Why do some cultures drop personal pronouns and others don’t? One argument is that languages from more tightly knit collectivist cultures tend to drop pronouns, whereas the more individualist societies retain them.
Status Markers in Language
Most languages are constructed to identify who in a conversation has greater status or respect. In Old English, our linguistic ancestors distinguished between you and thou. By the late eighteenth century, the formal and informal distinction was disappearing. Most European languages still use formal and informal versions of the pronoun you, although the distinction is becoming less common. Other languages, such as Japanese, signal relative status in the conjugation of verbs and other words. Indeed, it is almost impossible to say “I spoke with you about the car” without signaling the relative status of the speaker and addressee.
Direct Versus Indirect Knowledge
Some languages, such as Turkish, require you to provide evidence for any statement you make. If I said to you “It was very hot in Austin yesterday” in English, you would likely shrug your shoulders and assume that I’m telling you the truth. In Turkish, however, you would use different forms of the verb “was” to denote whether I personally experienced the hot weather or am simply relaying this information from some other source.
Social Knowledge Lost in Translation
In a striking series of studies, Stanford’s Lera Boroditsky has demonstrated how the language you are speaking at the time dictates how you remember pictures or events. A bilingual Japanese-English speaker would likely remember the relative status of three other people if introduced to them in Japanese rather than in English. A bilingual Turkish-English speaker will remember my talking about Austin’s weather differently if we spoke in Turkish compared to English.
Indeed, when anything is translated from one language into another, parts simply disappear or are created. If I have to translate “thank you very much” into Spanish, I will have to make an educated guess whether to make it a formal or an informal you. And when the same phrase is translated back into English, the formality information is stripped away.
Interestingly, nouns and regular verbs generally translate across languages fairly smoothly. It is the function words that can cause the biggest problems.
LANGUAGE STYLE AND PSYCHOLOGY: MAKING THE LEAP TO THE NEXT LEVEL
Function words are everywhere. We use and are exposed to them all the time. They are virtually impossible to hear and to manipulate. And many of these stealth words say something about the speaker, the listener, and their relationship. But this book really isn’t about function words per se. If you are talking with a friend and mention “a chair” versus “the chair” versus “that chair,” it really says very little about you. However, what if we count your use of articles over the course of a day or week? What if we find that there are some people out there who use a and the at very high rates and another group that tends to not use articles at all?
In fact, there are people who use articles at very high rates and others who rarely use them. Across hundreds of thousands of language samples from books to blogs to everyday informal conversation, men consistently use articles at higher rates than women. And, even taking people’s sex into account, high article users tend to be more organized and emotionally stable. Indeed, men and women who habitually use a and the at higher rates tend to be more conscientious, more politically conservative, and older.
And now things start to get interesting. Using articles in daily speech doesn’t make a person a well-adjusted, older conservative politician like John McCain (who, in fact, used articles at high rates compared to his opponents in the 2008 presidential election campaign). Rather, the use of articles can begin to tell us about the ways people think, feel, and connect with others in their worlds. And the same is true for pronouns, prepositions, and virtually all function words.
This is the heart of my story. By listening to, counting, and analyzing stealth words, we can learn about people in ways that even they may not appreciate or comprehend. At the same time, the ways people use stealth words can subtly affect how we perceive them and their messages. Before starting our journey on stealth words and the human condition, you might need a brief road map to jog your memory about what different function words mean. At the end of the book, a short word-spotting guide is available. As you study your own language or the words of others, you can refer back to the guide as needed to better understand what the words mean.
CHAPTER 3
The Words of Sex, Age, and Power
THERE IS NO better way to start a discussion of language and differences among people than with gender. Do men and women use words differently? As you may suspect, the answer is yes. Now that this has been established, take the following test.
In daily conversations, e-mails, informal talks, blogs, and even most formal writing, who uses the following parts of speech more, men or women?
For each of the questions, circle the correct answer:
1. First-person singular (e.g., I, me, my):
a. women use more
b. men use more
c. no difference between women and men
2. First-person plural (e.g., we, us, our)
a. women use more
b. men use more
c. no difference between women and men
3. Articles (a, an, the)
a. women use more
b. men use more
c. no difference between women and men
4. Positive emotion words (e.g., love, fun, good)
a. women use more
b. men use more
c. no difference between women and men
5. Cognitive words (e.g., think, reason, believe)
a. women use more
b. men use more
c. no difference between women and men
6. Social words (e.g., they, friend, parent)
a. women use more
b. men use more
c. no difference between women and men
This should be a very easy test for everyone. A day doesn’t go by where we don’t hear thousands of words from both men and women. In fact, we have all been deluged with words from people of both sexes our entire lives. Who could possibly miss these questions?
