficient amount of psychological control over the oral and physical manifestation of their affective states. Acuña Ferreira upholds this argument by probing into the importance of emotive-driven discourse interaction strategies dealing with metaphors, prosody, and lexical repetition. The author demonstrates the relationship between metaphors and prosody by analyzing Lola’s complaint to Mari about the disrespectful behavior of a third person female coworker who Lola dislikes:
144[Lola]: [hai quen (xx) nace con estrella]^ there are some who are born with star quality ^
145 MARI: {[f] [o sea que ti]}> {[very strong voice volume] [that means you]}>
146 LOLA: [e estrellado] v [and others with destruction] v (p. 112)
Acuña Ferreira argues that Lola uses the following Spanish proverb, formally spoken as “hay quien nace con estrella y hay quien nace con estrellado” (“there are some who are born with star quality and there are others who are born with destruction”), as a metaphorical representation of the moral conflict between Lola and her fellow female coworker in order to intensify the contextualization of Lola’s emotions, influence Mari to favor Lola’s perspective, and reprehend the coworker’s adverse behavior. The author also asserts that the prosodic change from high to low intonation (Lines 144 and146) reinforces the explosive effectiveness of Lola’s emotions. Acuña Ferreira provides additional support for her emotive communication argument (see above) by explicating the integration of lexical repetition and prosody in an example of discourse interaction where the protagonist/storyteller intensifies the dialogue with the constant repetition of the Spanish phrase “se acabó” (“it is over,” p. 115), accompanied by an accelerated tempo.
Chapter 6 expounds Chapter 5’s analysis of emotive communication by focusing on additional discourse strategies that characterize women’s and men’s speech tendencies: ascending inflectional tones and suspended statements (i.e. statements that omit a comparative syntactic structure) (feminine) and very strong voice volume and profane language (masculine). First, the author argues that women’s speech comprises more prosodic variation than men’s speech. Then, she contends that women’s suspended statements strengthen the explosiveness of their emotions whereas men’s profane language powers the high intensity of their emotions. Acuña Ferreira bolsters this first argument through examination of Isa’s (the first person/protagonist) complaint story to Ana (the second person/interlocutor) about the appalling behavior of her former female coworker (the third person/antagonist):
424 ANA: =ah {[a] es que tiene una cara}^^= =ah {[sharp tone] it is just that she has nerve}^^=
425 ISA: =y le dije yo= =and that is just what I told her
426 ANA: =es que tiene [un moRRO::]> =it is just that she has [such neRVE::]>
427 ISA: [y le dije yo] tienes [(xx)] [and that is just what I told her] you have [(xx)] (p. 129)
In this example, the author demonstrates that the combination of the suspended statements in Lines 424 and 426 and the statements of reaffirmation in Lines 425 and 427 explicitly exhibit the co-indignation of ISA and ANA towards the coworker’s abominable behavior and the effectuation of solidarity between ISA and ANA. Acuña Ferreira also shows how prosodic variation is manifested with marked ascending high tones at the end of the sentence and normal voice volume of individual segments (Line 424) and phonetic elongation of the “O::” vowel with high voice volume of the final three segments of the word “moRRO::” (“neRVE::” p.129) (Line 426). The author counteracts this discourse interaction example of female speech with one of male speech to demonstrate how Fran’s (the first person/protagonist) complaint to Luis (second person/interlocutor) about the unacceptable behavior of ticket office personnel of a soccer team (third persons/antagonist) exposes readers to extremely profane language (i.e. blasphemies) and very powerful voice volume (marked by capital letters).
EVALUATION
The introduction of the book clearly establishes current problematic issues regarding the analysis of women’s speech by providing examples of stereotypical women’s speech characteristics, such as frivolousness and lack of authority, which are often intuitively accepted by the general public. The author could enhance this introduction by supplementing these examples with examples of common stereotypical male speech characteristics in order to exhibit a more integral perspective of the sociocultural dynamics which show how gender and language complement each other. The author could also supplement important definitions of terminology such as “aproximación de la dominación y de la diferencia” (“approach of domination and of difference,” p. 2) with brief empirical examples to elucidate how these two approaches are distinguished with regard to social inequality and communication styles of discourse interaction.
In addition to the author’s main argument (see above) in Chapter 1, she extensively discusses Lakoff’s (1973) identification of stereotypical women’s speech traits such as triviality, insecurity, and courteousness in order to argue that Lakoff’s general assumptions about women’s speech have often been misinterpreted as substantiated postulates. However, the author does not directly associate these assumptions with the “polarización excesiva de las diferencias” (“excessive polarization of differences,” p. 38) between women and men’s speech. Therefore, I argue that Lakoff’s assumptions may be linguistically applied to not only the approaches of domination and difference, but also to the constructivist approach, in order to integrate the coherence of discourse interaction. For example, the author could incorporate an applied linguistics analysis of how male speech which exhibits feminine speech characteristics (e.g. triviality, insecurity, and courteousness), and female speech which exhibits masculine speech characteristics (e.g. assertiveness, power, and authority) harmonize in discourse interaction in order to denounce unacceptable behavior of third persons.
