Reference
William O'Barr
The finding that the speech features blamed on women actually track powerlessness, not sex, is his with Bowman Atkins.
O'Barr and Bowman Atkins spent thirty months observing an American trial court, testing a list of features Robin Lakoff had proposed as characteristic of how women speak: hedges, tag questions, hesitation, intensifiers, excessive politeness. The features did cluster. The cluster did not sort by sex. It sorted by the speaker's standing: expert witnesses used few of them whatever their sex, and witnesses with little education or low occupational status used many.
Their conclusion was that the features were "neither characteristic of all women nor limited only to women", and they renamed the category powerless language. That rename is the part worth holding on to. It moves the cause from who is speaking to the position they are speaking from, which is a different problem with a different remedy, and it is routinely dropped when this research is used to tell individuals to fix their sentences.
Referenced work
- Linguistic Evidence: Language, Power, and Strategy in the Courtroom (1982) reference
- Women's Language or Powerless Language? (with Bowman Atkins, 1980) reference
Elsewhere
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