Women, Men, and Type of Talk: What Makes the Difference?

Author(s): Alice F. Freed and Alice Greenwood

Source: Language in Society, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Mar., 1996), pp. 1-26
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4168671
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Language in Society 25, 1-26. Printed in the United States of America

Women, men, and type of talk:

What makes the difference?
ALICE F. FREED
Linguistics Department
Montclair State University
Upper Montclair, NJ 07043

ALICE GREENWOOD
AT&T Bell Laboratories
Murray Hill, NJ 07974

ABSTRACT

In a study of dyadic conversations between four female and four male

pairs of friends, the use of the phraseyou know and questions are exam-
ined within three types of discourse. Women and men are found to use
these features with equal frequency; and all speakers, regardless of sex
or gender, use them in comparable ways. Although these particular dis-
course features have been previously associated with a female speech
style, the results of this study show that it is the particular requirements
associated with the three types of talk that motivate their use, and not
the sex or gender of the individual speaker. The problems of generalizing
about the characteristics of female or male speech, outside of a partic-
ular conversational context, are discussed; and it is shown that a gen-
dered style cannot be adequately defined by counting individual speech
variables removed from the specifics of the talk context. (Gender, ques-
tions, tag questions, discourse analysis, conversation analysis)*

The concept of stable and mutually exclusive gendered speech styles,1

uniquely associated with women and girls or men and boys, is unfortunately
still pervasive in the field of linguistics (Tannen 1990b, Labov 1991, Ward-
haugh 1992, 1993, Fromkin & Rodman 1993). Many of the stereotyped pre-
sumptions commonly presented about female and male speech originated
with variationist studies carried out in the 1970s (Labov 1972, Trudgill 1972,
Macaulay 1978, Romaine 1978), and emerged from limited data on cross-sex
conversation collected in the 1970s and early 1980s (Hirschman 1973, 1994,
Zimmerman & West 1975, Fishman 1978, 1980, West & Zimmerman 1983).
From recent work on same-sex conversational exchanges (Coates 1989, 1991,
1994, 1996, Eckert 1989, Sheldon 1990, McLemore 1991, Holmes 1993) and
work that focuses on previously understudied populations (Coates & Cam-
eron 1989, Goodwin 1990, 1994, Morgan 1991, Hall & O'Donovan 1996), it
? 1996 Cambridge University Press 0047-4045/96 $7.50 + .10 1
 ALICE F. FREED AND ALICE GREENWOOD

has become increasingly apparent that the results of early cross-sex studies,
and work that investigated only white speakers living in the West, cannot be
unproblematically transferred to generalized conclusions about the speech
styles of all women or all men in all contexts (see also Edelsky 1981, Holmes
1986). We believe that many assumptions and conclusions about female and
male speech styles, drawn from research carried out before 1990, need to be
reconsidered.
In particular, the conception of gender which underlies much of the work
in this field - where gender is unquestioningly treated as a dualistic, polar-
ized, and explicitly assigned category parallel to sex - seems simplistic and
naive (see also Eckert 1989, Cameron 1990, Butler 1990, Gal 1991, 1992,
Ochs 1992). We object to conclusions about speakers'general communicative
style (or specific phonological characteristics)which are based on the exam-
ination of single linguistic variables, isolated from their full conversational
and communicative contexts (Lakoff 1975, Zimmerman & West 1975, Maltz
& Borker 1982, Tannen 1990b, Labov 1991); and we reject, as have others,
claimed correspondences between single linguistic structures or pragmatic
expressions and invariant functional meanings associated with any group of
speakers (see also Hymes 1974, Goffman 1983, Holmes 1984a,b, 1986, 1993,
Cameron et al. 1989, Tannen 1992, Coates 1993, Greenwood 1996). The
value of sociolinguistic research that fails to situate the examination of lan-
guage structures in the arena of human communication, where the goals of
specific communicative acts can be considered, is highly suspect. We agree
with Cameron's admonition (1990:186) that "The social practice of language-
using is not defined simply by the act of speaking (or writing or signing) ...
What most crucially defines this social practice ... is the act of addressing
someone, in some context, for some purpose" (see also Eckert & McConnell-
Ginet 1992a,b, Gal 1991, 1992).
In this article we examine two discourse features which have been widely
studied and regularly associated with gendered speech styles. We investigate
the occurrence of you know, and the use of questions in casual conversations
between eight same-sex pairs of friends. These features were chosen precisely
because of the amount of attention they have received in language and gender
research. They can serve as exemplars of other linguistic forms and devices
which should be reanalyzed before reliable conclusions about the character-
istics of specifically situated same-sex verbal style can be made. In this dis-
cussion, we offer evidence of the following:

(a) The requirements of specific verbal tasks elicit particular stylistic

devices for speakers who are members of the same speech community.
(b) Women and men of the same speech community, speaking in same-
sex pairs, respond to the requirements of such verbal tasks and to various
sociolinguistic contexts in equivalent ways.
2 Language in Society 25:1 (1996)
 WOMEN, MEN, AND TYPE OF TALK

(c) Women and men of the same speech community, speaking in same-sex
pairs in the same conversational context, with equal access to the conversa-
tional floor, do not differ either in the frequency of the use of you know or
in the number of questions uttered.
(d) Women and men of the same speech community, speaking in same-
sex pairs in comparable settings, not only utter equivalent numbers of you
know and of questions, but use you know and questions to achieve compa-
rable discourse goals.
(e) It is more accurate to associate a style of speaking with a particularlin-
guistic task, or with a specific kind of speaking situation within a given socio-
cultural context, regardless of the sex of the individuals participating, than
to attribute a language style to any casually defined group of speakers.

