Turn-Taking in Cross-Sex and Cross-Cultural Communication

Scholarly Paper aus dem Jahr 2007 im Fachbereich Anglistik - Linguistik, einseitig bedruckt, Note: 1,3, Universität Bayreuth (University of Bayreuth), Veranstaltung: Politeness and intercultural communication, 13 Quellen im Literaturverzeichnis, Sprache: Englisch, Abstract: 1. IntroductionConversations are occasions where participants are given the opportunity to give and take by making contributions and by allowing others to take turns. Turn-taking concerns the 'me and you' level of communicative interaction and examines how speakers share the floor in conversation. Every time, there is interaction, the mechanisms of how turns are taken are involved automatically. In conversations where turns between the participants are exchanged smoothly, and where speakers share similar or the same turn-taking patterns, communication is successful and allows the development of a topic. Disturbances in the flow of communication are likely to arise when there is disagreement in the turn-taking systems employed by speakers that may have different assumptions in regards to which linguistic behaviour is appropriate in conversation. Not later than John Gray we know that men are from Mars and women from Venus and it is not later than Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand that we know that men's and women's communicative styles can lead to misunderstanding in cross-sex conversation and to the development of stereotypes such as women talking too much and never getting to the point and men never listening. In Sociolinguistics, gender communication has become a popular field of analysis. Committed linguists, such as Coates (1993), West and Zimmermann (1977) and Leet-Pellegrini (1983) have done extended research on linguistic behaviour of men and women. The findings of their studies form the basis of the first part of this paper which will deal with turn-taking behaviour of men and women in cross-sex conversation. In an introductory part I will provide general information on turn-taking and gender and will then elaborate on interruptions and overlaps, minimal responses and silence, and hedges to illustrate what role they play in turn-taking in cross-sex communication. Finally, I will explore in how far men's and women's communicative styles are related to conversational aims, dominance and context situations. In cross-cultural encounters, there are not only speakers of different cultural backgrounds that stand vis-á-vis, but often also different turn-taking systems. When there is knowledge of the turn-taking system of each speaker in the conversation and knowledge of how to interpret it, the chances of cross-cultural communication to be smooth and successful are considerable.