The Dominance theory (1975)

Robin Lakoff

The Dominance theory says that in a mixed gender conversation, men are more likely to interrupt than women. Lakoff tries to get away from the deficit theory (which says female language is weak in comparison to the male language), and instead consider men’s language as dominant, but still, not better than the female language. However; Lakoff says that women lack authority, seriousness, faith in themselves and principle.

Some of the ways women’s language may be perceived as being the; are techniques such as tag questions, these are questions that follow a declarative sentence, for example: ‘This is nice, isn’t it?’ or ‘I should, shouldn’t I?’, fillers, such as words like ‘um’ or any break in the text filled with a verbal noise which usually has no meaning-for example ‘I think you should, um, urrrr…’, intensifiers, this is words like ‘very’, ‘completely’, ‘better’ etc… Anything that puts emphasis on the meaning or phrase, in context; ‘isn’t she very pretty’ and ‘I completely understand’, hypercorrect grammar: using grammar incorrectly to perhaps look better, formally or intellectually and hedging, which is things that weaken a sentence, and therefore make it lack in authority or declaration and show query, for example ‘I suppose I can’ or ‘I sort of can’

Here is an advert with a tagged question: http://www.printwand.com/blog/media/2013/08/example-advertising-question-with-answer.jpg

If this was used in woman’s language, according to Lakoff it could be considered a sign of weakened language compared to men’s. But in this advert it clearly is thought provoking and effective. The question at the end; ‘don’t they?’ perhaps makes parents (who I think are the target audience of this advert) think and reminisce about either children they have who have grown up, or young children and thinking about their future. This doesn’t show weakness, but that they are looking for you to think about the topic they are introducing, and getting the audience involved.

http://www.eclipse-creative.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/premier-foods-adverts2.jpg

Bibliography:

http://oliviatrippaslanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/three-ds-deficit-dominance-and.html

http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/lang/gender.htm#dominance

High frequency lexis grouping:
Text B-Recipe that appeared in a cookery magazine in 2004
Text C: An extract from a children's story called Mr Bump Loses his memory'
Text E: Transcript from a transaction in a newspaper's shop.
Text F: An extract from an IM conversation, taken from an internet forum.

In all four texts, high frequency lexis is used to communicate in an easy and understandable manner. The recipe in text B uses easy and straight forward sentences so the readers and can easily follow the instructions. Again; if the language was too difficult for people to understand, then the purpose of teaching people to cook the cake is pointless, as they wouldn't understand what they're supposed to be doing. Text C uses easy language so the children who are reading the book will understand what's happening, this helps with the purpose of entertaining the children, as if the language was too difficult then they wouldn't be able to understand and therefore not find it entertaining. Text E and F is a transcript/extract from a transcript, showing high frequency, everyday language, as they are performing everyday tasks, it would be unnecessary and not normal to have low frequency lexis. When having a conversation in a newspaper shop, you don't use high terminology, the purpose-in this case-is to settle his newspaper account, this doesn't take a huge amount of conversion or intellectual language. Nor does the conversation from the internet forum, which uses a lot of nonstandard language and abbreviations, perhaps because it is easier to type these that the whole word or sentence.