Chapter 2 auspiciously describes and outlines Günther’s (1997) three main components of complaint stories: narrator-protagonist, audience, and antagonist. The description and outline facilitate readers’ understanding of the qualitative analyses of discourse interaction in Chapters 3 through 6. However, there is a very sharp transition from these three components to the author’s description of research methodology, which discusses the principal objectives of data collection and the hypotheses developed prior to data collection. In order to smooth out this transition, I suggest discussing how collecting data simultaneously from narrator-protagonists, audiences, and antagonists in different contextual settings may affect the analysis of discourse interaction. At the end of this chapter, the author made an appropriate decision to foreground the topics of most of the complaint stories about third persons in order to demonstrate the thematic cohesion amongst the remaining chapters.
In Chapter 3, the author highlights meticulous discourse interaction examples which help decipher the pragmatic complexity of discourse strategies dealing with Spanish verbs of movement “llegar, ir o andar”(“to arrive, to go, or to walk,” p. 68) and the reconstruction of interaction between first person protagonists, second person interlocutors, and third person antagonists . Acuña Ferreira also contextualizes the physical setting of all of these examples by describing background details that explain why protagonists are censuring the immoral behavior of third persons. These contextualizations are vitally important for understanding the empirical data because without them, readers may become confused about the people who play the different roles depicted in the complaint stories.
The author could provide a clear definition of ‘moral censure’ in Chapter 4 in order to facilitate readers’ understanding of how it is pragmatically applied to the discourse interaction examples provided. I suggest modifying the author’s explanation of “el trabajo moral” (“moral work,” p. 86), by replacing this term with the term “censura moral” (“moral censure,” p. 86) in order to thoroughly define moral censure:
[la censura moral] es realizado de manera abierta o explícita: el significado moral del discurso se localiza en la superficie interaccional del habla y la moralidad [censurada] se convierte a menudo en el tema de la conversación (p. 86).
[moral censure] is attained in an open and explicit manner: the moral meaning of discourse is localized in the interactional surface of speech and the [censured] morality often becomes the topic of conversation (p. 86).
The conclusion of the chapter sheds some light on the author’s pragmatic meaning of moral censure by describing how first person/protagonists develop moral norms for their complaint stories in order to illuminate unacceptable behavior of third persons.
The author successfully uses the emotive communication characteristics of speakers’ discourse interaction in Chapters 5 and 6 to enliven the content of Chapters 3 and 4. Acuña Ferreira enlivens this content by examining the co-indignation and emotional reciprocity exhibited in second party interlocutors’ assenting oral responses to first person protagonists’ censure of third persons’ immoral behavior.
Acuña Ferreira vitalizes the contextualization of the social dynamics of discourse interaction in order to determine how masculine and feminine speech characteristics censure immoral behavior of third persons, connote solidarity between protagonists and second party interlocutors, and intensify affective states. While the book successfully illuminates men’s speech tendencies in opposition to women’s speech tendencies, it lacks empirical emphasis on the similarities between women and men’s speech tendencies in discourse interaction. The content of this book attracts professionals who specialize in discourse analysis, conversational pragmatics, semantics, and sociophonetics.
REFERENCES
Calero Fernández, María Ángeles. (1999). Sexismo lingüístico: análisis y propuestas ante la discriminación sexual en el lenguaje. Madrid, SP: Narcea.
Douglas-Cowie, Ellen. (1978). Linguistic code-switching in a northern Irish village: Social interaction and social ambition. In Peter Trudgill (ed.). Sociolinguistic Patterns in British English. London, ENG: Edward Arnold. 37-51.
Drew, Paul. (1998). Complaints about transgressions and misconduct. Research on Language and Social Interaction 31, 295-325.
Günther, Susanne. (1997). Complaint stories: Constructing emotional reciprocity among women. In Helga Kotthoff & Ruth Wodak (eds.). Communicating Gender in Context. Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins. 179-218.
Labov, Willam & Joshua Waletzky. (1967). Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In June Helm (ed.). Essays on the Verbal and the Visual Arts. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.12-44.
Lakoff, Robin. (1973). Language and woman’s place. Language in Society 2, 45-80.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Zahir Mumin teaches Spanish courses at the University at Albany, State
University of New York and conducts research in the field of linguistics.
His primary research interests include sociolinguistics, phonology,
phonetics, translation, language acquisition, language contact,
bilingualism, multilingualism, language change, and historical linguistics.
