#tamonion

[cabeswcter]

Cabeswcter » pyythia

I changed my URL!! Finally Spread the word, pretty please

[pyythia]

I was tagged by @tamonion Rules: Tag some followers that you would like to get to know better. NAME: Katie NICKNAME: I don't really have one GENDER: Female HEIGHT: 5'3 I think FAVOURITE COLOURS: sea green or teal TIME RIGHT NOW: 11:38pm AVERAGE HOURS OF SLEEP: 8 maybe LUCKY NUMBER: Don't have one LAST THING I GOOGLED: Alice in Wonderland character names NUMBER OF BLANKETS I SLEEP WITH: just one FAVOURITE FICTIONAL CHARACTER: This is the hardest fucking thing ever omg but speaking only book characters probably Jacob Portman from Miss Peregrine's or Cinder from The Lunar Chronicles FAVOURITE BOOKS: Everytime I read a book this changes but at the moment it's Hollow City by Ransom Riggs. FAVOURITE BANDS: Coldplay DREAM JOB: Writer/author WHAT I AM WEARING NOW: My pyjamas WHEN DID I CREATE THIS BLOG: April 2014 CURRENT AMOUNT OF FOLLOWERS: 454 I think WHAT DO I POST ABOUT: mostly fandom related stuff but sometimes random things DO I HAVE ANY OTHER BLOGS: Nope WHEN DID MY BLOG REACH ITS PEAK: last summer WHAT MADE ME DECIDE TO GET A TUMBLR: a friend of mine had one and encouraged me to make one too DO I GET ASKS ON A DAILY BASIS: Nope WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS URL: Because of cabeswater from The Raven Cycle I'm not really bothered to tag anyone but if you want to do it feel free :)

[madmaudlingoes]

Hi, I'm not being saying you contribution was wrong but on that post about the perception that women talk more than men, you added some research and findings on it from an experiment. Could I ask for some sort of source or how to find the report to see how accurate it is? I'm a huge (male) feminist but a very fair feminist. Please don't see me as a "typical man trying to make a woman look stupid" because I can assure you, I'm in no way like that. Thank you for reading 😊

Okay, just in case you don’t realize how this sounds, let me paraphrase this ask for you: “I call myself a feminist but I also don’t trust feminists. I’m not trying to make you look stupid, I’m just applying a higher standard of proof to your assertions than I do to other things; I presume that scientific research which exposes patriarchal power imbalances is less credible than research which doesn’t.”

If that wasn’t how you intended to come off, well, maybe think more carefully about your word choices next time.

That said, however, as an academic I do believe in citing my sources, and there’s a version of that post floating around with some serious typos in it, so here’s a partial bibliography:

Dale Spender, 1980. Man-Made Language. Routledge.  (link goes to WorldCat.) This is the book version of Spender’s dissertation research, which documents her research on the gender balance of conversation in university classrooms that I reported before. Not only do men talk much more than women in the classroom, but they also perceive the ratio of talk to be much more equitable than it really is, because female silence is so normalized.

John F. Dovidio, Clifford E. Brown, Karen Heltman, Steve L. Ellyson, Caroline F. Keating, "Power displays between women and men in discussions of gender-linked tasks: A multichannel study", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 55, issue 4. A laboratory exercise which found that both gender and assigned topic affected how much time people talked: men talked more than women (in terms of minutes of interaction) unless the topic was something explicitly “feminine.” When the topic was “masculine” or “neutral,” the men talked more; across all topics, men talked for 40% of the interaction time to women’s 27%.

Pamela Fishman, 1978. “Interaction: The work women do.” Social Problems vol. 25, issue 4. A small study, which found that women talked more than their husbands in private conversation--but that this was because they bore more of the interactional burden of keeping conversation going, while men were more likely to offer minimal responses or silences in return.

Peter Kollock, Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz, 1985. “Sex and Power in Interaction: Conversational Privileges and Duties“ American Sociological Review, vol. 50, issue 1. This was a study of same-sex and mixed-sex couples, comparing gender and a metric of “power” devised by the authors. They found that, in the mixed-sex couples, men talked more than women regardless of which partner scored higher on power, whereas other measures of dominance (like interruptions and tag questions) correlated with power, or the interaction of power and gender.

