Gender differences in usage of interrogative utterances in everyday English

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Gender differences in usage of interrogative utterances in everyday English



Introduction

This research aims to investigate gender differences in the use of interrogative sentences in informal dyadic conversations of British English speakers. Using Alice Freed's [1994] question taxonomy, functional question types were determined, whose distribution according to both the speaker's and addressee's gender was considered. The analysis has revealed that women use more questions which are a part of reported speech, especially in same-sex conversations, which is possibly explained by the proposition that women tend to prefer private, or rapport-talk. Differences in the use of deictic information questions and social invitations were also found. Additionally, a broad analysis of tag question distribution has shown that men used more tag questions and almost 3/4 of them were directed toward women, which proves once again that tags are not a feature of only women's language.

Since the 1980's, the field of gender linguistics has been rising in prominence. With social awareness growing and gender inequality being called out more and more openly, this branch aimed to investigate the ways in which gender influences individual's speech and whether the uncovering of trends could be useful in exposing more general trends about social interactions between genders.

Interrogative utterances present a separate field of study. Questions serve a multitude of purposes in everyday lives and not always are they used to elicit factual information [e.g., Hayano 2013]. The key to investigating in what ways men and women differ in their use of interrogatives lies in distinguishing the functions of these questions. Previously, researchers have attempted to closely inspect certain question types and their functions, for instance, Holmes' [1984] study of tag questions. Classic studies like [Sacks et al. 1974] focused on questions in terms of turn-taking and conversation structure, while others examined their relation to power dynamics [Freed & Ehrlich 2010] and conversational maintenance [Fishman 1980].

The following research is aimed at investigating gender differences in the use of interrogative utterances in everyday British English on the material of the Spoken BNC2014 corpus via a quantitative analysis of 5000 interrogative utterances from naturally occurring conversations. The task is to apply Freed's [1994] question taxonomy to the data from the corpus in order to uncover how question types are distributed according to the speaker's gender as well as that of the addressee. Freed's taxonomy will be given an interpretation in terms of how certain questions types and groups fit into one of the conversational strategies or what their lack or prevalence can tell about the speaker's interactional style. Furthermore, distribution of tag questions between genders will be briefly considered.



1. Literature review

1.1 Historical background

The oldest perceptions of what is characteristic of male and female linguistic behavior are documented in proverbs, a great many of which comment on women's perpetual verbosity (see Coates 2013 for examples and Mehl et al. 2007 for evidence against women being more talkative than men). This represents the belief that silence for women is desirable, which, in turn, can be said to be aimed at taking away their voice and, subsequently, power, primarily - in a household, and, subsequently, in society (silence as a power tool will be explored in a later section). Another idea that aims to prescribe rather than describe is that it is inappropriate for a woman to swear. Interestingly, there is evidence of women being criticized for being too prude because of their avoidance of taboo language [Coates 2013, 13]. This, seemingly, creates conflicting expectations, which is reflected in today's standards for women, too.

A set of society's own ideas of what constitutes male and female talk that stem from anecdotal evidence, unsupported by any scientific data (granted it was not available at earlier points in history), is what is referred to as folklinguistics [Coates 2013, 8]. Even after empirical evidence became available, the conclusions drawn from it were sometimes based on broad generalizations, often unflattering of women's thinking abilities or the nature of their reasoning, e.g., Otto Jespersen's interpretation of how women read faster because they are not paying attention to the content (see [Jespersen 1922 in: Coates 2013]). Researchers of the contemporary period sometimes fall victim to bias themselves; the field of gender linguistics itself has sprung up because of Robin Lakoff's attempt to apply stereotyping to linguistic research [Lakoff 1973].

For most of the history women's language was described as deficient (surely, not without exceptions, but the overall trend is evident). Features perceived as characteristic of female speech were criticized (e.g., excessive use of certain adverbial forms such as “vastly”, “horridly” etc., see [Coates 2013, 11]), while men's speech was either praised as the norm or/and held up to a much less strict standard (swearing for men, for example, is more acceptable). This tendency is what Coates gives the name of The Androcentric Rule to:

“Men will be seen to behave linguistically in a way that fits the writer's view of what is desirable or admirable; women on the other hand will be blamed for any linguistic state or development which is regarded by the writer as negative or reprehensible” [Coates 2013, 10].

It must be mentioned that men did advocate for giving women access to literacy for them to be a good influence on children as well as to educate their own minds. However, when (middle class) women did become widely literate and obtained visibility though their writing, they came under scrutiny by male authors.

Anthropologists have paid attention to linguistic differences in more “primitive” societies. What they came across were, however, gender-exclusive phonological, lexical, morphological differences that stemmed from taboos central to maintaining social order in those communities [Coates 2013, 33]. Linguistic gender differences observed in Western societies are gender-preferential, that is, variation exists within gender as well.

