SotA Anthology 2015-16
far more collaborative than
men, who take on a more
‘one at a time’ single floor
(2013, p.13). She suggests
that this is not due to any
sort of language inequality,
but merely a difference
in what is considered
politeness and a sign of
solidarity within male and
female interaction. In an allfemale group, to interrupt
and overlap shows signs
of shared enthusiasm in a
topic, whereas this is not
the case in male interaction;
instead, men tend to let one
person speak at a time in
order to show interest in
what the speaker is talking
of and to show politeness.
Examples such as this do
not suggest that males
speak one at a time to
reaffirm their masculine
social standing but merely to
fit the maxims of interaction
within an all-male group.
A large proportion of
Coates’s work is on allfemale interaction, claiming
that there has already
been work done on mixedsex interaction. This is
problematic in her research
however, as she does not
have a different group
interaction to compare
her research to. By using
an all-female interaction,
she may have collected
many features present in
their language, but she
cannot explore whether
this language changes in
the presence of males, or
whether indeed all-male
language is different. A
further issue with Coates’s
1989 research is her
methodology, which raises
questions as to whether
it is ethically acceptable.
The everyday interaction
is
recorded
within
a
private space of one of the
female’s home and they
are therefore comfortable
and the language will reflect
fairly natural language use.
She records their language
surreptitiously,
however,
and this is not an acceptable
method in which to collect
data. There are positives to
take from her methodology
in
her
ethnographic
approach; she will know
who each informant is and
whether their language was
a true reflection of their
general language use. This
gives her an advantage
over McEnery.
*****
I recorded my informants in
a private setting such as one
of their living rooms; one
interaction with four females,
one with four males, and the
third with two males and two
females. A recording device
was the most unobtrusive
way in which to collect the
language use, and is also
the most likely to reflect
natural everyday interaction.
To avoid the limitations
McEnery experienced in
using corpus data I used
primary recordings, and
as my study is more smallscale and specific, this has
given me enough data to
analyse with the knowledge
of who the speaker and the
hearer are. The relevant
data was then transferred
into bar charts and thus my
data are being presented
quantitatively.
I have borrowed McEnery’s
scale of offence table
(2006, p.36) to identify the
offensiveness of the BLWs
used and to determine
which gender, if any, uses
‘stronger’ swear words
than the other. For the
BLWs found in my own
data that are not present
on McEnery’s table, I have
created a further scale of
offence labelled as Table
1, which is specific to my
data, and have placed the
BLWs in their categories as
appropriate to McEnery’s
scale
and
a
survey
undertaken
by Andrea
Millwood-Hargrave (2000).
The two males in my mixed
sex recording are also two
of the speakers in the allmale interaction. It was
impossible, however, to
get two of the same female
speakers to be present in the
mixed sex group interaction,
and so one different female
speaker has replaced her.
By using a quantitative
approach I have found it has
helped to compare clearly
the difference within each
interaction, but also not lose
any of the valuable data
such as the specific BLWs
used by the informants.
All the informants are
current student at various
universities across the
UK, ensuring they are all
from a similar educational
background, which suggests
each informant belongs to
a similar social class. Due
to the short length of my
study, it was important to
reduce variables down in
order to focus solely on my
hypothesis. Variables such
as age and social class
would have been great
influential factors in the use