DATA AND METHODOLOGY

The data for this study are from eight dyadic conversations, of approximately
35 minutes each, recorded in an experimental setting. Students from linguis-
tics and women's studies classes at a university in New Jersey were invited
to participate in a study of friendship. The participants were White, 18-28
years old, from middle- and working-class backgrounds. Each volunteer was
asked to bring a friend of the same sex (from inside or outside the univer-
sity community) to a specified location. The volunteers were informed in
advance that they would be audio- and video-recorded during the study. In
all, 30 conversations were recorded. We report here on conversationsbetween
four female and four male pairs of friends, roughly matched for age and
length of friendship.
To manipulate the talk situation, we divided the conversation into three
parts, each of which had distinct conversational requirements.When the par-
ticipants arrived, we gave the appearance of being overwhelmed with equip-
ment problems, and we appealed to them to be patient until we had
everything in working order. Microphones and a tape recorder were in full
view on the table at which they were asked to sit. The equipment was run-
ning and they were so informed, but we explained that the formal part of the
project was not yet underway. We then left them alone and said that we
would return as soon as we were organized, encouraging them to relax and
to enjoy the doughnuts and juice that we had provided. We label this por-
tion of the conversation the SPONTANEOUS talk portion because the speakers
themselves, not the researchers, dictated the interaction and controlled the
conversational material. They sat at the table, waiting for us to officially
begin, and chatted about matters unrelated to our project or to any other
assigned topic.
After 10 minutes we returned, apologized for the delay, and told the par-
ticipants that we were ready to proceed. We explained that, ratherthan inter-
Language in Society 25:1 (1996) 3
 ALICE F. FREED AND ALICE GREENWOOD

view them separately, we wanted them to talk together about the nature of
friendship between women as compared to friendship between men. We
attempted to be as casual as possible in giving our instructions, hoping to
mitigate the speakers' self-consciousness. We call this the CONSIDERED talk
portion because the speakers were focused on a particulartopic, assigned by
the researchers.
After 15 more minutes we interrupted the conversations, thanked both
speakers, and asked each one to fill out an anonymous demographic ques-
tionnaire and a form granting us permission to use the taped conversations.
Because the documents had to be filled out individually, no talk was
required. However, there was usually a good deal of conversation. It was
apparent that the pairs of friends believed that their task was completed; they
proceeded to talk to each other in an informal and relaxed manner. They
made jokes about the questions, read them aloud to each other, sometimes
collaborated on their answers to the questions, and engaged in general com-
mentary about filling out the forms. This section, which lasted 6-10 minutes,
provided us with an opportunity to observe COLLABORATIVE talk.
This approach had several important methodological advantages for the
type of analysis that was undertaken. The research design allowed us to ana-
lyze the pragmatic expression you know and the use of questions in the lan-
guage of 16 individuals, in three different types of speech where both the
relationship between the interlocutorsand the setting remained constant. Fur-
thermore, this experimental design ensured that comparable speech samples
were analyzed for women and men. Holmes warns (1986:12) that "any com-
parison of the number of forms used by each sex clearly needs to control for
differential opportunities for producing such forms," a point frequently over-
looked in earlier research. Our approach guaranteed like access to speech
production for all female and male participants.

YOU KNOW

The expression you know has often been described as a female hedging
device, and interpreted as a marker of both insecurity and of powerlessness
(Lakoff 1975, Fishman 1978, 1980, O'Barr & Atkins 1980, Ostman 1981,
Coates 1986). For example, Fishman 1980 reported that, in the conversations
that she studied of three heterosexual couples, women's frequent and dispro-
portionate use of you know signaled both the subordination of the female
speakers in the conversations and the heavy conversational workload that
they carried. At the time that Coates' first edition of Women, men and lan-
guage was published (1986), researcherswere still making assumptions about
women's speech based in part on evidence from such mixed-sex conversa-
tional data. Thus you know was included in the list of gendered speech char-
acteristics typical of women and not of men. In her review of the literature,
4 Language in Society 25:1 (1996)
 WOMEN, MEN, AND TYPE OF TALK

Coates pointed out that "A statement like It was, you know, really interest-
ing is considered less assertive than its unhedged version It was really inter-
esting" (1986:102). She also reported that the frequent occurrence of you
know revealed "malfunction in turn taking" (102). However, in the second
edition of the book (1993), these comments were revised to reflect the impor-
tance of examining linguistic forms in context. Our data show that impor-
tant information about the discourse function of you know in conversation
is masked if it is analyzed as a single pragmatic device, isolated from its full
conversational context.
Our corpus consists of 612 instances of you know,2 from approximately
4' hours of informal conversation between eight pairs of same-sex friends;
compare this to the mere 104 instances of you know in 11 hours of intimate
conversation between the three heterosexual couples reported by Fishman
1980. This large difference between our data and Fishman's corroborates the
observation made by Holmes (1986:14) of an increase in the frequency of
occurrence of you know in same-sex interaction as compared to mixed-sex
interaction. In addition, this contrast in the frequency of you know may
result from the type of discourse; i.e., casual conversation between friends
may elicit a greater use of this expression than intimate talk between couples.
A comprehensive analysis of the distribution of you know in our data
reveals the following:
(a) Every speaker in the sample, female and male, used this expression
eight or more times in 35 minutes of conversation.
(b) In every conversational dyad, one member of the pair used the expres-
sion more frequently than the other.
(c) The frequency of occurrence of you know varied widely with the type
of talk of the three differcnt segments of the conversations studied.
(d) All speakers in the sample, female and male, varied their usage of you
know in identical ways, in accordance with the three different types of talk.
Table 1 shows the number of occurrences of you know in the speech of
each participant, and compares it to the frequency of occurrence of this form
in the speech of that individual's conversational partner. The total number
of occurrences of you know in the eight female and male conversations out-
lined in Table 1 are almost identical. Out of the total 612 tokens of you
know, women used the form 310 times, and men 302 times.3 The totals
show that every member of these female and male pairs of friends used this
expression - and that, in each pair, one speaker used the form more often
than the other. For example, in female dyad 3, Speaker A used this expres-
sion 37 times, which represents 70% of the total occurrences of you know
in that conversation. The number was more than double that of her inter-
locutor, who used you know only 16 times. Similarly, in male pair 8, you
know occurred 20 times in the speech of Speaker A; again, this was more
Language in Society 25:1 (1996) 5
 ALICE F. FREED AND ALICE GREENWOOD