When it came to the study of European languages, gender at first was not viewed as a significant variable. For instance, dialectologists have excluded women from their research, deeming their language too standard or conservative to be of interest [Coates 2013, 43].

1.2 Variationist studies

dyadic gender interrogative

Arguably, the area of research with most quantitative evidence and most productive explanation models is the study of how people adhere to the linguistic standard. Central works in this field such as [Trudgill 1972; Macaulay 1978; Labov 1972] have shown that in each social class, women use less stigmatized forms. Moreover, women overreport themselves using the correct variant, whereas men tend to underreport [Trudgill 1972]. This suggests that women aim at the prestigious standard, while men aim at vernacular forms. Trudgill's proposed explanation deals with `covert prestige', that is, vernacular forms imply their own set of values such as affiliation with the working class. For men, this covert prestige is even more actual.

Another pattern that contributes to this model is how lower middle-class women's speech is more like that of upper middle-class women, while lower middle-class men speak more like upper working-class men [Macaulay 1978]. This is said to represent the conflict of identities; lower middle-class women aim at more standardized speech of upper middle-class women, whereas lower middle-class men aim at vernacular speech of upper working-class men that has covert prestige. This model is further corroborated by Edwards' [1979] experiment in which the speech of some middle-class boys was mistaken for girls' speech and the speech of working-class girls sounded like that of boys.

However, Penelope Eckert's study of high school jocks and burnouts revealed than the girls were more polarized in their usage of vernacular forms, namely, jock girls used significantly more standardized forms than jock boys, and burnout girls used more vernacular variants than burnout boys [Eckert 1999]. In this context, jocks represent the middle-class culture and burnouts - working-class culture. These results are explained with the use of the term `linguistic market' first introduced in [Bourdieu & Boltanski 1975]. According to this account, women seek to acquire symbolic capital (which includes prestigious language) because material capital is mostly seized by men; “educational level, employment and income are not reliable indicators of a woman's status (because women have not had the same educational and employment opportunities as men)” [Coates 2014, 68]. Thus, to be accepted and to maintain their affiliation to jocks or burnouts, girls have to do more linguistically.

Milroy's study of working-class communities of Belfast has demonstrated how the notion of social network can be relevant to the differences in the genders' adherence to the linguistic standard [Milroy 1980]. Close-knit communities that men historically belonged to are more efficient in establishing vernacular forms, while women in their less tight-knit communities tend to aim at the standard. Thus, women's speech is more standardized because they are less exposed to the vernacular forms and, additionally, there is no pressure to express solidarity within a less tight-knit community through adherence to the vernacular forms, which would be otherwise indicative of one's affiliation in a close-knit community.

1.3 Questions and gender

Firstly, it is crucial to establish that an interrogatively formed utterance does not necessarily request information, as well as that the eliciting of information can be achieved through declarative sentences (e.g., [Hayano 2013]).

The frequency with which men and women ask questions has long been a prominent subject in gender linguistics. For instance, Carter et al. 2018 report that in academic discourse, women ask audience members fewer questions, later stating this was a result of feeling self-conscious and incompetent. The authors attribute such behavior to the lack of female representation (especially in such fields as Science, Technology etc.) and unwelcoming professional environment. Furthermore, while in institutional contexts such as courts or hospitals questions are seen as devices of power, an information eliciting tool that is unavailable for the person being addressed, questions in informal conversation can have multifaceted functions (for other research showing women's under-participation and men's prevalence in asking questions during academic discussions see Eakins & Eakins 1978).

In Pamela Fishman's 1980 study of couples' everyday talk, women asked 2,5 times as many questions as men. Fishman links this trend to what she calls `interactional shitwork', the notion that women do more to keep the conversation going, engaging their male interlocutor and supporting the topics he brings up, while the ones they, women, bring up themselves are often dropped. Maltz and Borker [1982] also argue that women use questions to maintain conversation, while men use them to request information. While Fishman's study in question was accused of extrapolating from a small sample, the author herself states that the particular type of intimate conversation of a heterosexual couple reveals the underlying power dynamic. As it often is the case with housework and moral support, women are simply expected to do their workload that remains essentially unnoticed. The imbalance of effort put into everyday interactions contrasts the role male interests play in the relationship as opposed to those of a woman.

Another possible explanation as to why women may ask more questions is that the expert role is reserved for men. In other words, women's requests for factual information, while signaling their lack of expertise, does not contradict their social role. Men, on the other hand, may feel as though expressing lack of knowledge through questions could undermine their hierarchal position. In contrast to this suggestion, Coates 2013 observes that women rarely use information-seeking questions, rather using them as invitations to discussion (often in the form of tag questions). They avoid the former so as not to highlight the asymmetry of their relationship, that is, avoid painting their interlocutor as the expert in possession of some extent knowledge. As for men, Coates writes that questions in their interaction “encourage speakers to play the expert” [Coates 2014, 134]. Moreover, questions introduce topics that the speaker himself is knowledgeable in in order for him to take the floor later.

