Mills: Gender and Politeness (2003)

The most interesting argument in this book by Sarah Mills is that we cannot treat politeness as a matter of form. Meaning is extremely context-dependent, and people often spend quite a lot of time and mental resources trying to figure out how whether something was a sarcastic jab, a polite compliment, or something completely different.

The Indeterminacy of Politeness

Front cover, from amazon.com.

As an example of such a case of very real uncertainty, Mills relates a story of a woman who asks a man whether he has any change for the payphone just as he exits the booth (p. 84). He tells her that there is 80p of credit left in the phone, and that she can use that, and she replies

• Thank you VERY MUCH; thank you VERY MUCH.

The man, who was Libyan but experienced this incident in Britain, was later unsure what exactly to make of this comment. He wondered whether she thought that he "had been stupid to be so generous to a stranger" (p. 84). Possibly, she could also have been ironically remarking that the gift had been too small rather than too big. Or perhaps she really just meant to thank him.

A more straightforward example (p. 80) is that of a teacher telling her class,

• Can you PLEASE be quiet?

Obviously, this is not a matter of the teacher subserviently bowing and scraping for the kids, but rather quite forcefully giving an order. (I'm sure you have heard an equivalent of this exact sentence back in your school days.) Mills attributes this example to Mark Jary (1998).

In both cases, the linguist can't simply sit on a mountaintop and claim to have special insights into the meaning and force of the things that people say. If you want to know whether something appears as polite or impolite to the participants in a conversation, you need to ask them.

Deep and Shallow Conversational Themes

The fifth chapter of the book, also called "Gender and Politeness," largely takes the form of a prolonged criticism of the book Men, Women, and Politeness (1995) by Janet Holmes.

Mills correctly criticizes her for having a way too superficial conception of the relation between form and function, and for ignoring or explaining away data that doesn't fit her theory. On a theoretical level, nothing is done here which has not already been done better and more pointed by Deborah Cameron, but it's perhaps still worth the time to see in detail where the seams come apart.

By way of illustration, Mills analyses two telling examples of mismatches between stereotypically "mannered speech" and the real motivations of the participants. One example is about excessive thanking between women (pp. 227–31), and the other is about two women having a discussion while a largely quiet man is also present in the home (pp. 231–34).

Lovely, Lovely

In the first of these examples, a woman codenamed "D" gives a Maori shell as a present to her hosts, who proceed to thank. One participant, codenamed "M," for instance shoots off this tirade (p. 228):

• … oh, that's lovely. lovely, isn't it? […] oh, that's lovely, thank you very much, I love the colours …

On the face of it, this seems like a perfect example of stereotypical "women's speech," but in her interviews with the participants, Mills actually found that, during this exchange, the women were in fact trying to shut up D so that they could to get on with their lunch. This led to a kind of unfortunate spiraling effect, since D took thanking as an invitation to talking, and her talking led the other women to ramp up their thanking.

Again, had Mills been sitting in her office handing out judgments of what this or that utterance meant, she would probably only have added yet another layer of misunderstanding, and largely misread the subtext of the conversation.

Pointing the Camera the Wrong Way

The other example concerns a conversation between two participants, two women who are old friends, and the partner of one of them. The exchange centers around a misunderstanding — the woman codenamed A is visiting the couple, planning to go out with them, but the host couple then realize a bit too late that she didn't come by car as they first thought.

A then apologizes quite heavily (p. 232):

• I'm sorry, I've, um, messed up all the plans.

Mills comments:

Focusing only on the way that A explicitly apologizes, which conventional politeness theories such as Holmes do, would not allow us to focus on the way that in this interaction questions of the sex of the participants is not particularly salient. (p. 234)

Instead, the exchanges surrounding the misunderstanding all could instead be seen as a collaborative project of building and maintaining intimacy, so that

… they can present themselves as a group of friends who get on well together because they can resolve conflicts jointly, not allowing difficulties and misunderstandings to threaten anyone's face. (p. 234)

So, looking for superficial cues like I'm sorry would very likely lead an analyst to think that A was very explicitly gendering herself in this dialogue. But in fact, one could just as well focus on the quite forceful way that the other female speaker asserts herself during the dialogue, or the much more withdrawn role of the male participant. From that perspective, the use of apologies, teasing, and irony would be seen much more as a product of the local context.

Cameron: "Is there any ketchup, Vera?" (1998)

In reaction to Beborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand (1990), Deborah Cameron wrote a short and insightful paper that, for various reasons, only got published much later.

In the paper, she argues that the observable differences in women's and men's conversational styles are the visible sign of strategies for handling gender roles rather han direct consequences of either gender differences or gender inequality.

"Thanks, mom"

According to Cameron's summary, Tannen's central thesis is that women and men have different conversational styles, and this leads to systematic misunderstandings. She gives an example, repeated by Cameron on page 79, of a female and a male co-worker walking between two buildings on a cold day. The following exchange takes place:

• Female speaker: Where's your coat?
• Male Speaker: Thanks, mom.

According to Tannen's analysis, this is an example of a frustrated communication situation that arises because a typical female move (showing consideration for others) is interpreted by a male hearer as a typical male move (status-grabbing through pecking).

Cameron is uncomfortable with this analysis, among other things because we have no overt evidence that the man actually misunderstood the woman's question. Instead, this "momming" might instead be a case of

'strategic' misunderstanding, where the relativity of linguistic strategies is exploited as a weapon in conflicts between men and women. (p. 86)

Here, the relevant "relativity" would be the two different functions of a question, as an expression of interest, or as a covered command.

"Would you like to finish that report today?"

