Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 10, Issue 1, 1981

On the basis of a corpus of 626 utterances produced in buying a train ticket at the Central Station of Amsterdam an investigation was made of a) differences between the speech used by women and by men, and b) differences between the speech allocated to women and to men.The independent variables were: sex of speaker, age of speaker and sex of addressee. The dependent variables were: diminutives, hesitations, requests for information, speaker's polite forms and addressee's polite forms. The results indicate that there are hardly speech differences between female and male speakers, if the speech events and the factors of situation, setting, and topic are the same for all informants. The sex of the addressee, however, affected the use of polite forms: the travellers - both women and men - were more polite to the male ticket sellers than to the female ticket sellers. Both of the results point to the importance of taking into account inter-actional aspects in research of sex differences in speech. Also attention should be paid to the choice of the interviewer in sociolinguistic studies: a female interviewer may be more suited to elicit informal speech. The fact that both male speakers and female speakers show by their use of polite forms more respect for men and less respect to women reflects the sex-linked hierarchy in society, and one should realize that women themselves contribute to the continued higher valuation of men.1) This investigation is a sequel to the paper which has been published in both J.F. Matter (ed.), Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen 4 (1978), 52-75 (Dédé Brouwer, Marinel Gerritsen & Dorian de Haan, 'Verschillen in taal-gebruik tussen vrouwen en mannen: een dood spoor?') and Language in Society 8 (1979), 33-50 (Dédé Brouwer, Marinel Gerritsen & Dorian de Haan, 'Speech differences between women and men: on the wrong track?').

In this article it is assumed that verbal and nonverbal aspects of communication should be accounted for in one integrative theory, as is for instance proposed by Watzlawick et al. (1967). The article examines the question whether Maccoby & Jacklin's (1973) hypotheses concerning sex differences hold when we also take pragmatic and non-digital but analogue nonverbal aspects of communication into account.In considering these hypotheses (1) observational data of pre school and primary school interaction; (2) observational data of communication in a behavior therapy setting; and (3) the observational capacity of nonverbal communication with respect to the PONS-test, a test for emotions and one for human relations, are dealt with.It is found amongst other things that (1) boys communicate more abstractly and therefore more succesfully in a school situation than girls do; (2) male therapists communicate more effectively with their clients than female therapists do; (3) female clients communicate more effectively than the male clients; (4) communicative capacity depends on situation, role, and on who is the addressee, and is to a large extent sex-specific; (5) male, female, and androgynous are effective self-attributions in a differential psychology sense in differentiating between achievements in tests on observational capacity with respect to nonverbal communication; (6) androgyny is generally advantageous for woman and disadvantageous for men; and (7) Maccoby and Jacklin's hypotheses should be reconsidered.

Quantitative research has been done on sex differences in French spoken language. A corpus of 51 interviews was fed into a computer with sex and age as independent variables.Approximately the same word categories were examined as Gerritsen & de Jong tested in Dutch: categories that reflect the polite, correct and insecure behaviour of women and categories of "female" words (adorable, etc.) and "male" words (pompous words), categories of words referring to special subjects (house, sports, etc.).Some other catagories, not studied by Gerritsen & de Jong, were introduced, like personal pronouns (subject).The results in French confirm the Dutch results. Significant differences are found in so far as it concerns the subject people talk about. Other significant differences were found concerning abstract words ("male" words) and personal pronouns (used more by women than by men). No other signifi-cant differences were found.

A model is a system of which the structure is known and which provides information through isomorphism about a system of which the structure is not known. In (applied) linguistics a model is often not more than a theory in the form of a diagram, but constructing a model is useful especially when there are many variables. Concerning the relationship between model and reality a distinction is made between result models, process models and physiological models. The models of Carroll, Gardner et al., Krashen, Dulay and Burt, and Bialystok are discussed on the bases of the following questions:a. What kind of model is it?b. Are the elements and the relationship between them clear?c. What research has been based on the model?There appear to be but few useful models and so far virtually no research has been carried out to test the existing models.

In this article Krashen's Monitor Model is discussed. The working of the Model is explained and the criticism of McLaughlin and Sajavaara are discussed. It is argued that the Monitor Model can be seen only as a first attempt to get a better insight into the processes that play a part in a second language acquisition, and furthermore that there are still a lot of questions left to be answered, of which the most important are:(a) Is Krashen's distinction between acquisition and learning real?(b) And if so, how can this distinction be proven?

This paper presents the annotated text of a semi-spontaneous conversation of a Dutch student with two Turkish foreign workers in the Netherlands. The conversation, which lasted nearly an hour, is published completely, with the exception of fragments in Turkish, which have been summarized between brackets.The introduction describes the interview situation, difficulties in a linguistic interview with the aim to elicit use of a language which is not the mother tongue of the informant, and illustrates certain disturbances in the communication process. In addition the utterances of the Turkish participants are analysed according to the theory of the communicative sentence perspective as developed by Prague scholars. An intonation analysis shows similarities and differences with intonation patterns related to theme-rheme structure of standard Dutch.

The present paper deals with the acquisition of finiteness in German and Dutch child language. More specifically, it discusses the assumption of fundamental similarities in the development of the finiteness category in German and Dutch L1 as postulated by Dimroth et al. (2003). A comparison of German and Dutch child corpus data will show that Dimroth et al.'s assumption can be maintained as far as the overall development of the finiteness category is concerned. At a more fine-grained level, however, German and Dutch children exhibit different linguistic behaviour. This concerns in particular the means for the expression of early finiteness and the status of the auxiliary hebben/haben 'to have'. The observed differences can be explained as the result of target language specific properties of the input.