These propositions fit into the framework of conversational styles. As Cheshire and Trudgill [1998] summarize, men seem to adhere to a competitive style, while women prefer the collaborative style; male same-sex talk is oriented towards “stressing their own individuality and emphasizing the hierarchical relationships that they enter into with other people” [ibid., 3], while women use language to support each other and emphasize solidarity.



1.4 Potential benefits

This section is concerned with exploring how research in the field of gender linguistics could be useful.

On one hand, mentioned studies could help disprove existing stereotypes. Both negative (“men are more aggressive”) and positive stereotyping (“women are more polite”) can be harmful in certain contexts. In other words, if certain findings showed no differentiation between men and women, this would help challenge false gender representations that contribute to justification of folk beliefs that are used for continuous mistreatment of women as well as men. The dismantling of gender stereotypes at least to some extent would lessen the hostile and discriminatory behavior such as, for instance, denying women work opportunities or shunning men for seeking psychological help.

On the other hand, if gender differences are found to exist in certain contexts, exploring their underlying causes would help paint a fuller picture of the innerworkings of gender. As a result, it would be possible to detect and call out harmful identities if they are of statistical character and work toward constructing and encouraging identities beneficial for the society as a whole.

It is safe to assume that there is no finish point at which the scientific community could declare whether the sexes differ in terms of language use or not. Most probably, language use is dependent on a multitude of factors, which gender is one of. As Eckert and McConnell-Ginnet rightfully argue, gender cannot be isolated from other aspects of social identity [Eckert and McConnell-Ginnet, 462]. Whether the findings of gender linguistic research support the claims about female and male speech or not, they give us a fuller understanding of what it is to be a gendered member of society.



2. Methods

2.1 The corpus

Research material was acquired via the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014; [Love et al. 2017, 1]), which is a publicly accessible collection of informal conversations in British English gathered between the years 2012 and 2016. It is accessible after a registration on the CQPWeb (an online corpus analysis system) server. The lead researcher for the Spoken BNC2014 was Robbie Love (Lancaster University). The corpus is characterized by the use of public participation in scientific research (see Shirk et al. 2012). A series of national media campaigns, realized as research press releases with lists of words which have decreased or increased the most compared to data from the Spoken BNC1994DS (demographically-sampled component of the Spoken BNC1994 [Love et al. 2017, 1]), called for willing participants. After the main call, in order to fill in the gaps in certain demographics, another targeted recruitment was launched.

The participants were instructed to record informal conversations, preferably in quieter surroundings, using their smartphones. All speakers were required to give formal consent to being recorded as well as encouraged to fill in the form asking for metadata. Moreover, those conducting the recording were offered a £18 payment for every hour of recorded content.

As a result, 668 speakers overall produced 11,422,617 (transcribed) words in 1,251 recordings. The Spoken BNC2014 presents an undoubtedly abundant collection of everyday British English speech.

The query was formed in the following way. Firstly, according to simple query language syntax, to search for interrogative sentences the question mark must be preceded by the backwards slash “\” and a space, resulting in a query that looks like this: “\ ?”. Then, using restricted query by speaker's gender, two sets of questions are returned, thinned randomly (using the “thin” option) to 2500 hits each to form a dataset of 5000 hits total. Moreover, a restriction on the number of speakers (only 2) was placed to eliminate extra variation that would need to be accounted for separately. These sets are now saved queries for one to be able to come back to them later. An Excel dataset is created that metadata about the speaker's and the addressee's gender, the question's syntactic form, then its type, left and right context are put in.

Statistical analysis was conducted via RStudio and programming language R, for visualization, the ggplot2 package was used.

Granted, since only the transcripts of the recordings are available, it is impossible to account for intonation in cases where it would play the determining role in where the question is to be placed in the taxonomy. In such unclear cases, wider context was considered, and the most likely interpretation was assumed.

It is also crucial to acknowledge that gender should not be regarded as an isolated factor and other variables such as social status, class, age, personal relationship should always be taken into account. This research, however, is quantitative-oriented and does not account for the nature of relationship between the speakers, their age or socio-economic class. It is aimed at discovering broader patterns if such are present. The utterances were sampled randomly to represent a wider context. A more detailed analysis is thus always encouraged and desired.

2.2 Question taxonomy

As Coates 2013 notes, “if we are to make sense of the way questions are used in speech, we have to distinguish between the different functions of questions” [Coates 2013, 94]. Central to the present research is the question taxonomy developed by Alice Freed in her 1994 work on the mapping of question form and function. Freed's taxonomy is depicted in Fig. 1

The most crucial aspect of the suggested taxonomy is that question types are placed on the continuum “information sought - information conveyed”. As noted before, not all questions request information, which is reflected accurately in Freed's classification. Understanding whether an interrogative utterance is actually used to seek information is central to functionally characterizing the type of interaction taking place.

