Male terms suggest positive meanings, but the female terms suggest negative meanings. some female marked forms have therfore undergone semantic derogation.
Female terms often are suggestive of promiscuity.
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Jennifer Coates
Working class are associated with roughness and toughness which are supposedly characteristics of working class life.
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Deborah Tannen
Men issue commands, women make proposals or offer ideas
Women often suggest that people do things in indirect ways such as 'lets', 'why don't we'. Men may use and prefer to to hear a direct imperative.
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Lakoff
Suggested that women use tag questions more than men do.
Found that both sexes use tag questions to check facts (the meeting is at 3pm, right?).
Found that women use tag questions after expressing an opinion to seek confirmation/approval of that opinion (it's lovely sherry, isn't it?).
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Pamela Fisherman
In studies of heterosexual couples, women ask more questions, not just tag questions.
They are used as opening moves in a conversation, 'how was your day?'.
Women use them to find a topic the man wants to talk about.
Men are not unwilling to talk once they get a topic they like, then they will do more of the talking.
Women do the work of facilitating talk.
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Janet Holmes
Tag questions generally used by men to check facts.
When women use tag questions it was not because they sought rassurance or confirmation. They were simply allowing the person being addressed the opportunity to speak.
This is called 'facilitative' use of tag questions.
She concluded that women prefer a co-operative style of interaction in which everyone is actively encouraged to contribute.
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Kathy O'Leary
The speaker's role in the conversation is a better predictor of tag question use than gender is.
Teachers, vets, police officers and lawyers use tag questions frequently their job is to get people to talk and respond.
This does not support Holmes' theory that women use facilitative tag questions to make converstaion interactive. Women who were not playing facilitative roles did not use facilitative tags frequently.
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Tridgill
Found that across social classes men use non-standard forms of English more than women.
Men use non-standard forms to gain covert prestige.
Women tend to use standard forms and hypercorrect language.
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