TABLE 1. Totals and percentages of you know

by pair and by sex

Female Male

1. A: 36 B: 138 = 174 5. A: 11 B: 41 = 52
(21o) (79%) (21%Vo) (79%)
2. A: 8 B: 25 = 33 6. A: 38 B: 60 = 98
(24%) (76%) (39%) (61%)
3. A: 37 B: 16= 53 7. A: 71 B: 53 = 124
(70%) (30%) (57%) (43%)
4. A: 18 B: 32 = 50 8. A: 20 B: 8 = 28
(36%) (64%) (71%) (29%)
Total 310 Total 302

than double the eight occurrences of the form in his partner's speech. These
numbers show that, in informal dyadic conversation, it is not unusual for one
conversational partner to use you know more than the other.
When Fishman 1978, 1980 found an imbalance in the use of you know in
cross-sex conversations, she attributed it to the imbalance in power between
the speakers. Because her studies found that women used you know signifi-
cantly more than men, she interpretedyou know as a linguistic signal of the
interpersonal powerlessness of the women. However, in the conversations
under study here, where there is no overt (or societal) power differential be-
tween the participants, an imbalance is nonetheless found in the use of you
know. Given the limited knowledge that we have about the speakers' friend-
ship, it is unwise to speculate about the interpersonal function of the greater
number of you knows in the speech of one member of each pair. This imbal-
ance may reflect greater involvement or conversational effort on the part of
one speaker over the other - or more simply, may reflect a personal speak-
ing style of one of the participants. Yet it is clear that a specific linguistic phe-
nomenon or communicative feature, in this case the imbalance between
speakers in the use of you know, cannot be explained outside the full com-
municative context in which it occurs, and cannot be generalized from one
context to another.
In addition to analyzing the number of occurrences of you know by indi-
vidual speaker and by sex of speaker, we examined the distribution of you
know across the three distinct parts of the conversations. We found that a
striking 546 instances, or 89% of the total occurrences, occurred in Part II,
rising from 56 instances (or 907o)in Part I. Only 10 examples (2%) of you
know occur in Part III of the conversations. When adjusted for the time dif-
ferences between the three parts of the conversations, 13'07o of the instances

6 Language in Society 25:1 (1996)

 WOMEN, MEN, AND TYPE OF TALK

Legend
P kns
Pati:56youb
80- 546you
PathI: k&s
PaI
III : youb*s
pat

60-

PadlI:CIrdTalk (15mh.)
1:SptbneoTalk
Part min.)
(1O PadIII:
Collaborative
Talk min.)
(6-10
FIGURE 1: Distribution of you know by type of talk, adjusted for time.

of you know are seen to occur in Part I, 84%1o in Part II, and 2% in Part III;
see Figure 1.
Women and men were nearly identical in the number and distribution of
you know, with both groups showing an extraordinary increase in the usage
of you know in Part II; see Figure 2. Since the fluctuation in use is so dra-
matic for all eight dyads, regardlessof the sex or gender of speaker, it is clear
that associating this form with female speakers (or with males for that mat-
ter) is incorrect. Rather, these data lead us away from generalities which
focus on categories of sex or gender, and toward a conclusion grounded in
discourse requirements:women and men speaking in same-sex pairs respond
to the differences in the talk situation in exactly the same way. The only
change that takes place in the speaking situation in going from Part I to
Part II is the requirements of the talk itself. Thus it is the demands of this
particular talk situation, in which the participants respond to an assigned
topic - plus the constraints associated with this particular topic - that elicit
this verbal behavior. It is not the sex or gender of the speakers, or the nature
of their personal relationship outside this setting, that explains their increased
use of you know in the CONSIDERED section of the interaction.
For researcherswho have moved away from a reliance on gendered speech
styles as explanations for linguistic choices, there is now general agreement
that you know is a hearer-oriented expression, providing the speaker with a

Language in Society 25:1 (1996) 7

 ALICE F. FREED AND ALICE GREENWOOD

100

Legend

Fern*E|

801

20 m-E
ParII:
Corsidred
Tall
(15min.)
Part Talk
l:Spontneous(10
min.) PadIlIl: Talk
Collaborative mi.)
(6.10
FIGURE 2: Distribution of you know by type of talk and by sex.

means of checking for shared background information (Ostman 1981,

Holmes 1986, Schiffrin 1987). However, its various conversational functions
are much broader than this; they are succinctly summarizedby Holmes 1986,
1993, who provides a thorough and nuanced analysis of the form. She con-
cludes that there is no single function that corresponds to the use of you
know, nor is there one gendered group that uses it more than another.
Rather, all instances of you know "tie participants' turns together," "func-
tion as verbal fillers," and "allude ... to the relevant knowledge of the
addressee in the context of [the] utterance" (1986:16). Beyond this, Holmes
contends that you know is a signal of both speaker confidence and speaker
uncertainty. She concludes: "There is no doubt about the fact that you know
may be used primarily to appeal to the addressee for reassurance. It may
equally be used, however, as an 'intimacy signal' and as a positive politeness
strategy, expressing solidarity by generously attributing relevant knowledge
to the addressee" (1986:18). Chafe & Danielewicz (1987:105-6) assert (using
Ostman 1981 to confirm their point) that you know is an "obvious measure
of involvement with [one's] audience." Their study documents the presence
of you know in informal conversation, and its absence from formal speech,
casual letter-writing, and formal lectures. The data presented here support
these claims, and offer a discourse-basedanalysis of what may trigger the use
of you know in friendly same-sex conversation.
In the examples to be presented, taken from the speech of both female and
8 Language in Society 25:1 (1996)
 WOMEN, MEN, AND TYPE OF TALK

male pairs, you know can be seen as a device that effectively connects the
speaker to the hearer. This interactive function seemed to vary little from one
conversational segment to another; what changed was the frequency of
occurrence - brought about, we believe, by the participants' need to work
in concert to produce a discussion on an externally assigned topic of conver-
sation. This communicative behavior, manifested by both the women and
men in the sample, appears to reflect the speaker's desire for mutual orien-
tation, especially in the CONSIDERED talk segment.
These examples, which are representative of the sorts of utterances that
occurred in all the conversations, show that, after an utterance containing
you know by one speaker, the other speaker often follows with an explicit
yeah, just like ... , or a clear continuation of the topic initiated by the other
speaker in the immediately preceding utterance. (All these examples are taken
from Part II of the conversations.)