However, a question type's position on the said continuum would be just one of its aspects, which is why a further, conversation analysis-oriented inspection of the taxonomy will be proposed below. Moreover, examples given to illustrate Freed's question types are limited and at times have too specific of a context or strongly lack it to fully understand why they were classified in that way. It very well may be the case that the present elaborations on the nature of particular question types might somewhat contradict Freed's original design, but closer examination of the questions in their dynamic context is necessary considering this research's focus on gender and speech styles. A critical discussion of the classification is aimed at improving its usefulness.



2.2.1 External questions

2.2.1.1 Public and social information questions

These types are placed on the “information sought” end of the continuum and, by themselves, are quite straightforward but may cause confusion in their relation to other types, which will be discussed later.

To differentiate between the two types, one must consider the nature of requested information. In Freed's words, a public information question is a “question which asks for public domain information. Such questions are about the external world and request new factual information” [Freed 1994, 626], whereas social information questions ask “for new private domain information of a factual and specific nature” [ibid.], which pertains “to the speakers, their lives and the people and events with which they are familiar” [ibid.].

This opposition is crucial as questions are often assumed to be information seeking devices when the frequency with which men and women use them is discussed. This is why the reasoning pertaining to the idea of “expert position” is applied. As mentioned in section 2.2.1.1, supposedly, asking questions (namely, public information questions) highlights the asymmetry in the relationship, resulting in women avoiding information seeking and in men either avoiding questions not to seem unknowing or, on the opposite, using them to bring up topics they are expert in.

Although this research deals with informal conversations in which hierarchy is not an interaction-defining feature, some observations about men's insecurity about hierarchy can be brought up. Deborah Tannen in her book “You Just Don't Understand” exploring miscommunications between the genders recalls how a friend's husband was anxious about asking his boss if he was up for a promotion (which would define his decision on whether to quit or not) despite being a fairly confident person. At the same time, the wife, who believed herself to be no more confident than her husband, did not hesitate to inquire about whether her temporary job could become permanent. Tannen reflects that “although his wife didn't especially relish taking the role of supplicant with respect to her boss, it didn't set off alarms in her head, as it did in his” [Tannen 1991, 21].

This creates a fascinating dynamic. It seems as though while men seem more insecure about being in a subordinate position, they are more eager to challenge the status quo in symmetrical same-sex interaction. Women, on the other hand, in intimate conversation avoid emphasizing potential asymmetry through information seeking, while being in a subordinate position is not as much of an issue. One can argue that the latter is due to women being used to such distribution of power.

The reason why the opposition of public and social information questions matters so much is that unlike social information questions, public information questions deal with facts that one can gain knowledge on through education, be it school, college, reading up or research. A person in possession of many facts about their life or the life of their social circle may not be seen as an expert in any area. In Western society, succeeding in formal education, on the other hand, is demonstrative of one's good work ethic, discipline, and overall thinking abilities.

Highly specific professional skills and knowledge are, thus, in public eyes, only attainable through hard work. However, arguably, it takes skill and attention to be able to gather and store information such as what school a friend's kid goes to. Women more than men are seen as being in possession of such information, or rather, deeming it important enough to keep track of. Think of a stereotypical scenario where a male partner forgets about the couple's anniversary, which upsets the female partner. This stereotype also probably has ties to division of labor that was, and sometimes still is, characteristic of nuclear families, where the man is the provider, working in an area he has expertise in, while the woman is busy with house chores, spending her free time communicating with other women, therefore, obtaining and exchanging information on social topics.

This “women's talk” is often regarded as empty, meaningless, even as gossip, and not only by men; due to androcentricity, women often internalize this contempt for their own culture of speaking. While anthropologists agree that gossip is not gender-specific and is central to maintaining relationships and establishing common values, see, for example, [Coates 2004, 104], Cameron [1997, 57] observes how it serves slightly different purposes for male same-sex talk, with some competitive elements being incorporated.

When it comes to social information questions, per [Tannen 1991], women “pry” for details following their interlocutor's turn to show concern and understanding. When men do not follow up a woman's express of concern with questions, she might see it as a failure of intimacy. Men, in their turn, can regard such interrogation as disrespecting personal boundaries, and Tannen describes an instance where a man was overwhelmed and made uncomfortable by women's multiple questions following his sharing of an experience. Moreover, “men's approach seeks to assuage feelings indirectly by attacking their cause” [Tannen 1991, 47], while women expect their feelings to be supported.

