The Know and the Fallout 4 trailer – Investigation into Language and Gender
Hypothesis When looking at 2 transcripts about the same subject, one involving all women and the other all men, the men and women will follow Tannen’s difference pairs.
-Status: -Men - 1 -Women - 0 -Support: -Men - 0 -Women - 0
-Independence: -Men - 0 -Women - 0 -Intimacy: -Men - 1 -Women - 0
-Advice: -Men - 0 -Women - 0 -Understanding: -Men - 0 -Women - 0
-Information:* -Men - 0 -Women - 0 -Feelings: -Men - 2 -Women - 0
-Orders: -Men - 3 -Women - 1 -Proposals: -Men - 1 -Women - 1
-Conflict: -Men - 2 -Women - 2 -Compromise: -Men - 0 -Women - 0
*as it is a news story I didn’t count this pairing in either transcript
Key quotes Men -“Have you heard of Nuzu” “No” - conflict -“We’re gonna be kind of down” - feelings -“I care about you Adam”- feelings and intimacy -“(2) Spoole (.) work”- status and orders
Women -“let’s take a look and see what you think”- proposals -“but first”- orders -“come on|” “|hey come on”- conflict -“fuzzy and cute”- female topics/ baby talk
PEE analysis According to Tannen’s difference pairings, men should prefer conflict whereas women should prefer to find compromise. In the transcript I have both men and women use conflict an equal number of times and never seek for compromise. This is shown in the male transcript with one of them saying “have you heard of Nuzu” and the other male saying “no” despite the fact that he was the one to bring up Nuzu and how they are going to talk about it. This shows that he had in fact heard of Nuzu and was only saying “no” to cause conflict between to two of them. In the female transcript they show conflict through interruptions. I would be compromise if it was co-operating interruptions but the first woman said “come on” and the other overlapped her with “hey come on” showing that she is disagreeing with her statement. One reason for the lack of compromise is because it is a news story and they are trying to raise different ideas about the game and cause conflict, not only among themselves, but also among the viewers.
Another one of Tannen’s pairings is orders vs. proposals. In both of the transcript they both use orders and proposals. The men use three times more orders than the females though and they both use the same amount of proposals. While this does support Tannen’s pairing to an extent as they do follow the pairing, it also goes against Tannen’s theory as they aren’t exclusive in each side of the pairing. With the proposals in each of the transcripts they are referencing the audience with “let’s take a look and see what you think” in the female transcript and “you probably wanna stop” in the male one. The use of the personal pronoun “you” in each of the transcript includes the audience in the story making them more inclined to discuss the same as they are in the comment section of the video. While both of the transcripts use orders it is in a different manner in each transcript. In the female transcript she says “but first” as an order, more to move the conversation on rather than to control the other person. Whereas in the male transcript they use their orders in a more demanding and controlling way, an example of this is “(2) Spoole (.) work”. By telling him to continue working and now join in the conversation could be demeaning but it can be assumed that they are friends and that it is either playful chatter or an inside joke.
Tannen also has the difference pairing of independence vs. intimacy which isn’t followed in these transcripts. In neither transcript independence is shown and the only time intimacy is shown is in the male transcript. In the male transcript it says, “I care about you Adam”, this admittance of care isn’t something which is stereotypical of male language and thus makes it odd. The people in this video could be friends so this admittance could be common between them but typically this declaration of feelings is something of a female trait. The person who the quote is directed to does respond with an order which is a part of Tannen’s male pairing and could also be a show of status but as explained in the last paragraph it could just be playful conversation amongst friends.
While it is not a part of Tannen’s pairings, it is interesting to look at the difference in the language they used to describe the dog in the trailer. In the male transcript they don’t boost up the dog and even go as far to say that they have seen a better dog in a different trailer, but in the female trailer they use completely different language to describe the dog. One of the females describes it as “fuzzy and cute” which is a form of baby talk and is stereotypical of females to be on the topic of cute animals. It can also be assumed that when the female spoke this in the transcript that she changed her tone of voice to sound higher as if she was talking to a baby or animal.
Evaluation and whether or not my hypothesis was supported There are aspects of the transcripts that do follow Tannen’s difference pairings but as a whole they don’t. The two transcripts tend to follow the stereotypically male traits more, possibly because of the topic of the videos which is video games. The rare times when female traits are used are mainly by the men rather than the females. It could be possible that these videos were lightly scripted and so the language would’ve been adapted to fit the assumed to be primarily male audience, however by the interruptions and stutter over words it can be assumed that some of the script was to be improvised. In order to get results without this restriction I could’ve recorded males and females talking about the same subject that aren’t from YouTube, but this could be affected by the ‘observer’s paradox’.