(1) Female pair

A: Like it's not, I wouldn't call it bonding, but it's like, I don't know. It's more like prov-
ing yourselves to each other.
B: Yeah.
A: It's their type of bonding, you know.
B: Sure, I agree.
A: Like the competition of it.
B: Um hum. I mean, if anybody's bonding, it would be two females who were chatting
over coffee about real life problems, you know.
A: Yeah.
(2) Female pair
A: um, I know. It's good. I don't know. It's different like there's a lot of kinds of friend-
ships, you know, like
B: like when I talk to my best friend Jen, it's interesting. Because the two of us, you
know, we can talk about guys, we can talk about stuff that's going on in our life,
we can talk about, you know, soaps and school. It's, you know, it's just something
I can, I feel like I can relate more to her than I do to
A: anyone else.
(3) Male pair
A: Right, no but I mean, like say we were talking about sex, right? They would be more
sensitive to each other's feelings and the guys would just like, hey, look what I did
today, you know.
B: Brag about it more.
A: Yeah and you know the guys take it like, they won't take it as serious as the girls
would.
B: Yeah.
(4) Male pair
A: Two people I know of, two guys that, you know if I don't talk to them for two years,
I could call them up and you know it would
B: it would still be the same
A: no big deal.
B: Yeah.
A: We're still friends. It doesn't matter if you don't keep in touch all the time. It doesn't
matter this; it doesn't matter that. And that's, that's kind of you know like my
friend Mike. You know. He's lived in town. There's no reason I, I just
B: Yeah.
A: We just haven't gotten together for a long time.

Language in Society 25:1 (1996) 9

 ALICE F. FREED AND ALICE GREENWOOD

You know is thus a tool that works to reinforce mutual involvement in the
conversation, whether as an expression of speaker certainty or uncertainty,
and assists in the joint production of conversation. It is therefore understand-
able that 897o of the occurrences of you know in the data reported on here
take place in Part II of the conversations, where the speakers are most self-
consciously engaged in talking to one another. In this segment, speaker turns
are longer, phatic communication through question use increases, and a
greater amount of attention to a single topic is evident. It appears that both
female and male speakers are using you know to maintain close contact with
one another as they attempt to jointly construct a reply to an assigned topic
of conversation. It is the task at hand, the imposed face-to-face encounter -
and perhaps the nature of the subject itself, a discussion of friendship -
which best explains the frequent occurrence and the function of you know
in these conversations. Thus a discourse-based analysis, unlike previously
proposed explanations for the frequency of you know in the speech of
women (gender, sex, hesitancy, or conversational workload), provides an
adequate explanation for the findings reported here.

THE USE OF QUESTIONS

Question use is another linguistic device which has been stereotypically asso-
ciated with the conversational style of women. Lakoff 1975, among the first
to claim that women used more questions than men, declared that women
use tag questions as a hedging device, and that women have a greater ten-
dency to use rising intonation on declaratives, thereby turning their state-
ments into questions. As with you know, this usage was interpretedas a sign
of women's hesitancy and societal powerlessness. Lakoff's claims, which were
not based on empirical data, inspired a significant amount of research that
produced conflicting conclusions about tag and other question usage (Dubois
& Crouch 1975, Brouwer et al. 1979, O'Barr & Atkins 1980, Holmes 1984a,
Preisler 1986, Cameron et al. 1989, Coates 1989).
In other important research that subsequently formed the basis for widely
accepted beliefs about women's question-asking behavior, Fishman 1978,
1980 found that, in naturally occurring conversations between three hetero-
sexual couples, women asked many more questions than men. As with you
know, she interpreted this usage as evidence of the disproportionate conver-
sational workload carried by women when interacting with men. The differ-
ential use of questions by women and men has continued to be a much
discussed topic, fueled most recently by Tannen's (1990b) assertions about
women and men's different communicative styles, where question-asking is
seen as part of women's cooperative speaking style and as a device for shar-
ing the floor.

10 Language in Society 25:1 (1996)

 WOMEN, MEN, AND TYPE OF TALK

Despite the limited data on question use by women and men and the
paucity of definitive empirical evidence to support one of these three inter-
pretations over the others - hesitancy, conversational workload, or cooper-
ativeness - many linguists still accept the claim that, as a part of a female
speaking style, women ask more questions than men. Our treatment of ques-
tions demonstrates, to the contrary, "the absolute necessity of considering
forms in their linguistic and social context, not in general, and suggest that
[researchers]should regard multifunctionality as the unmarked case" (Cam-
eron et al. 1989:77). We believe that questions constitute another discourse
phenomenon that has been incorrectly associated with gender, and has been
inaccurately assumed to serve one invariant communicative function for a
particular group of speakers.
Our corpus consists of 787 questions uttered by the 16 different speakers
in the eight 35-minute conversations described earlier. We used syntactic and
intonational criteriato identify utterances as questions. Six types of questions
were found in the corpus:
(a) Yes/no questions characterized by simple subject-auxiliary inversion;
these included reduced yes/no questions where the auxiliary is deleted and
alternative questions.
(b) WH-questions.
(c) Full declaratives and other syntactic phrases with a final phrase rise.
(d) Tag questions, including both canonical (or auxiliary) tags, e.g. They
didn't hit you, did they? and invariant (or lexical) tags, e.g. That's whereyou
lived, right?
(e) WH-questions, followed by a phrase with a final rise in tag position,
e.g. What's today's date? the 25th?, sometimes called "WH-questions plus
guess" constructions (Norrick 1992).
(f) Questionsof the form How/ What about ..., e.g. What about when
women get older, like when they get married and stuff?