Paul Rayson, Geoffrey M. Leech, Mary Hodges (1997) “Social Differentiation in the Use of English Vocabulary: Some Analyses of the Conversational Component of the British National Corpus.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Volume 2, Number 1, 1997. Unfortunately this isn’t a JSTOR link. This analysis of the BNC (which involved people carrying recording equipment while going about their day) found that women spoke more than men, but this might be an artifact of the sampling method: for consent reasons, the people carrying the tape recorders had a choice as to when they turned them on, and had to get permission from their interlocutors, so we don’t know if the sample is representative of all their conversations. 

Mattias Mehl et al, 2007. “Are women really more talkative than men?” Science, Vol. 317, no. 5834. This is a JSTOR link but the article doesn’t appear to be available without an institutional subscription. This paper used a recording device that automatically switched on and off to record 30 second snippets of conversation without the person carrying the device having to take action. They found that men and women, on average, used about the same number of words per day, but individual differences were enormous. I don’t necessarily think this is a useful method of data collection for this type of study, since it’s not sensitive to the context of speech, but it does avoid the problem of the BNC research. Still, we can’t tell from a bunch of thirty-second clips that don’t include interlocutor information whether individual men were talking more or less than the women around them.

Janet Holmes,1995. Women, Men and Politeness. Longman. In contrast to the above study, Holmes looked carefully here at context of interaction. She points out that men tend to talk more “when talk offers the possibility of enhancing the speaker’s status” but that all interactions have different norms for interaction--for instance, the subjects of interviews tend to talk more than the interviewers, because that’s how interviews work. But students in the same classroom, as in Spender’s study, shouldn’t show a meaningful different in the amount of speaking compared to one another--so when we find that men are dominating this type of talk, that’s a problem.

Mark Lieberman’s “quick experiment,” posted to Language Log, discussing gender differences in word counts in the Fisher English Corpus. He demonstrates that, for this corpus (which involved elicited conversations between strangers) men talked slightly more than women, though the effect size is fairly small.

Another Language Log post by @jengaoneweekatatime, with commentary by Mark Lieberman. She wasn’t looking at speaking time per se, but at interruptions: however, there’s an intuitive link between someone who interrupts a lot and someone who dominates the conversation in other ways. She found that men interrupt more than women, that women are more likely to be interrupted than men, and that women talking to other women use a lot of overlapping speech--which she interprets as interruption, but Lieberman points out that such overlaps can also be a type of backchannel. Deborah Tannen and Jennifer Coates have proposed that, at least for white and Jewish English-speaking women, a type of intensive backchannel called “participatory listenership” is the norm. (Citation here and here--again, sorry these aren’t JSTOR--and also here.)

So, to sum up: the research seems to show that men and women don’t speak a significantly different amount over all, but also that this isn’t a good metric overall for studying conversation dominance. In specific, high-stakes contexts, men often dominate talk.

[languageramblings]

Salut! Could you explain the difference between 'an' and 'année', 'jour' and 'journée' and other ones like that s'il vous plaît. Is there a different meaning or do you use them in different parts of a sentence? Merci beaucoup 😊

Bonjour !

awesomefrench answered some asks about this, so I’ll just refer you to them: (one) (two) 

[languageramblings]

Hey, I'm a huge fan of your blog. It's so good and I really love it :D. Anyway, I was wondering if you could make a post of casual French phrases car je vais on an exchange to France tôt et je voudrais if you could do that. Phrases that are used all the time comme 'I don't mind' or 'that's cool' et cetera. Merci beaucoup :D P.S. English is my first language and French is my third; I've been doing French for three years but I'm obsessed with it so I'm always looking for that extra bit 😊

Hello~~! 

C’est pas grave - no problem, no big deal

T’en fais pas - don’t worry about it

N’importe quoi - whatever 

Laisse tomber - just forget it, never mind that

Tiens-moi au courant - keep me updated

Bref - in brief, all in all, in short

Ouais - yeah 

dépêche-toi - hurry up 

Some other useful words and phrases can be found here, here, and here.

Bon voyage et bonne chance !