Here is the finished draft outlining our project in more detail:

Englang Group 8:

According to Lakoff’s theory (1975), do women today use hedges more often in descriptive language than men?

Introduction to our topic:

As a group, we decided that we were most interested in doing our research in sociolinguistics. As we spoke about our ideas, we decided to focus on looking into the linguistic differences between genders. During our research and looking at previous studies carried out on gender, we found Lakoff’s theory on ‘Women-speak’ (1975) which is presented in The New Sociolinguistic Reader. Lakoff’s study is very detailed and she homes in on 10 characteristics that she found were unique to ‘women’s language.’ In our project, we aim to study one of these characteristics in particular - hedging, and will investigate whether Lakoff’s findings are still relevant 36 years later.

Research Design: Methodology

We aim to interview 10 female and 10 male University of Birmingham students, all in the age band 18 to 25. We will provide the participants with a stimulus (for example a soft piece of fruit) and ask them to describe how it feels and record (using a dictaphone) the answers that they provide. After transcribing a stratified sample of these answers, we will study in detail the use of hedges in both the female and the male answers and apply our findings to Lakoff’s study.

Problems to look out for

The observer's paradox: we will have to gain consent from the women and men that we question whether we can record their answer. We will ask them to sign a consent form in order to maintain ethically sound research. Unfortunately, this may lead to the interviewees altering how they respond to try and fit in with, or reject, the research motive.

We only intend to interview 20 participants, which is rather a small sample size that could potentially end in skewed results. Unfortunately, interviewing a bigger sample of informants may eat into the limited research time and result in us falling behind.

There is also the bigger question of whether Lakoff is still relevant to how modern women talk. Her study is now 36 years old and it seems only natural that much of her research may be at least slightly outdated. Despite this, Lakoff was one of the first to really research how women's speech is different to that of men's, so it makes sense that we use her study as the basis of our research.

Research so far

We carried out a pilot interview, which was not as successful as we hoped. As a result of both this and considering our potential problems from Sealey (p. 124, 2010), we tweaked our investigation so that it was more detailed and less generic. We also changed the participants from only females, in our pilot, to include males as well. This will give us a chance to compare the two sexes and give a more detailed result.

Bibliography

Bloomer, A., Griffiths, P. and Merrison, A.J. (2005) Introducing Language in Use: a Coursebook. Routledge: London.

Cameron, D. (2005) Language, Gender and Sexuality. Applied Linguistics 26 (4), 482 - 502 (available on the e-library).

Cameron, D. (2001) Working with Spoken Discourse. London: Sage.

Coates, J. Language and Gender: A Reader

Eckbert, P. McConnell-Ginet, S. Language and Gender

Sealey, A. (2010) Researching English Language. Oxon: Routledge.

Sebba, M. (2000) Focussing on language. Definite Article Publisher: Lancaster.

We thought, that as a research topic, we could use Lakoff’s theory (as well as those who have questioned and updated her theory since it was put forward) as a basis, and build upon this.