All things considered, men can be expected to ask both more and less public information questions, either not to seem to lack expertise or with the intent to play the expert respectively. Women can either avoid these questions not to highlight the asymmetry or ask them freely due to lack of insecurity of being perceived as unknowing. As for social information questions, women may use them to get a fuller understanding of the interlocutor's experience to express solidarity, while men may regard those as invasive, additionally doing what can be seen as invalidating the interlocutor's feelings in order to appear superior.

2.2.1.2 Social invitation questions

Freed describes social invitation questions as inviting or requesting “information which involves the physical participation of the hearer or the speaker” [Freed 1994, 627]. Furthermore, “such questions are often described as indirect speech acts, understood as invitations or offers by way of conventional implicature” [ibid.].

In the present research, all interrogatives expressing an indirect speech act were classified as social invitation questions. Those included invitations (“Or shall we get a takeaway?”), suggestions (“Why don't you organise tomorrow night?”), commands (“Do you wanna get it out of the fridge then?”), requests (“Have you got a board pen I can take?”), permissions (“Can I have a bite?”). Such grouping allows a degree of generalization that would make it possible to reason about what place indirectness has in men and women's use of interrogatives.

Indirectness is strongly associated with politeness [Brown & Levinson 1987, 135], but there is no consensus on whether women use more indirect requests. Men and women are undeniably held up to different standards when it comes to powerful behavior. Women are expected to be nurturing and soft, while men are supposed to be ambitious and assertive. The latter set of traits is widely regarded as ideal for a leadership position. Nevertheless, Mullany's 2003 study looking at conversations recorded in the workplace shows how female managers are criticized regardless of the strategy they chose, called “bossy”, “bombastic” and “dragon-like” in one case and unprofessional for getting a maternity leave during the company's busiest year. Nonetheless, the study revealed that male and female bosses did not conform to leadership styles prescribed to their gender.

It is a separate point of discussion, however, whether directness equals powerfulness and impoliteness and indirectness - powerlessness and politeness. Macaulay [2001] notes how an indirect request “I wanna ice cream cone” is certainly not more polite than the direct “Buy me an ice cream cone” [Macaulay 2001, 299]. The study examined male and female interviewer's use of requests for information during political interviews, concluding that female interviewers “employ more polite indirect requests for information than do the two male interviewers examined, but they also employ more provocative forms” [ibid., 314]. Women used indirect requests “to ask `tough' questions, maintain a line of questioning, and maintain their position as speakers who have power” [ibid., 293].

Moreover, Mills [2002] criticizes the tendency in gender linguistics to assume that women are more polite. Looking into the distribution of indirect speech acts in the form of interrogative utterances will thus provide additional insight into whether this belief is reflected in reality.



2.2.1.3 Deictic information

Deictic information questions are defined by Freed as seeking “new factual information about the immediate physical environment” [Freed 1994, 627]. It would be logical to suggest that deictic questions tend to appear more frequently in conversations taking place during a shared activity. In the Spoken BNC2014, such activities included cooking, surfing the web, playing videogames, eating out, babysitting. It is hard to hypothesize about which gender would tend to use more such questions. Thus, their frequency is probably more correlated with the situation that the conversation took place in than with the speakers' gender.

2.2.2 Talk-related questions

2.2.2.1 Clarification of information vs. confirmation of information questions

Freed relates clarification of information, repetition of information, and confirmation of information questions with “other-initiated repairs” [Schegloff et al. 1977]. Other-initiated repairs pertain to “troubles of speaking, hearing, and understanding” [Kendrick 2015, 164], typically occur right after the trouble-source and require an answer. Without the repairs, the conversation cannot continue to function properly. Thus, this brings up the problem with confirmation of information questions. It is often the case that confirmation questions (that is, true repairs) match in form with what can be characterized as a particular type of backchannels expressed as questions. Backchannels, in their turn, “serve to provide feedback to the current speaker that his message is being received” [Pipek 2007, 7]. By nature, they do not require an answer, although it can be optionally provided. Conformation questions, on the other hand, check “the accuracy of newly received information” [Freed 1994, 628] and are placed quite high on the information continuum, requiring a definitive answer.

Compare the two examples below:

(1) S0392: yeah (.) oh they love them

S0391: do they ?

S0392: especially Walkers ones yeah

S0391: there 's some in our pantry

(2) S0615: I think so (.) yeah I think the last time we saw him was at Christmas

S0525: have you not seen him since then then ? you could n't have done

S0615: well no but no I do n't think he 's been back since

S0525: right

Example (1) demonstrates a typical case of a backchannel question. Short expressions such as “do/does you/they/she/he?”, “(oh) really?”, “(oh) yeah?”, “mm?”, do not request any information, they instead express interest, amazement, encourage continuation of information exchange. There have been several suggested classifications of backchannels, but many are too context-dependent and require the “precise knowledge of the intended meaning” [Pipek 2007, 48]. Pipek proposes 4 functions of backchannels: continuers (the most common function), capture interest tokens, consonance tokens, information confirmation tokens (not to be confused with Freed's confirmation of information questions; Pipek's information confirmation tokens “express that the stated information has been received and in addition the agreement or disagreement with the information conveyed” [ibid., 50]).

