Communication is unavoidable and human beings are constantly involved in this process of exchanging ideas, thoughts, and feelings with others. There are different strategies when it comes to communicative competence and these strategies can occur because of gender discrepancies: men and women sometime use different styles in communicating with one other. In our everyday lives we are surrounded by preconceived ideas on communication and the use of language being uttered by men and women in different ways.
Gender study is a field devoted to gender identity and gendered representation as central categories of analysis. Numerous studies, books, articles were published upon this subject, focused on gender discrepancies especially and on the use of language by men and women.
Collocations like discourse analysis, conversation analysis or gender studies are highly used in many sociolinguistics works. Discourse is a linguistic level in which sentences are combined into larger units, but before making up sentences we have to deal with words, the syntax level in which combined words result into sentences and finally the morphology level is the level in which sounds are combined into words. Conversation analysis on the other hand, is ‘to discover how participants understand and respond to one another in their turns at talk, with a central focus on how sequences of action are generated.’ (Hutchby and Woffitt, 2008: 12). An important characteristic for the conversation analysis is to examine the conversation turn by turn and moment by moment.
Many sociolinguists wrote about these discrepancies and they tried to figure it out why is that so. A great book that distinguishes between ‘women’s language’ and ‘men’s language’ is Robin Lakoff’s work, Language and Women’s Place published in 1975. Robin Lakoff’s book marked a turning point in sociolinguistics, but her work was severely criticized because it has ‘no empirical evidence’ as Jennifer Coates says. Although for the development in the analysis of gender differences Lakoff’s work represents a good starting point for the further analysis.
She states in her book, for example, that generally women use precise color words like: ‘beige’, ‘lavender’, ‘aquamarine’, ‘mauve’, ‘ecru’, etc but most men do not use these terms even if they have these colour words in their vocabulary. This might lead to the conclusion that women like to be more precise in terminology than men. An important idea in her work is the use of adjectives, such as: ‘adorable’, ‘charming’, ‘divine’, ‘lovely’, ‘cute’, ‘sweet’, etc. Coates names these adjectives ‘empty’ adjectives and observed that they are, again, mostly used by women, which means that women, unlike men, seem to be very fond of a certain type of ‘affective’ language.
Another important author which analyzed the discrepancies between men and women is Deborah Tannen with You Just Don’t Understand published in 1992, in which she distinguishes between ‘a language of connection’ (women’s language) and ‘a language of dominance’ (men’s language). Joan Swann wrote in his book Schooled Language: Language and Gender in Educational Settings (2003: 624- 644) that are different ways of using language and according to the gender differences there are ‘cooperative’ speaking styles (associated with female speakers) and ‘competitive’ speaking styles (associated with male speakers).
In order to demonstrate all the aspects mentioned above I gave a questionnaire among Romanian University ‘Ștefan cel Mare’, Suceava students in order to confirm Lakoff’s theory and not only. The results and the commentary regarding the answers are to be found in the second chapter ‘Men’s language vs. women’s language’. The aim of this survey is to verify whether there are indeed any differences in male conversation and female conversation. Besides the given test, what I analyzed, was only the spoken language, the oral exchange of sentiments, ideas, observations or opinions in an academic environment, between students between 21 and 24 years of age. And what I did was to analyze their conversation during the break or in their free time when they use colloquial language with others.
Furthermore, in the first chapter the study approaches the process of changing English words in Romanian language and how English becomes lingua franca and the main donor language for our country. I wish to demonstrate in the following chapter, which are the Anglicisms that are highly used especially by young people, those new words which define the new generation. In this chapter I will analyze this overwhelming influence of this universal language and the impact of this language on our. I also investigated some of the anglicisms which are used in an incorrect manner in Romanian and whose original meanings are changed.
Sextil Puṣcariu, the founder of ‘The Linguistic School of Cluj’ and a great philologist, analysed, in his book Limba Romȃnӑ, vol I, Privire generalӑ (1940) the importance and the consequences of anglicisms in our language. He also studied the way in which English words are integrated and used in Romanian. He is not the only one concerned with this matter, Florica Dumitrescu describes this phenomenon as ’o avalanșa de anglicisme care au invadat limba și care continuǎ sǎ creascǎ într-un ritm accelerat’ (Dumitrescu, 1997: 3) Both were worried about the way in which Romanian language develops, and how willing the Romanian speakers are to embrace a foreign language instead of their own.
In the last chapter, what I want to demonstrate is the overall use of discourse markers and if there are indeed significant differences in the use of discourse markers between men and women. Another important thing that I tried to prove was how both sexes differ in using discourse markers. The study attempts to explore the possible reasons of the gender differences in the use of discourse markers in the spoken language. Some of the most important analysts that tried to give a definition for discourse markers are: Deborah Schiffrin (Discourse Markers, 1987) and Romero-Trillo (Discourse Markers. In: Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2006); and many others that tried to define the functions of a discourse marker in their work, such as: Simone Mȕller (Discourse Markers in Native and Non- Native English Discourse, 2005) and Michael Stubbs (Discourse Analysis: The Sociolinguistic Analysis of Natural Language, 1983). These analysts explained the meaning in a conversation of a discourse marker and they tried to give a clear cut definition for it.
The aim of this case study is therefore to discuss gender differences in conversation and to present different opinions about it, based on the research of Lakoff (1975), Tannen (1992), Costin-Valentin Oancea and ultimately my own research project that I conducted among Romanian students at the University of ‘Ștefan cel Mare’ Suceava. Not only to present the differences in conversations but also the discrepancies in using anglicisms and discourse markers.