You Just Don't Understand

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You Just Don't Understand
You Just Don't Understand cover.jpg
First paperback edition
Author Deborah Tannen
Cover artistJames B. Harris
CountryUSA
LanguageEnglish
Subject Language and gender
Published1990 (Ballantine Books)
Pages330
ISBN 0-345-37205-0

You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation is a 1990 non-fiction book on language and gender by Deborah Tannen, a professor of sociolinguistics at Georgetown University. It draws partly on academic research by Tannen and others, but was regarded by academics with some controversy upon its release. It was written for a popular audience, and uses anecdotes from literature and the lives of Tannen and her family, students and friends.

Research into the many possible relationships, intersections and tensions between language and gender is diverse. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, and, as a bare minimum, could be said to encompass work notionally housed within applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, cultural studies, feminist media studies, feminist psychology, gender studies, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistics, mediated stylistics, sociolinguistics and media studies.

Deborah Tannen American sociolinguist

Deborah Frances Tannen is an American academic and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She has been a McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences following a term in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on language. It differs from sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics. It is historically closely related to linguistic anthropology, and the distinction between the two fields has been questioned.

Contents

Tannen writes that, from childhood, boys and girls learn different approaches to language and communication; she calls these different approaches "genderlects". According to Tannen, females engage in "rapport-talk" — a communication style meant to promote social affiliation and emotional connection, while men engage in "report-talk" — a style focused on exchanging information with little emotional import. The differences in metamessages, Tannen claims, result in misunderstandings between men and women.

The book remained on the New York Times best seller list for nearly four years (eight months at #1) and was subsequently translated into 30 other languages. [1] It received generally positive reviews, and some readers have even credited it with helping save their relationships. [2] However, another linguist has criticized Tannen's representation of the research she cites as limited and misleading, faulting her for making generalizations and contradictory claims.

Summary

Tannen's chapters, which are broken up into short titled sections of two or three pages, start by distinguishing what men and women seek from conversations: independence and intimacy respectively.

For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships ... For most men, talk is primarily a means to preserve independence and negotiate and maintain status in a hierarchical social order. [3]

Rapport is a close and harmonious relationship in which the people or groups concerned are “in sync” with each other, understand each other's feelings or ideas, and communicate smoothly.

This leads to conversations at cross-purposes, since both parties may miss the other's metamessages, with attendant misunderstandings—for example, a woman complaining about the lingering effects of a medical procedure, who may merely be seeking empathy from female friends by doing so, becomes angry at her husband when he suggests a solution involving further surgery. Men and women both perceive the other gender as the more talkative, and they are both accurate, since studies show men speak more in public settings about public topics while women dominate private conversation within and about relationships. The latter is frequently derided as gossip by both genders, and Tannen devotes an entire chapter to exploring its social functions as a way of connecting speaker and listener to a larger group.

Empathy The capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing

Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position. Definitions of empathy encompass a broad range of emotional states. Types of empathy include cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and somatic empathy.

Gossip idle talk or rumor, especially about personal or private affairs of others

Gossip is idle talk or rumor, especially about the personal or private affairs of others; the act is also known as dishing or tattling.

Men often dominate conversations in public, even where they know less about a subject than a female interlocutor, because they use conversation to establish status. Women, on the other hand, often listen more because they have been socialized to be accommodating. These patterns, which begin in childhood, mean, for instance, that men are far more likely to interrupt another speaker, and not to take it personally when they are themselves interrupted, while women are more likely to finish each other's sentences.

These patterns have paradoxical effects. Men use the language of conflict to create connections, and conversely women can use the language of connection to create conflict. "Women and men are inclined to understand each other in terms of their own styles because we assume we all live in the same world." [4] If the genders would keep this in mind and adjust accordingly, Tannen believes, much discord between them could be averted.

Reception

The book was well received by major media outlets. The New York Times called it "a refreshing and readable account of the complexities of communication between men and women." [5] You Just Don't Understand "goes a long way toward explaining why perfectly wonderful men and women behave in ways that baffle their partners," said Judy Mann in The Washington Post . [6]

During its four years on the Times' bestseller list, it spent eight months at the top. [1] Tannen chose to interrupt her teaching and researching career to do book tours and appear on talk shows. Many readers thanked her for saving their marriages. [2]

Criticism

At a 1992 conference on women and language, Montclair State University linguistics professor Alice Freed gave an extended critique of You Just Don't Understand. "Its popularity and overwhelming acclaim are both astonishing and troubling," she began. "[A]n otherwise well-respected linguist has publicly and successfully promulgated a theoretical framework that is widely disputed within the academic community." [7]

Tannen's book, Freed says, "simultaneously perpetuates negative stereotypes of women, excuses men their interactive failings, and distorts by omission the accumulated knowledge of our discipline." While Tannen accurately cites the factual findings of one researcher on the development of linguistic interaction among children, she uses them to support notions of intrinsic gender difference whereas the actual research finds greater similarities. Her readable anecdotes support unjustified generalizations that fail to take ethnic differences into account. "As an American Jewish woman married to an Irish American man," says Freed, "the constellation of conversational traits that I live with is completely at odds with those described by Tannen." She also points out that men and women are able to communicate with each other quite well when courting. [7]

Freed also says Tannen draws different conclusions from the same anecdotes in her scholarly work. In one she uses in both a scholarly article and her book, a man interrupts a joke his wife has begun telling to finish it for her. The article explains the man's behavior as a display of dominance, while the book simply suggests the two have different understandings. [7]

Related Research Articles

Conversation form of interactive communication between or among people

Conversation is interactive communication between two or more people.