A detailed analysis of the distribution of questions reveals the following:

(a) Every speaker in this sample asked 25 questions or more during the
three parts of this conversation.
(b) In five out of the eight conversational pairs, one member of the dyad
used questions more often than the other.
(c) The frequency of occurrence of questions varied with the type of talk
of the three different segments of the conversations studied.
(d) All speakers varied their usage of questions in comparable ways and
in accordance with the different types of talk.
One of our goals in studying same-sex pairs of friends was to investigate
how questions are used when sex was controlled for, and to examine whether

Language in Society 25:1 (1996) 11

 ALICE F. FREED AND ALICE GREENWOOD

TABLE 2. Totals and percentages of questions

by pair and by sex

Female Male

1. A: 26 B: 45 = 71 5. A: 54 B: 65 = 119
(37Wo) (63Wo) (45%0) (55%)
2. A: 84 B: 41 = 125 6. A: 43 B: 38 = 81
(67%) (33%) (53%) (47%)
3. A: 58 B: 64 = 122 7. A: 27 B: 52 = 79
(48%) (52%) (34%) (66%)
4. A: 27 B: 59= 86 8. A: 65 B: 39= 104
(31%) (69%) (63%) (37%)
Total 404 Total 383

question-asking is, as previously claimed, predominantly a characteristic of

women's style. It is therefore worth noting the frequency of occurrence of
questions in these conversational dyads. Table 2 shows the number of ques-
tions uttered by each participant and by each conversational pair, and it pro-
vides the combined total used by women and by men. Questions occur in
each of the eight conversations, and they are used by every speaker. The
female pairs used between 71 and 125 questions each; the male pairs asked
from 79 to 119 questions. The women used a total of 404 questions and the
men uttered 383 questions. These figures indicate that question-asking can-
not be generalized as being more characteristic of women's conversational
style than men's.4
The numbers in Table 2 also show that, in five of the pairs (three female
and two male), one speaker uses questions more often than the other. For
example, in female pairs 2 and 4, and in male pair 7, one speaker uses ap-
proximately double the number of questions than the other; in female pair
1 and male pair 8, one speaker asks nearly one-third more questions than the
other. These data suggest that, in informal same-sex dyadic conversation, it
may be common for one conversational partner to use more questions than
the other, and that this is not a communicative practice unique to women in
cross-sex conversations. Since our data show that one member of a conver-
sational pair frequently asks more questions, and because an imbalance
occurs in both female and male dyads, neither sex nor gender differences can
be responsible for the imbalance. Once again, these data confirm our con-
tention that it is misleading to assert correspondences between a large het-
erogeneous category of people (e.g. all women or all men) and a complex
discourse feature, such as question use.
Note also that past research would predict that, in dyadic conversations,
a large number of questions by one speaker would be coupled with a large
12 Languagein Society25:1 (1996)
 WOMEN, MEN, AND TYPE OF TALK

1X0
Legend

* Parti:328Ques0f
80- Partl:259Questions
[II PatIII:200Questions

60
20-

PatII:CafdlTalk(15niin.)
1:Sptneous
Part Tak(Omin.) Par
III:
Mo akTa k(6-1l0min.)
FIGURE 3: Distributions of questions by type of talk, adjusted for time.

number of you knows by that same speaker, based on the assumption that
the speaker was displaying a particularly female style, a powerless style
(O'Barr & Atkins 1980), or a cooperative style. However, this generalization
is contradicted by the data presented here. We find that, in only four of the
conversations (2 female and 2 male) does the speaker who uses more you
knows also ask a greater number of questions. In the other four dyads, the
speaker who uses the greater number of you knows either asks approximately
the same number of questions as the other speaker, or fewer.
Examining the distribution of questions across the three parts of the con-
versation (spontaneous, considered, and collaborative), we found within each
part, just as with you know, that male and female speakers all followed the
same pattern. Our results show a non-random distribution, with 4207oof all
the questions occurring in Part I, 3307oin Part II, and 25% in Part III.5
That is, the first, spontaneous talk portion of the interaction produced many
more questions than either of the other two parts. The distribution, adjusted
for time, is 45%oin Part I, 2401oin Part II, and 3107oin Part III; see Figure 3.
Our data again establish that neither sex nor gender is a salient variable in
these conversations, and that discourse requirementsunderlie the use of par-
ticular linguistic forms. Speakers adapt the number and functional type of
questions they ask to the demands of the particular conversational situation.
The same general patterns are followed by all eight pairs, with women and
men adjusting their question use in strikingly similar ways. The rate of ques-
Language in Society 25:1 (1996) 13
 ALICE F. FREED AND ALICE GREENWOOD

1X--
Legend
Feniae
80-g Male

40-

-
20

PitII: Tak
Cosidered
(15
mn.)
Pat1:
Sp uUSTaIk
n.)
(1On P III:
CbtoeTaIk
(6Omh)
FIGURE 4: Distribution of questions by type of talk and by sex.

tioning, adjusted for time, is greater for both women and men in Part I of
the conversation, and the lowest in Part II. Consistent with the pattern found
for you know, these data show that women and men speaking in same-sex
pairs respond to the differences in the talk situation in exactly the same way;
see Figure 4. Once again, the only change in the speaking situation, between
one part of the conversation and the others, is the requirements of the talk
itself. It is these requirements that govern the frequency of occurrence of
questions. We conclude that, unless conversational participants are observed
in several different talk situations, with other variables controlled, assertions
about characteristics of their speaking style are suspect.
Not only did the rate of questioning change in the same way for all speak-
ers in the three parts of the conversation, but the functional type of ques-
tions being asked differed as well. Each section of the conversation had a
distinct distribution of question categories. Our earlier work (Freed & Green-
wood 1992, Greenwood & Freed 1992, Freed 1994) describes in detail how
each question in our corpus was separately identified, and then categorized
along an information continuum. Questions were found to fall into four
broad categories - depending on their functional use within the conversation,
and on the type of information sought or conveyed by the speaker. Our anal-
ysis makes it apparent that previous research which casually groups all ques-
14 Language in Society 25:1 (1996)
 WOMEN, MEN, AND TYPE OF TALK

