Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Gossip Revisited: Language in all-Female Groups
The video clip I found is from The Desperate Housewives. Unlike what Coates studied in her article, this one is just a very brief 40 seconds conversation.
As we concluded in class, Coates concludes four formal features of femal gossip, including topic developement, mininal responses, simultaneous speech and epistemic modality.
We can see the four women establish their topic because they are watching their new neighbour moving in and commenting based on their "assumptions." They are not interrupting each other, but developing the topic in a collaborative way. Everyone is actively participating in the discussion to draw some kind of conclusion.
Due to the length and the form of the conversation, there isn't many minial responses in this clip. At one point, Lynette picks up two key words from the previous two persons' comments to start for her comment. This functions as a minial response to indicate herself paying attention to other speakers. Similarly in some other videos I saw, sometimes minimal responses could be replaced by transitional words or phrases, or even facial expressions and head nods.
Simultaneous speaking refers to multiple speakers voicing at the same time which doesn't really happen here. It's more like turn taking in this case where thay are talking on after the other to make the conversation flow.
Epistemic modality is very apparent here because we can hear words like "definitely" and "maybe." Like we discussed in class, it is a way of showing confidence to save face for others or themselves. We would later learn that the women who use "definitely" are actually very confidence in their conclusions because they've seen the new neighbor earlier whereas the woman who uses "maybe" are just guessing based of her past experience. Beyond words, their tone would also suggest if they are confident with what they are talking.
This conversation, though short, still consists a bit of storytelling in the end. They do start out talking about things, but they are not talking about how to do things, but what those things represent.
I think Coates do have some great observations, but her sample is too small and it might just represent a certain group of people instead of general female gossip. I do agree that female gossip is not a chaotic mess, but a constructive and continueous process. It is also important to see how women incorporate nonverbal during conversations as well.
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I agree with Yiling that Coates' sample is too small to make generalizations. She was very familiar with her group of friends that she recorded. However, I also think that analyzing television "gossip" in scripted programs is a little biased as well. Most writers in Hollywood are men, although there are some women, and as a result sometimes the scripted "gossip" that we watch in shows like Sex and the City is gender-biased. I watched a clip of The View (see link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEDSZ9z3NRQ&feature=sh_e_se&list=SL) where the five female hosts converse with their guest Debra Messing. Barbara Walters demonstrates epistemic modality when she asks Debra, "You took two years off....right?" She frames it as a question to refrain from sounding too confident or positive. There are also many examples of minimal responses, topic development, and even simultaneous speech when in one instance Whoopi interrupts Debra with a comment, and in another where two of the other hosts start talking at the same time and one backs down and allows the other to speak first. This type of unscripted discussion format is closer to reality than scripted female talk, and in this instance the women on The View seem to support Coates' argument.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very good point and the like the article the video is about a very small sample group. In the clip the main girl talking was very confident in the beginning and you could tell that in her tone of voice and the words she was using and also her facial expressions used as she spoke. When the guy walked up she started tripping over her word and didn't really say anything and her facial expressions changed and you could tell she was very uncomfortable.
ReplyDeleteI think when it comes to gossip with girls it not all about attacking another person but its all about telling a story about the person. Some stories are good some are bad some are true others are not. When it's guys they more or less just say what happened and thats that. Girls are all about the story and how theatrical it can be.