<i>Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus</i> book by John Gray

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992) is a book written by American author and relationship counselor John Gray, after he had earned degrees in meditation and taken a correspondence course in psychology. The book states that most common relationship problems between men and women are a result of fundamental psychological differences between the sexes, which the author exemplifies by means of its eponymous metaphor: that men and women are from distinct planets—men from Mars and women from Venus—and that each sex is acclimated to its own planet's society and customs, but not to those of the other. One example is men's complaint that if they offer solutions to problems that women bring up in conversation, the women are not necessarily interested in solving those problems, but mainly want to talk about them. The book asserts each sex can be understood in terms of distinct ways they respond to stress and stressful situations.

Assertiveness is the quality of being self-assured and confident without being aggressive. In the field of psychology and psychotherapy, it is a learnable skill and mode of communication. Dorland's Medical Dictionary defines assertiveness as:

Robin Tolmach Lakoff is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her 1975 book Language and Woman's Place is often credited for making language and gender a huge debate in linguistics and other disciplines.

Louann Brizendine, M.D., is an American scientist, a neuropsychiatrist who is both a researcher and a clinician and professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).. She is the author of two books: The Female Brain, and The Male Brain.

Rudeness is a display of disrespect by not complying with the social norms or etiquette of a group or culture. These norms have been established as the essential boundaries of normally accepted behavior. To be unable or unwilling to align one's behavior with these norms known to the general population of what is socially acceptable is to be rude and are enforced as though they were a sort of social law, with social repercussions or rewards for violators or advocates, respectively.

<i>Thats Not What I Meant!</i> book by Deborah Tannen

That's Not What I Meant! How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships is Deborah Tannen's first book presenting, for a general audience, her linguistic approach to explaining how ways of speaking affect relationships. Predating by four years her phenomenally bestselling book about gender differences in ways of speaking, You Just Don't Understand, this short book approaches communication and miscommunication from a linguistic point of view rather than a psychological one, emphasizing differences between the genders. This book lays out the linguistic devices and rituals that constitute "conversational style," such as indirectness, pacing and pausing, humor, overlap and interruption, and shows their effects when styles differ.

Difference theory, broadly, is the notion that in communication and other interactions, men are fundamentally different from women.

Justine Cassell is an American professor and researcher interested in human-human conversation, human-computer interaction, and storytelling. Since August 2010 she has been on the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII).

Deborah Cameron, is a feminist linguist who currently holds the Rupert Murdoch Professorship in Language and Communication at Worcester College, Oxford University.

Feminist theory in composition studies is the application of feminist theory to composition studies. It considers the influence of gender, language, and cultural studies on composition in order to challenge preexisting conventions.

Small talk is an informal type of discourse that does not cover any functional topics of conversation or any transactions that need to be addressed.

Interactional sociolinguistics is a subdiscipline of linguistics that uses discourse analysis to study how language users create meaning via social interaction. It is one of the ways in which linguists look at the intersections of human language and human society; other subfields that take this perspective are language planning, minority language studies, quantitative sociolinguistics, and sociohistorical linguistics, among others. Interactional sociolinguistics is a theoretical and methodological framework within the discipline of linguistic anthropology, which combines the methodology of linguistics with the cultural consideration of anthropology in order to understand how the use of language informs social and cultural interaction. Interactional sociolinguistics was founded by linguistic anthropologist John J. Gumperz. Topics that might benefit from an Interactional sociolinguistic analysis include: cross-cultural miscommunication, politeness, and framing.

The Japanese language has some words and some grammatical constructions that are associated with men or boys, while others are associated with women or girls. Such differences are sometimes called "gendered language". In Japanese, speech patterns associated with women are referred to as onna kotoba or joseigo, and those associated with men are referred to as danseigo.

Susan C. Herring is an American linguist and communication scholar who researches gender differences in Internet use, and the characteristics, functions, and emergent norms associated with language, communication, and behavior in new online forms such as social media. She is Professor of Information Science and Linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington, where she founded and directs the Center for Computer-Mediated Communication. In 2013 she received the Association for Information Science & Technology Research Award for her contributions to the field of computer-mediated communication. She has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. The BROG project was founded and directed by her.

Turn-taking

Turn-taking is a type of organization in conversation and discourse where participants speak one at a time in alternating turns. In practice, it involves processes for constructing contributions, responding to previous comments, and transitioning to a different speaker, using a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic cues.

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An interruption is a speech event when one person breaks in to interject while another person is talking. Linguists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists are among the social scientists who have studied and identified patterns of interruption that may differ by gender, social status, race/ethnicity, culture, and political orientation.

References

  1. 1 2 "You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation by Deborah Tannen". HarperCollins. Archived from the original on July 9, 2010. Retrieved February 16, 2011.
  2. 1 2 Gamarekian, Barbara (June 19, 1991). "Men. Women. Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. Talk. Hear? No". The New York Times . Retrieved February 16, 2011.
  3. ↑ Tannen, Deborah (1990). You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation . Ballantine. p. 77. ISBN   978-0-345-37205-5.
  4. ↑ Tannen, 179.
  5. ↑ Rose, Ruth (August 5, 1990). "I Hear You, I Hear You". The New York Times . Retrieved February 16, 2011.
  6. ↑ Mann, Judy (July 25, 1990). "Why (S)He Acts So Funny". The Washington Post . Retrieved February 16, 2011.
  7. 1 2 3 Freed, Alice (1993). Hall, Kira; Buchholz, Mary; Moonwomon, Birch (eds.). "We Understand Perfectly: A Critique of Tannen's View of Cross-sex Communication". Locating Power: Proceedings of the Second Berkeley Women and Language Conference. 1: 144–152. Retrieved February 16, 2011.
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