Mitigation, Indirection, and Women's Speech: a Speech Act Approach

INTHODUCT ION Some of the recent work on women's speech has been concentrated on the issue of women's 'linguistic insecurlty'9 that is, on the claim that women are generally less assertive, more uncertain and hesi.tant in conversation than men are. Such studies usually follow the lead of Robin Lakoff's discussion in Language and Women's Place (1975), focusing on those indicators of verbal timidity she first idcntified--tag questions» hedging expressions like kind of or sort of, mitigating phrases like I think or I don't know,--or-indirect utterances like 'You could go homet'Omorr;w' (as opposed to 'I wnnt you to go home tomorrow'). If we assume the rough correlation Lakoff postulntes between the frequency of such variables and speaker insecurity, then the research task is fairly uncomplicated: to discover whether or not one speaker or group of speakers is more linguistically uncertain than another, we need only record them in similar conversational situations and tabulate variables of this sort. Certainly this seems to be a reasonable approach; we nnturally feel that someone who says !_ guess or probably more often than someone who does not is more conversationally insecure. Or at least we suspect that such a speaker will be perceived as weak or unassertive by her interlocutors.