A Study of verbosity between male and female in a telephone dialogue

Indrati, Retno (1996) A Study of verbosity between male and female in a telephone dialogue. Bachelor thesis, Petra Christian University.

Abstract

Stereotyping is one of the traits of human being which is closely related to prejudice. It is assigned to objects or subjects which threat them or unknown to them. Verbosity is a stereotype assigned to women and their use of language be-cause little is known about women's nature. This study tries to find out whether in telephone con-versation verbosity can be seen in the speech of both male and female subjects. Another important focus of this study is what is the cause of verbosity. Also, what might influence the occurence of verbosity in one's speech. Grice's Conversational Principle is used to measure excessive use of words in a conversation. Violations of the maxims of quantity, relation and manner result in words which is unneccesarily said. To find what might influence the presence of verbosity in a conversation, Dell Hyme's Contex-tual Features are applied. After a thorough study, it is revealed that violations of the maxim of manner and relation caused verbosity. Another result is that the tendency of male's and female's verbosity can-be seen. Both sexes are capable to be verbose, yet the topic of conversation seems to influence one's verbosity. Male subjects tend to be more verbose when the topic is Impersonal while female tends to be more verbose when the topic is either Gossip or Personal.

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