Example (2), presumably, serves as a true repair. Compare it to Freed's example of a confirmation of information question (Example 3):

(3) A: It was left at work and no one wanted it and like, “I'll take it.” I think it's neat.

B: Oh, someone left it at work?

A: Yeah.

It is highly arguable that this interrogative utterance does, in fact, check if the received information had been interpreted accurately, as is the case in Example 2. It very well may be that Freed draws her conclusions from the intonation as well as the presence of the answer (“Yeah”). Notably, [Hayashi & Hayashi 1991] distinguish a “repair” function in their classification of backchannels and in their interpretation, this type calls for an answer. Pipek 2007's data are audio recordings too, and the author relies heavily on intonation in his analysis of backchannels. In the case of Spoken BNC2014, as discussed before, only transcripts of conversations are available, which makes classifying certain question types problematic.

Notably, Schegloff [1981] clearly separates backchannels from repairs: “backchannel functions as a continuer whereby the hearer, by uttering backchannel cues, relinquishes the right to other-initiated repair, thus mandating the speaker to continue the current turn” [cit. from Pipek 2007, 27]. This is in contrast with Hayashi & Hayashi's point of view, which is that backchannels can themselves act as repairs. This opposition does not, however, exclude the possibility of both processes occurring within the conversation, that is, avoiding a repair through a backchannel and initiating it through one. In fact, it reveals a potential dynamic relationship between choosing whether to ask for clarification (Freed's clarification of information questions) through an other-initiated repair or use what Freed sees as confirmation questions, a backchannel that encourages further elaboration (not to be confused with Freed's elaboration questions) by, in Schegloff's words, giving up one's own right for a repair.

Since this research cannot afford to focus this closely on backchanneling questions and their own different functions, it is going to assume a more general standpoint provided above: while clarification questions are a direct way to fix lack of information in the immediate context that would hinder further communication, confirmation questions function more as backchannels, encouraging the speaker to continue and expressing attention and involvement. Unfortunately, considering the lack of audio recordings, we cannot afford to speculate about the particular functions of backchannels (for example, whether they express judgement).

While the theory of male and female preferred communicative styles would expect women to be more caring to express attentiveness and to validate the speaker, there exist studies that both show women's more active use of backchannels and those that fail to find a gender difference.

In other words, in the case of information confirmation questions, they most often act as backchannels that most often do not require an answer, expressing interest, signaling that information is being received and encouraging the interlocutor to go on. Freed's positioning of such questions on the information continuum is thus questionable as well as their attribution to other-initiated repairs. Confirmation of information questions were still treated as a category. It can be theorized that clarification of information in contrast to confirmation of information represents a full-on repair, whereas through confirmations acting as backchannels, as Schegloff [1981] reasons, the speaker “relinquishes the right to other-initiated repair” and encourages the interlocutor to continue providing information. The lack of audio data also presents an issue since it may play the defining role in classifying the question type. Hence the resulting data is an educated guess based on the context.

2.2.2.2 Repetition of information

This type of question asks for the repetition of the signal. Firstly, it must be acknowledged that the frequency of such function probably deals most with hearing loss and/or age. An alternative approach, however, deals with communicative styles and paying attention. As stated above, there is no consistent proof of women's expressive attentiveness though their more frequent use backchannels. However, Coates 2013 is cited summarizing that sociolinguists generally agree that in same-sex communication, men tend to “disagree with or ignore each other's utterances, women tend to acknowledge and build on them” [Coates 2013, 126]. Already mentioned Fishman's study of couples' talk as well as Victoria DeFrancisco's [1998] similar research give examples of men's lack of commitment to the conversations. Women often fail to elicit a response from their partner and use a greater proportion of “you know” in an attempt to get a reaction.

Men's dismissal of female-introduced topics can be hypothesized to be demonstrative of their overall lack of attention towards what women have to say and would like to discuss. It goes without saying that this view is based on generalizations that are not true of all men (and not all women too for that part). It is, nonetheless, a starting point for setting forth predictions about the data to be analyzed.

2.2.3 Relational questions

2.2.3.1 Conversational focus

This type is described as referring “the hearer to the informational content contained in what the current speaker is about to utter or about the direction the conversation is about to take” [Freed 1994, 629]. Freed also links these to “pre-announcements” [Levinson, 1983, 349 in: Freed 1994]. Example (4) (taken from Freed) demonstrates such question:

(4) A: Yeah, and then, urn, he walked upstairs. He walked upstairs. And I was waiting. That upset me. And you know what's upsetting? When I'm excited about something, like like the way you responded to the living room,

B: urn hum

A: I wish once he'd say, “Oh this is, this is coming coming together!”