As it turns out, most people do. This includes the leading scholars in many top departments of psychology and linguistics around the world. Your high school English teachers would have done no better. How about you? The answers are: 1. a; 2. c; 3. b; 4. c; 5. a; 6. a. Women use first-person singular, cognitive, and social words more; men use articles more; and there are no meaningful differences between men and women for first-person plural or positive emotion words. If you are like most people, you probably got the social words question right and missed most of the others.
Before going farther, it might be helpful to review the test answer key:
1. Women use first-person singular pronouns, or I-words, more than men. People’s pronouns track their focus of attention. If someone is anxious, self-conscious, in pain, or depressed, they pay more attention to themselves. Research suggests that women, on average, are more self-aware and self-focused than are men. The differences in the use of I-words between women and men are not subtle. In natural conversations, blogs, and speeches, women use I-words at much higher rates.
2. Men and women use first-person plural words, or we-words, at the same rate. The use of we highlights one of the most enigmatic function words in our vocabulary. The natural assumption is that when speakers use we, they are referring to themselves and their close friends. There are even famous psychology studies where people see the word we flashed on a screen and it makes them feel all warm and fuzzy and more connected to others.
We, as it turns out, is really two very different words. Yes, there is the warm and fuzzy we—“my wife and I,” “my dog and me,” “my family.” You can feel the welcoming arms of the w and e embrace us. So, yes, there is that tight sense of group identity that goes with we some of the t
ime.
Another we, however, is the cooler, distanced, and largely impersonal we. My graduate students know this we. It’s when I say, “You know, we really need to analyze that data.” My son rarely feels warm about his father when I say, “We need to take out the trash.” As it happens, I have no intention of actually analyzing that data. Nor am I proposing to my son that we take a family outing to the trash bin. In many situations, people use the word we when they mean you. It serves as a polite form to order others around.
A variation on the cool we-meaning-you is the royal we. “We are not amused,” Queen Victoria is supposed to have said, meaning that the queen herself was not amused. Soon after the birth of her first grandchild, England’s prime minister Margaret Thatcher announced to the press, “We have become a grandmother.” Royalty, office holders, and senior administrators occasionally slip in the royal we when they should really be using the word I.
Finally, there is the purely ambiguous we that is particularly loved by politicians. We need change in this country and we deserve it! Our taxes are too high and we need to do something about it! I sometimes sit around with my students trying to deconstruct political speeches in order to figure out who the “we” is. Sometimes, the politician means “you,” sometimes “I,” sometimes “you and I,” and sometimes “everyone on earth who agrees with me.”
The reason we is such a fun word is that half of the time it is used as a way to bring the speaker closer to others and the other half of the time to deflect responsibility away from the speaker. And indeed, there are sex differences. Women tend to use the warm we and men are more drawn to the distanced we. On average, however, men and women end up using we-words at about the same rates.
3. Men use articles (a, an, the) more than do women. Except for people who read the last chapter closely, hardly anyone would know the answer to this one. Articles? Who cares about articles? I do, for one. And I personally want you to care because they are very important words. Articles are used with nouns—especially concrete, highly specific nouns. A person who uses an article is talking about a particular object or thing. Guys talk about objects and things more than women do. They talk about the broken carburetor, the wife, and a steak on the grill for the dinner. We’ll return to this shameless generalization in a minute.
4. No differences in the use of positive emotion words. Although women use slightly more negative emotion words in everyday conversation than do men, the two sexes use positive emotion words at the same high rate.
5. Women use more cognitive words than men. Cognitive words are words that reflect different ways of thinking and include words that tap insight (understand, know, think), causal thinking (because, reason, rationale), and related dimensions. That women use more of these words is a slap in the face of Aristotle, who believed that women were less rational than men and incapable of philosophical thought. But there is a simple explanation. It all comes into focus with social words.
6. Women use social words at far higher rates than men. Social words refer to any words that are related to other human beings. Surely you got this one correct. Women do, indeed, think more and talk more about other people.
The various sex differences in word use actually make a coherent story. When women and men get together, what do they talk about? Women disproportionately talk about other people and men talk about, well, carburetors and other objects and things. Ultimately, which topics—other people versus carburetors—are more complex and require more cognitive work in explaining? Human relationships are not rocket science—they are far, far more complicated. We can get our top scientists together and send people to the moon. Two speakers—male or female—can troubleshoot a carburetor in under an hour. But even the most creative and diligent scientists, much less two interested speakers, are unable to understand, explain, or agree on why actress Jennifer Lopez is attracted to the men she is or how long she will remain married to her current husband.
PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT TEST: OTHER WORD CATEGORIES THAT DISTINGUISH BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN
The sex-differences test you just took is only the beginning. Men and women differ in a variety of other language dimensions that will be discussed throughout the book. In case there is another gender-language exam, it is important to appreciate that men and women also differ in the following ways:
MEN USE MORE
WOMEN USE MORE
Big words
Personal pronouns
Nouns
Verbs (including auxiliary verbs)
Prepositions
Negative emotion (especially anxiety)
Numbers
Negations (no, not, never)
Words per sentence
Certainty words (always, absolutely)
Swear words
Hedge phrases (“I think,” “I believe”)
These additional language differences buttress what has already been noted. Males categorize their worlds by counting, naming, and organizing the objects they confront. Women, in addition to personalizing their topics, talk in a more dynamic way, focusing on how their topics change. Discussions of change require more verbs.
Finally, one of the most studied dimensions of women’s language concerns hedge phrases, or hedges. Hedges typically start a sentence in the form of a phrase such as “I think that” or “It seems to me” or “I don’t know but …” Consider the meaning of the two following answers to the question
What’s the weather like outside?
I think it’s cold.
It’s cold.
The answer “I think it’s cold,” as opposed to “It’s cold,” tells more than the outside temperature. The “I think” phrase is implicitly acknowledging, “Although there are different views on this—and you may indeed come to a different conclusion—my own personal belief is that it might be cold outside. I could be wrong, of course, and if you have a different sense of the weather, I won’t be offended.” To say “I think,” then, implies that there are multiple perspectives and, at the same time, announces that the estimation of coldness is ultimately an opinion rather than a fact. To say “It’s cold” is to say the weather outside is cold. An indisputable fact. End of discussion.
Consistent with the greater social interests of women, it is not surprising that they are more likely to use hedges than are men. Interestingly, women are just as likely to use hedges when talking with other women as when talking with men.
GENDER, STEREOTYPES, AND COMPUTERS
There is nothing inherently mysterious about the language of women and men. Nevertheless, most of us have been blind to these sex differences our entire lives. I’m no different. Soon after developing the computerized word counting program LIWC, I started analyzing dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of essays, blogs, and other text samples from men and women. One of the first analyses revealed the pattern of effects you have just read about. When I first found that women used I-words more than men, I just ignored the results. Had to be a fluke. Another study, same effects. Another fluke, I thought. It probably took a dozen analyses with very large samples to slap me awake.
The stereotypes we hold about women and men are deeply ingrained. Even within the scientific community, the study of gender differences in language is highly politicized. One group of scientists passionately believes that men and women are essentially the same; another believes that they are profoundly different. Yet others simply don’t want to think about it. But the stereotypes persist. Some believe that women are more emotional and men are more logical or that women talk about others and men talk about themselves. Yet others are convinced that women simply say twice as many words every day as men. Even though most of these beliefs have been debunked by good scientific studies, it is hard to let go of them.
Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the women’s movement awakened the culture to the fact that women and men were not treated equally. A Berkeley linguist, Robin Lakoff, published a stunning book in 1975, Language and Woman’s Place, that pointed out how women
and men talked differently. Lakoff argued that men used the language of power and rudeness, while women’s speech tended to be quieter, passive, and excessively polite. In the decades that followed, several studies supported Lakoff’s observations. By the early 1990s, Deborah Tannen, a linguist at Georgetown University, attracted international notice with her book You Just Don’t Understand. Her book, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for over four years, argued that men and women often talk past each other without appreciating that the other sex is almost another culture. Women, for example, are highly attentive to the thoughts and feelings of others; men are less so. Women view men’s speaking styles as blunt and uncaring; men view women’s as indirect and obscure.
Sociolinguists such as Lakoff and Tannen focus on broad social dimensions such as gender, race, social class, and power. Their approach is qualitative, involving recording and analyzing conversations on a case-by-case basis. It is slow, painstaking work. Over the course of a year, a good sociolinguist may analyze only a few interactions. Whereas the qualitative approach is powerful at getting an in-depth understanding of a small group of interactions, the methods are not designed to get an accurate picture of an entire society or culture. This is where computer-based text analysis methods can help. By analyzing the blogs of hundreds of thousands of people, for example, the computer-based methods can quickly determine the nature of gender differences as a function of age, class, native language, region, and other domains. In other words, a relatively slow but careful qualitative approach can give us an in-depth view of a small group of people; a computer-based quantitative approach provides a broader social and cultural perspective. The two methods, then, complement each other in ways that the two research camps often fail to appreciate.
The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us Page 5