tions, as if they were a single invariant discourse phenomenon, should be

re-evaluated. Treating questions as equivalent and identical in conversational
function fails to reveal the complexity and diverse pragmatic use of these
forms.
For the purposes of this analysis, questions which sought factual informa-
tion about the world or about the lives of the speakers were designated
EXTERNALquestions. These questions asked about information that was exter-
nal to the conversational setting and/or was outside of the circumstances of
the conversation. They included invitations, factual queries, and deictic infor-
mation questions; e.g. What is today's date?, Do you want to go to the mov-
ies tonight?, Did you watch 90210 last night?, Have you heard from her?
Questions which solicited information about the current and ongoing con-
versation were labeled TALKquestions. These were questions which asked for
clarification, confirmation, or repetition of something said in the conversa-
tion. Included here were questions like Oh, he's remarried?, What did you
say? You mean you asked him out?, Really? This category overlaps with
what Schegloff et al. 1977 call "other-initiated repairs."
Questions which seemed designed to continue the conversational flow were
labeled RELATIONAL questions because they usually had as their basis the
shared relationship and shared knowledge that existed between the speakers;
e.g., Do you remember my math teacher?, Why do you think they did that?,
So what do you talk about?, Do you know what I mean?, Do you know
another thing I was going to say? Questions designated elsewhere as "con-
versational maintenance" questions (Maltz & Borker 1982) fall into this
category.
Finally, questions which contained information already known to the
speaker, through which the speaker conveyed (rather than sought) informa-
tion to the hearer, were categorized as EXPRESSIVE STYLE questions. These
included didactic questions, rhetorical questions, questions used for humor,
self-directed questions, and questions used in reported speech; e.g., What's
she going to do about it anyway?, Why'd I say that?, Who knows?, and
Should we sing? (looking at the tape recorder).
Figure 5 shows that the types of questions asked were different in each part
of the conversation. In Part I, when the speakers were talking about topics
which they themselves chose, there is a preponderance of EXTERNAL ques-
tions, 350o, and relatively few RELATIONALquestions, 130Wo. The distribution
is quite different in Part II, in which we asked the speakers to focus on the
topic that we assigned. In this part, the number of EXTERNALquestions drops
to 8Wo,whereas the number of RELATIONAL questions rises to 45%. Questions
which refer to the TALKitself also drop from 28% in Part I to 80/oin Part II.
The number of EXPRESSWVE STYLEquestions rises from 24% in Part I to 39%
in Part II. In Part III, when the speakers were filling out a questionnaire,
we find still another pattern of distribution of question types: here the num-
Language in Society 25:1 (1996) 15
 ALICE F. FREED AND ALICE GREENWOOD

Legend

80 E
RdtiQuen

40 - _

20-~ Palak CnsdreTak(1

m.

0__~

Paq Cms Talk

11: (I5min.)
1:Sp ,n Talk
Padl (I0min.) Pad
I11: Talk
Colborabve
(6.O
min.)
FIGURE 5: Distribution of question types by type of talk, all speakers.

ber of EXTERNAL questions rises to a high of 54% - more than half of all the
questions asked in this section of the conversation - and the RELATIONAL ques-
tions drop to 9'70. Again, EXPRESSIVE STYLE questions make up 26% of the
questions used. In fact, the use of such questions, through which speakers
convey rather than seek information (see Freed 1994), remains the most con-
stant throughout the three parts of the conversation.
The following are examples of the sorts of questions that most frequently
occurred in each of the three parts. We present one exchange from a female
pair and one exchange from a male pair to illustrate each of the major func-
tional categories of questions for each part of the conversation.
TALK questions (underlined), which provided the speakers with the oppor-
tunity to confirm or verify the preceding utterance of the other speaker or
clarify what the other speaker meant, occurred most frequently in Part I.
(5) Male pair
A: I heard she's a flight attendant.
B: Oh, is that what she is? Okay. I know it was, had something to do with the airlines.
A: That's what Schultz said. He said he probably never sees her.
B: She speaks French and he speaks German.
A: Fred speaks German?

16 Language in Society 25:1 (1996)

 WOMEN, MEN, AND TYPE OF TALK

(6) Female pair

A: If we could get a ride to Somerset, I could like definitely drop you at Newark.
B: Newark, not Newark. New Brunswick.
A: Well, like
B: Yeah. Somerset's right near New Brunswick?
A: I'm right up the street from Rutgers. My aunt's trying to get me to move down there
so bad, She's like, "Why don't you transfer?"
B: Really?
A: Move into this building. She pays. Harrison Towers on Eastern Ave.
B: Oh oh oh my god. You're on Eastern Ave? That's right there. Holy shit.
RELATIONAL questions, whereby speakers engage one another through
phatic questioning, by focusing one another's attention, or by requesting
elaboration of a statement, occurred most frequently in Part II.
(7) Female pair
A: You know, it's weird. Remember the night that John went down to talk to Kevin?
B: Oh yeah.
A: They never, I don't think they ever met each other. Maybe for five minutes, they met
each other once.
B: They've said hello before.
A: Yeah, and that night, John came back with a total feeling of like Kevin. You know
what I mean? Like Kevin opened up to him? But only with alcohol.
B: Oh yeah.
(8) Male pair
A: Well, that's male bonding, you know.
B: It's male bonding.
A: It's like what what is the equivalent? I mean
B: Is there a female equivalent?
A: If she had sisters, is there a way that like, girls punch each other and get on each other
and like, you know, hit each other?
B: I doubt it.

EXPRESSIVESTYLEquestions are the other functional category that occurred

with considerable frequency in Part II. These are questions that typically did
not elicit answers, but were used by speakers to convey information of their
own to the hearers. Again, these include rhetorical questions, self-directed
questions, and questions from reported speech.
(9) Male pair
A: Yeah, it's like, wh ... where where do these irrational fears come from? I mean, you
know, like you have to think, does, uh, society say, well, this is going to happen?
You know and men can just go out and grab any woman they want if they're
unprotected or you know.
B: Yeah, well
A: Is that the culture we live in?
(10) Female pair
A: Oh, um, I don't know cause I have guy friends that are un- that are not relationships
B: not sexual re-
A: They're not sexual in nature.
B: Um hum.
A: But it, you know, it is hard though cause I mean, you won't, like, you know, you
wonder, you know, do they like me more than a friend? Are they friends with
me cause, you know, they want something more?
B: Do you feel like that? That ...