Hardly anything could be said about this question type in relation to gender, but its positioning on the continuum is once again questionable. This resembles more the speaker's expressive style and should have been, in my opinion, placed closer to the “information conveyed” end of the scale.

2.2.3.2. Shared information

A shared information question “seeks to establish the existence of mutual or shared information, knowledge or reactions” [Freed 1994, 629]. Example (5) from the corpus illustrates this function:

(5) S0517: right well --ANONnameM spoke to him this week

S0558: ah

S0517: and he 's still got two options he 's been offered a place at that you know they 're opening the --ANONplace academy for football ?

S0558: no

Perhaps it can be argued that this function expresses the speaker's concern for the hearer's complete understanding of the spoken material, avoiding the need for other-initiated repairs. It is impossible to speculate, however, whether men or women would be more eager to avoid other-initiated repairs and to provide the hearer with accurate context. Other-initiated repairs can be treated as a sing of both lack of mutual understanding and lack of symmetrical distribution of knowledge, or even demand explanations, showing the person failed to communicate clearly. Thus, the dynamic between communication styles and shared information questions is yet unclear.

2.2.3.3 Phatic information

In Freed's definition, a phatic information question “allows the speaker to check that the hearer is following the information exchange in the conversation and/or is aware of the relevant background information” [Freed 1994, 630]. Examples provided immediately after take on the form of “You know what I mean?” and “Know what I'm talking about?”, leaving the impression that the range in which the phatic sense can be expressed is limited to these options. Another example provided without context in the “The mapping of form and function” section takes on the form of a tag question: “It's interesting, isn't it?”. This one, in my opinion, should have replaced one of the two very similar examples above in order to illustrate the diversity of potential syntactic form. Moreover, the lack of immediate context and of closer inspection of what it is that leads one to classify this utterance as phatic results in confusion. For instance, the only tag question other than the one above is given as an example of a rhetorical function, this time with context. One is left to speculate about what is meant to be the difference. The rhetorical function in relation to the phatic function and tag questions will be discussed later.

Tag questions present a fascinating case in regard to phatic information questions. Freed's data contains 66 tag questions (making them account for around 5% of all questions), 45% out of which belong in the relational group. There, 93% of tag questions are classified as phatic information questions. In my data, there were 886 tag questions that accounted for 17,72% of all interrogatives, which is considerably higher. This difference may be attributed to, firstly, the variance of British and American English and, secondly, experimental setting (Freed's data is comprised of 12 same-sex friend pairs' conversations recorded in an experimental setting, whereas Spoken BNC2014 is a collection of naturally occurring speech, not necessarily between friends and not limited to same-sex talk).

[Holmes 1984] differentiates between the tag questions' modal and affective function. While the modal function indicates the speaker's degree of certainty, the affective function is addressee-oriented, either supporting the addressee (facilitative function) or softening the negative speech act (softening function). As Eckert & McConnel-Ginet [2003] note, while “an epistemic modal tag often has a rising intonation, a facilitative tag a falling one” [ibid., 168], intonation is just one of the determining factors in assigning function; moreover, a tag can be multifunctional.

Nevertheless, the function resembling a phatic information question most is the facilitative one. It can appeal to the hearer to acknowledge background information, “check that the hearer is following the information exchange”, in Freed's words, as in the Example (6) below:

(6) S0465: er we just stop the interview we do n't we do n't carry on you know they they always understand that you say the whole explanation

S0456: >>yeah well because it is it is legal is n't it ? it 's not just (.) somebody going out to buy fruit and veg

S0465: >>yeah you 're right yeah (.)

Or a tag can be aimed more at eliciting a response. Example (7) presents a series of tags, speakers engaging each other:

(7) S0455: the birds were quiet were n't they this morning ?

S0454: perhaps it 's too hot for them

S0455: yes

S0454: it is very warm is n't it ?

S0455: yes it is yes it said twenty-four today so th- for us that 's pretty warm is n't it ?

S0454: yes

S0455: do n't know what it 's like in Scotland do you ?

S0454: no --ANONnameM says it 's alright

S0455: --UNCLEARWORD

S0454: but it 's always colder up there is n't it ?

S0455: yes well it 's probably for him he 's probably thinking it 's marvelous

Example (8) depicts how a “You know/Know what I mean/Know what I'm talking about?” question and a tag question are used consecutively, expressing one phatic sense:

(8) S0421: well they 're gon na ask for it back and also she 's only gon na get paid half wage for a third amount of time and then she 's gon na be on like nothing (.) until she goes back to work

S0423: well half wage is still (.) you know when you do n't have your mortgage or rent to pay (.) it 's not too bad really (.) all you 've got ta pay is your food (.) and the electricity and gas bills do n't you ? you know ?