To illustrate this point further, Cameron cites two more examples. One comes from a magazine advising women in managing positions to use "on record" strategies when giving orders to male employees. Forms like

• Would you like to finish that report today?

are, in other words, not recommended, since the employee receiving this request could worm his way out of the obligation under the excuse that "if it was really urgent you should have made that clear" (p. 86).

The other example is an anecdote she heard from a friend about a recurring dinner table exchange between the friend's parents (p. 87). Every night, the mother would serve dinner, and the father would ask,

• Is there any ketchup, Vera?

This was, of course, intended as a request or order and always understood as such.

The Use of Forms

Cameron's point is that the inderect form of request – a "feminine" form according to the stereotype – is not invariably produced in all women and all circumstances. Rather, using one or other form is a matter of choosing the right strategic move in a particular situation.

A key aspect of the situation is indeed the power distribution, and this power distribution is not independent of gender. In the classical dinner table setting, it is thus almost unthinkable that Vera should respond "Yes, it's in the kitchen cupboard," while this might be appropriate if the young daughter had asked (p. 88). On the other hand, as the magazine said, it is absolutely conceivable that a man would exploit this ambiguity strategically; hence the recommendation.

This is not necessarily due to any differences in cognition, nor even global differences in power between the sexes. It is rather the visible trace of a strategy/counterstrategy dialictic that follows in the slipstream of social change and challenges to traditional privileges.

In Camoron's words:

One might paraphrase Marx: 'men and women make their own interactions, but not under conditions of their own choosing'. (p. 91)

Robin Lakoff's introduction (2004) to Language and Woman's Place (1975)

In 2004, a new annotated edition of Robin Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place came out. I addtion to the orignal text, this new edition includes a number of essays on the topics raised in the book as well as a new introduction by Lakoff herself.

The Frustration of a Comskyan

The introduction is interesting for several reasons. One of them is that it contains an interesting personal account of the ideas that were splitting transformational grammar apart in the era of Aspects:

By the late 1960s it had become clear to several of us that Chomsky's linguistic revolution wasn't the recolution in which we had enlisted. Chomsky had promised us a theory that would make language a "window into the mind." But within standard transformational theory that possibility could be realized only to a very limited dregree, if at all. While investigators could use their minds as interpretive instruments—to judge the grammaticality or semantic similarity of sentences—they were not permitted to investigate meaning, much less a speaker's intention in uttering a sentence in a particular form, or the effect of that utterance on the addressee.

Consequently, Lakoff and others got the idea of starting from meaning representations of a certain form and then deriving syntactic form out of that. To the extent that it ever was a single or coherent theory, this new framework is what we now call "generative semantics":

We devised rules and representations to relate externally accessible linguistic forms to mental states—for example, desires, assumptions, and personal identities—while retaining the Chomskyan belief in the primacy of the syntactic component of the grammar. Deep structure got deeper, wider, and more complex.

"Deep structure got deeper"—what a wonderful summary. Remember also George Lakoff's comment that he and his gang just wanted to be "good little comskyans," quoted in The Linguistics Wars. How wrong they both were—about what they were doing, and how much linguistics would change.

Grammar Unlimited?

Interestingly, the orthodox Chomskyan argument against this augmented view of grammar was, in Lakoff's rendering:

If you followed generative semantics to its logical conclusion, everything speakers know about the world would have to be included within the transformational component, which therefore would become infinite. [...]

Not necessarily, said the generative semanticists. The linguistic grammar need only include those aspects of the extralinguistic world that have direct bearing on grammatical form: just a small subset of everything. [...] But we still had to answer, at least to our own satisfaction, the question that these claims raised: What parts of our psychological and social reality did require linguistic encoding, in at least some languages?

Lakoff's point in the essay is of course that gender is one of the important variables of linguistic expression—not just "in a few 'exotic' languages (Japanese, Dyirbal, Arawak, and Koasati)," but in solid, run-of-the-mill English as well.

But at the same time, the quote points right at the big taboo of linguistics, whether or not Lakoff herself intends it to do so: Once we admit that syntax can't be isolated from meaning, the floodgates are open to seeing that there really isn't any such thing as a "language" at all; the difference between syntax and anthropology is really more about differences in interests than about anything inherent in the "object of study."

Is Linguistics Linguistics?

Lakoff is also aware that something in transformational grammar and generative semantics was holding it back from saying anything intelligent about discourse structure on a larger level:

Linguists spoke on occasion of "structure above (or beyond) the sentence level," but mostly about how it couldn't be done. When we attempted it, we thought of larger units as concatenations of sentences: S+S+S ..., rather than as structures with rules of their own, wholes different from the sum of their parts.

While I think that this has something to do with the game of showing-and-hiding that linguistics necessarily entails, Lakoff seems to attribute it more to the fact that different tools fit different situations:

While a generation ago, "structure above the sentence level" had the status of the basilisk (mythical and toxic), now it is an accepted area of linguistics [...] These analyses made it clear that discourse should be understood not as concatenations of S's, but as language directed toward particular interactive and psychological purposes.

So now we're OK, the message seems to be; we just had to realize that a different set of concepts was needed (turntaking, politeness, power, identity, etc.).

While I agree that conversational analysis has something new and interesting to say about language use, I also think that there's something genuinely wrong about saying that it does the same thing as Chomskyan grammar, only with a different tool. It's not just a shift of attention or of measuring equipment, it's a shift of standards, mindset, ethics, and goals.

Not that there's anything wrong with either hermeneutics or with mathematics—it's just that they are never going to be unified into a single methodology. There is a tension between the picture of what counts as data and valid argument that Lakoff's book drew attention to, and I don't think it's a tension that can or should be resolved.