Language in Society 25:1 (1996) 17

 ALICE F. FREED AND ALICE GREENWOOD

EXTERNAL QUESTIONSwere the type found most frequently in Part III. It

was here that the exchange of information included the greatest number of
questions whose function was to gather factual information.
( 11) Female pair
A: How do you spell your name again?
B: I know it's long. How often do you use my last name?
A: No, I didn't know whether it was a "k" or "h."
B: What's today's date?
(12) Male pair
A: ... What were we doing two hours before we got here?
B: Taking an exam.
A: Driving I guess. I was going from school to school. Two hours ago. What time was
that then, ten? Waking up. Not here. What did I do? I dropped someone off at
the school. What would you say for that?
B: You drove to school. I don't know.
What is noteworthy about the varying distribution of these question types
is that nothing about the speech situation changed for the speakers except
the demands of the talk. It is reasonable to conclude that factors inherent
to the type of talk, or the requirements associated with the type of talk of
each part, elicited from the speakers a particularpattern of question use. For
example, the highest proportion of TALK questions occurs in Part I, where
the speakers are adjusting to the situation and are just beginning to talk to
each other. This is when the largest number of questions asking for clarifi-
cation, confirmation, and repetition takes place. Similarly, the preponder-
ance of RELATIONALquestions in Part II reflects the kind of activity in which
the speakers are engaged. They had been asked to discuss the nature of
friendship between women and between men, and their assignment during
this second part of the conversation was to expose how they felt about this
topic. It is in this part that we find a large number of questions in which the
speakers address each other directly about shared and mutual information.
It is also at this time that speakers express their own views, in part through
the use of a high number of EXPRESSIVESTYLEquestions. Finally, it is not sur-
prising that the highest proportion of EXTERNALquestions occurs in Part III.
It was during this segment of the conversation that the participants were
asked to fill out a questionnaire which posed a series of factual questions,
e.g. "How long have you know each other?" and "What were you doing in
the two hours before you came here?"That almost half the questions uttered
in this part were EXTERNAL iS clearly related to the kind of task being per-
formed, that of considering factual events in their own lives. The distinct dis-
tribution of these functional categories confirms that the particular talk
situation controls the kinds of questions deemed useful or appropriateby the
speakers.
Although Figure 5 reveals the distribution of different questions types
across the three portions of the conversations, it shows nothing about the use
of questions according to sex or gender. Figures 6 and 7 reanalyze this infor-
18 Language in Society 25:1 (1996)
 WOMEN, MEN, AND TYPE OF TALK

10
Leqend

Qe
80 mTalk
ReWWQuesSom

0-

I Cmied Tak(15w.
Padll:
1:Span Tak
Pad (10*i.) III:
PartCoab Tak
(6lOninL)
FIGURE 6: Distribution of question types by type of talk, female speakers.

mation by sex. These figures show that women and men use questions in
almost identical ways. The distribution of functional categories used by both
women and men generally conforms to the configuration seen in Figure 5,
where no such breakdown is made.
The women and men in this sample do essentiallythe same kind of question-
asking, e.g. more EXTERNALquestions in Parts I and III than in Part II, more
TALK questions in Part I than in Part II, more RELATIONALquestions in Part
II than in either of the other two sections, and slightly more EXPRESSIVESTYLE
questions in Part II than in Parts I and III. However, some subtle differences
emerge. In all three parts, women ask a higher percentage of RELATIONAL
questions than men, and men use more EXPRESSIVE STYLE questions than
women. Of the total number of questions women asked, 29% were RELA-
TIONALquestions. For men, relational questions represented only 16% of the
total questions used. By contrast, men use questions for EXPRESSIVE STYLE
36% of the time, as compared to women's 24%. This finding is suggestive
of the research which reports that different socialization practices within the
same speech community may result in different language behavior for women
Language in Society 25:1 (1996) 19
 ALICE F. FREED AND ALICE GREENWOOD

Legend

Exrnal
Questons

E S1leQuesbons

PatII:
Considered
Talk
(15
min.)
1:Spontneous
Pad Talk
(10
min.) Pad CotIabrative
IlI: Tak
(610
min.)
FIGURE 7: Distribution of question types by type of talk, male speakers.

and men (Goodwin 1980, Maltz & Borker 1982, Tannen 1990b). Women, it
is thought, are socialized to actively engage their conversational partners,
whereas men have been taught to display their verbal uniqueness. The slight
differences between question-asking style that we observe may well result
from the fact that, in our gender-differentiated society, men typically find
themselves in the sort of talk situations which elicit RELATIONALquestions less
often than many women; instead, they are in settings which encourage them
to express their individuality.6 We wish to emphasize, however, that the
comparable use of questions by this group of women and men when speak-
ing in identical talk situations is of prime importance, and that the similari-
ties between the four pairs of women and the four pairs of men are more
striking than any differences.

CONCLUSION

Our investigation of you know and of the use of questions in conversations

between same-sex pairs of friends has substantiated the need to re-evaluate
some of the principal categories of analysis that have been previously
20 Language in Society 25:1 (1996)
 WOMEN, MEN, AND TYPE OF TALK

accepted in language and gender studies. In particular, these data demon-

strate that a gendered conversational style cannot be defined by counting
individual linguistic forms without regard to situated context: the context
itself, the task undertaken, the topic, and other discourse variables may be
responsible for the forms that occur. Moreover, we have shown that, if sin-
gle linguistic forms like you know or broad categories like questions are
treated as unidimensional forms - related to a single, predetermined func-
tion - the result is linguistically and socially simplistic, and therefore uninfor-
mative. Our findings on the distribution of you know and the use of
questions in same-sex friendly dyadic conversation show that it is the specific
requirements associated with the talk situation that are responsible for elic-
iting or suppressing specific discourse forms, not the sex or gender of the
speakers, or some abstract notion about the relationship between the speak-
ers, or their group membership. It is the demands of the conversational tasks
that control the type of speech used by these women and men.
Interestingly, in the conversations analyzed for this study, both the female
and male speakers (paired by friendship) engage in a conversational style rem-
iniscent of what Coates 1989, 1991 calls cooperative speech (see also Holmes
1993, Coates 1996). As Coates explains, "at the heart of co-operativeness is
a view of speakers collaborating in the production of text" (1989:118). She
characterizesthis manner of speaking as being marked by mutual topic devel-
opment, frequent use of minimal responses, frequent instances of simulta-
neous speech, and the interactiveuse of devices such as you know. In Coates'
work, this communicative style is specifically described as characteristic of
informal conversations between female friends.
Although the present study did not undertake an analysis of all the fea-
tures to which Coates 1989 referred, the findings related to the use of ques-
tions and of you know indicate that the manner of speaking described as
cooperative can be appropriately applied to both the women and men who
participated in this study. The conversational tasks presented to the speak-
ers essentially required them "to collaborate in the production of a text"
(Coates 1989:118). Thus, when considering speaking styles (whether coop-
erative or powerless), we need to guard against overgeneralization. We argue
that it is wrong to characterize all women and no men as powerless or inse-
cure speakers, and that it is equally wrong to portray all women and no men
as engaging in cooperative talk.
The findings of the work presented here clearly indicate that the type of
talk, not the sex or gender of the speaker, motivates and thus explains the
language forms that occur in the speech of the female and male pairs stud-
ied. We might ask, however, whether the effect of the type of talk is more
apparent under these controlled conditions than in everyday naturally occur-
ring discourse. There is no question that, in our gender-differentiated soci-
ety, women and men are often encouraged to engage in different activities
Language in Society 25:1 (1996) 21
 ALICE F. FREED AND ALICE GREENWOOD