Linked with the phatic function can be the case described in [Tannen 1991]. During an academic conference, a female scientist was constantly asking the audience if they were following what she was saying, using questions like “Are you with me so far?”. Male presenters, on the other hand, were concerned with not being put down by the audience members. Tannen reasons, “if covering one's tracks to avoid attack entails obscuring one's point, it is a price worth paying” [Tannen 1991, 52]. However, the act of asking if the hearer understands you can, no question, be seen as framing one as superior. Furthermore, women can enjoy feeling powerful and knowledgeable as much as men, but, in Tannen's opinion, “having information, expertise, or skill at manipulating objects is not the primary measure of power for most women. Rather, they feel their power enhanced if they can be of help” [Tannen 1991, 53], moreover, “if they are focusing on connection rather than independence and self-reliance, they feel stronger when the community is strong” [ibid.].

What can also be brought up in relation to phatic information questions is the hedge “you know”, which is often a marker of a question's phatic function in the corpus. Homes 1986's study of hedges in male and female speech distinguishes between two functions of “you know”: expressing confidence and uncertainty. These functions are linked to the falling and rising intonation respectively [Coates 2013, 88]; and while a rising intonation of this hedge would not always result in the utterance being classified as interrogative, it can be assumed that “you know” at the end of an utterance that had been marked with a question mark does, in fact, have rising intonation. It is questionable, however, to state that all rising intonation hedges express uncertainty. Checking whether the hearer is following the information exchange (that is, being classified as a phatic question) does not carry a sense of uncertainty. Nevertheless, we can consider studies' results pertaining to the use of this hedge in relation to gender.

Holmes found that while overall the frequency of usage did not differ significantly, women used “you know” to express certainty more than men and less to express uncertainty. This challenges the view that hedges are a marker of powerlessness. However, think back to Fishman's 1980 study of couples' talk that showed the men's lack of commitment to the conversations. In malfunctioning interactions, women used “you know” abundantly to try to engage their partner. Overall, women used this hedge 5 times more than men. So perhaps women were found to use “you know” more in the confident sense because they care to invite the hearer to increase solidarity, resulting in this function being more prevalent than expressing one's uncertainty.

To sum up, phatic information questions can be seen as an attempt to ensure mutual understanding and unity between the speakers, which could be seen as a female trait. Moreover, men can avoid this type of question so that their argument is not challenged. On the other hand, asking whether the hearer is following your argument can be signaling authority by way of assuming the hearer's incompetence or lack of mental capacity to do so. Phatic questions are also engaging the hearer into the conversation, prompting them to acknowledge some fact, even non-verbally.

2.2.3.4 Elaboration

Elaboration questions invite “broadly defined information exchange, often of a nonfactual, social and non-specific nature” [Freed 1994, 630]. They differ from social information questions in that they “elicit non-specific information to encourage open-ended discussion” [ibid.]. Freed also connects these with “conversational maintenance” questions [Maltz & Borker 1982], although nowhere in the source is a particular question type linked to this function. Rather, it is discussed by Maltz & Borker that women use questions for conversational maintenance, while men tend to request information instead.

The authors suggest that men and women are socialized (namely, in middle childhood, through child play practices) to be used to different conversational rules. Thus, cross-gender miscommunication occurs not because of “bad faith” but simply because men and women have learnt to interpret the same conversational cues differently. Moreover, as illustrated by Tannen's example in section 2.2.1.1, men can interpret women's social or elaboration questions not as a sign of interest, but as interrogation, perhaps aimed at finding flaws in their (men's) reasoning. Thus, it can be speculated that women would ask more elaboration questions as a conversational maintenance technique.

2.2.4 Expressive style

2.2.4.1 Didactic function

A didactic function question “refers the hearer to information which the speaker already knows; the speaker is asking about certain information in order to teach the hearer something” [Freed 1994, 630]. Example (9) is Freed's:

(9) A: Well, you know, what she really needs is, you know what she really

needs?

B: Therapy.

A: She needs therapy.

This function is very specific and was almost non-present in the corpus. Not much can be said about its relation to gendered speech.

2.2.4.2 Rhetorical function

Freed's definition of a rhetorical question is provided below:

“(a) A question which refers to information that the speaker already knows which is communicated to the hearer in the form of a question as part of the speaker's expressive style, or (b) a question, the utterance of which, orients the hearer to the speaker's point of view; this may convey sarcasm, irony, etc.” [Freed 1994, 631].

In her investigation of form-function correspondence, Freed also discovers that 48% of rhetorical questions was comprised of wh-questions despite [Kearsley 1976]'s speculation that it would be mostly tag questions that would account for the majority of rhetorical questions. Example (11) shows a wh-question serving a rhetorical function:

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