Women In Competition For The Floor

In sociolinguistics, the term"the floor"refers to the course of verbal interaction. It is an abstract platform, on which people take turns to speak and thus make a conversation. Like linguistic forms, people's performance on the floor also plays an important role in revealing the characteristics of their language use. Some people tend to quit the floor for others to speak. Others tend to be more stubborn to hold the floor, even when being interrupted. The different performance of men and women in competition for the floor has long been a concern in sociolinguistic studies, and discourse analysis as well. For sociolinguists, the floor is a significant factor for the study of woman's language in a sense that it functions as a key reference in the research based on dominance approach.Sociolinguists take dominance approach as one major perspective in the study on woman's language led by the"difference—dominance"modal. They find that women usually take a subordinate position in a verbal communication and men a dominant position. Women are more easily deprived off the floor of discourse by speakers of the other sex. Or, they are more conservative to protect or take the floor actively from men in order to express themselves freely. As to conversational behavior, women usually observe the rules of discourse, the simplest systematics, so that they distinguish themselves as a more polite and well-behaved speakers in a sex-mixed conversation. Linguists believe that this subordination falls into the characteristics of woman's language together with those linguistic forms, such as vocabulary selection. It is notable that the assumptions made by sociolinguists are based on researches of natural language, through recording the real conversation. Therefore, the data is considerably credible for us. However, language takes various forms in use. Literary language, one might doubt its facticity, remains to be a practical use of language. One possible consequence of studying on language employed in literature is that gender difference still remains.In order to prove the assumption, data are collected randomly from 28 stories written during the considerably modern period by female and male writers. This study focuses on the competition for the floor by means of analyzing interruptions that occur in processes of turn-takings carried out between fictional characters. The data analysis results in two propositions. One is that the fictional characters tend to behave equal in a process of turn-taking, no matter the author is female or male. The other is that writers of these stories tend to behave unequal in presenting their ways of holding the floor of different genders since they are greatly biased by their sexual identities. These seemingly contradictory propositions actually converge to a common idea that literary language may prove the different dominance of the two genders in discourses as well.So long as we believe literature is a mirror of real life, the literary language is sure to carry along the nature of real social life. With the result drown from my research based on literature, it is easy to trace power, in terms of Foucault's theory, functioning in the unbalanced competition for the floor. As Foucault argues, power works everywhere through joined efforts of different forms of forces without any certain subjectivity. So does it in the formation of those conversational conventions. In this way, power explains the nurtured characteristics of gender difference in language use. Holding a proper understanding on power and how it works is essential for us to interpret woman's performance in language use, with neither prejudice nor misunderstandings.