and to be involved in distinct practices; as a result, women and men may not
routinely participatein equivalent types of discourse. That is, we have no rea-
son to doubt that some differences in the everyday speech of women and men
may result from distinct socialization practices for girls and boys, and from
various gender-assigned activities; women may engage in cooperative talk in
a wider range of settings than men. Yet we believe that, just as the commu-
nicative style of women has been overly stereotyped as cooperative, so too
the verbal style of men has been overgeneralized as competitive and lacking
in cooperativeness. We are not convinced that the sort of verbal behavior
found in these conversations is absent from men's natural speech, and we
continue to object to the characterization of women and/or men as having
distinct conversational styles, when these differences are generalized to all
women and all men in all contexts and situations. As Eckert has argued
(1989:253):
gender does not have a uniform effect on linguistic behavior for the com-
munity as a whole, across variables, or for that matter for any individual.
Gender, like ethnicity and class and indeed age, is a social construction and
may enter into any of a variety of interactions with other social phenom-
ena. And although sociolinguists have had some success in perceiving the
social practice that constitutes class, they have yet to think of gender in
terms of social practice.
It is our hope that the conclusions from this study will motivate researchers
in sociolinguistics, particularlyin language and gender studies, to direct their
work away from simple correlations between linguistic form and communi-
cative function, away from dependence on global binary categorizations of
human beings, and toward a more nuanced analysis of gender and its inter-
action with other linguistic and social phenomena.

NOTES

* Earlier versions of this article were presented at the American Association of Applied Lin-
guistics in Seattle (1992), in Atlanta (1993), and at the 1992 BerkeleyWomen and Language Con-
ference. We thank the director of the Psychoeducational Center at Montclair State University
for allowing us to use their facilities for taping these conversations. We also thank Marc Freed-
Finnegan for technical computer assistance.
l In this article we have not attempted to resolve the important conceptual distinction
between "sex"and "gender."As the term gender has become the commonly accepted one in lan-
guage and gender research, we have used gender when referring to speech styles thought to be
associated with women and men. We use the term sex to refer to the biological categories of
women and men; and we use both terms in cases where the distinction is blurred. This usage
is intended to alert our readers to the fact that the issue remains unresolved.
2 For the purposes of this analysis, we considered only those instances of you know which
occurredas separateand intonationally discreteunits. We did not count as instances of you know
the initial part of such reduced yes/no questions as You know where I'm going? (from Do you
know whereI'm going?) or You know what? (from Do you know what?). In this we differ from

22 Language in Society 25:1 (1996)

 WOMEN, MEN, AND TYPE OF TALK

the analysis proposed by Schiffrin 1987, who considers both sorts of occurrences of you know
together. In our view, these forms are syntactically and functionally dissimilar.
3 In female pair 1, Speaker B uses more cases of you know than any other woman or man.
In fact, this one speaker, who utters you know 138 times in 35 minutes, accounts for 45% of
all instances of you know uttered by the eight female speakerscombined. The next highest occur-
rence of you know is the speech of a man, speaker A from pair 7, who uses the form 71 times.
Consider the strikingly different conclusions that would be drawn if a different female pair,
matched for age and length of friendship, were substitutedfor pair 1. In another such pair, which
we designate as la, one woman uses 10 instances of you know, and the other uses 61. If we sub-
stituted this female pair for pair 1, the combined number of occurrences of you know for all
eight pairs would come to 510 instances of you know, instead of 612; women would be shown
to use the form 207 (not 310) times, and men 302 times. Based on this other set of numbers,
we concluded in an earlier study (Freed & Greenwood 1993) that men used you know one-third
more often than women. At that time, we stated that our findings were consistent with the num-
bers reported by Holmes 1986, who found that, in same-sex samples, men used you know twice
as often as women.
4 When we first reported on this analysis of questions in 1992 (Freed & Greenwood 1992,
Greenwood & Freed 1992), we found that the total number of questions asked by women was
slightly higher than those asked by men. Our numbers were then based on inclusion of female
pair la described in note 3. It was our impression that one woman in this pair skewed the results,
because she used 133 questions, which was 49 more questions that the next highest questioner.
(The range of questions for all other speakers was 27 to 84 per individual.) As we have stated,
when we examined and compared the speech of this pair with that of female pair 1, matched
for age and length of friendship, we found that the occurrence of questions in 1 was consistent
with that of all the other dyads. However, one of the women in 1 used an unusually high num-
ber of you knows. We were obliged to choose between these two female pairs, each of which
included one individual whose speech was markedlyidiosyncratic. We chose to report on 1 rather
than la, because la would have forced conclusions that were not clearly substantiated by the
other speakers.
5 If the number of questions asked in these conversations occurred in a random distribution
(adjusted for the different length of time of each segment), we would expect 30%0to occur in
Part I, 4407 in Part II, and 26%oin Part III.
6 There is a considerable literature (Aries 1976, Edelsky 1981, Tannen 1990a, Bischoping
1993, Johnstone 1993) that explores sex differences in conversational topic choice. The discus-
sion goes beyond the scope of this article, but may be related to the issue raised here.

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