Gender and age peculiarities of the language and some linguistic difficulties of translation them in practice

Gender and age peculiarities of the language and some linguistic difficulties of translation them in practice

Gender and age peculiarities of the language and some linguistic difficulties of translation them in practice

Chapter 1. Language and Gender studies

1.1Gender and linguistics stereotyping

1.2Gender Language and its subdivisions

a)Womens language

b)Mens language)Childrens language)Age-graded language

Chapter 2. Linguistic peculiarities of translation of gender graded languages

.1 Difficulties of translation of childrens speech

.2 Linguistic features of womens speech

.3 Age-graded language and the way of improving it

Bibliography

Introduction

The study of language has been a constant preoccupation with more or less professional researchers for thousands of years. Since the earliest times, much before the birth of linguistics as a distinct scholarly discipline, people have been aware of the essential role language plays not only in their everyday life, but also as a characteristic feature of mankind, radically differentiating human beings from other species of the animal kingdom.fact that language acts as a fundamental link between ourselves and the world around us and that in the absence of language our relation to the universe and to our fellows is dramatically impaired is something that people have been (at least intuitively) aware of since the beginning of history. Suffice it to mention that different cultures seem to associate speech problems with intellectual deficiencies. The origin of language (believed to be divine in most ancient cultures), the relation between language and thinking, the question if we can think without the help of language (and if we can, what kind of thinking is that), the manner in which human beings (who are not, obviously, born with the ability to speak, but have, however, an innate capacity for language acquisition) come, with an amazing rapidity, to successfully use language, beginning with the very first stages of their existence (the acquisition of language actually parallels the birth of the childs self-consciousness and the latter can hardly be imagined without the former) have puzzled researchers for centuries and none of these questions has actually received a satisfactory and universally accepted answer.is obviously the main system available for us, not only for knowing the world and understanding it, but also for accumulating, storing and communicating information. Language can thus be understood as the main system we have for communicating among us. All the other systems of conveying information are actually based on this essential, fundamental one. Communication by means of language can thus be understood as a complex process actually consisting of several stages. Any act of communication basically takes place between two participants: on the one hand we have the source of the information, the person who has to communicate something, the sender of the message that contains the information, and on the other hand we need a second party, the recipient, the addressee of the message, the beneficiary of the communication act, in other words the person(s) to whom the information contained in the message is addressed. Since the sender has to convey a message, and the transmission is to take place on the basis of a system of signs (a code), the first thing the sender has to do is to encode or codify his message, in other words to render the contents of the message by means of the signs of the respective code (the language) .The next stage is obviously represented by the transmission of the message proper, which can be achieved in several ways (depending of the type of communication; e.g. written or oral). Once the message reaches the recipient, the process should unfold in the opposite direction. That is, the message gets to the recipient in an encoded form so that the recipient has to decode it and grasp its meaning.

The novelty of the study. Novelty of the diploma work is that it adds some details to what was studied before. This theme is actual for today and will always be. Many linguists are interested in the peculiarities of gender linguistics. Due to the analysis which is used in this diploma work to determine the womens language and mens language to reveal their differences and dominance.

The subject of the study is peculiarities of the womens and mens language and the linguistic behavior of men and women across languages.

The purpose of this diploma paper is the study of lexical and morphological differences of the womens and mens language, grammatical forms of verbs according to the sex of the speaker.English language gradually becomes one of the most widely used languages in the world. There are large numbers of students in institutions of higher and further education who are learning English for many purposes: as the medium of the literature and culture of English-speaking countries; for access to scholarly and technological publications; to qualify as English teachers, translators, or interpreters; to improve their chances of employment or promotion in such areas as tourist trade, international progammes for economic or military aid. In countries where it is a second language, English is commonly used as the medium for higher education, at least for scientific and technological subjects.

Advantage of this diploma paper is that it will be useful both to teachers, and to students. In teaching activity it can be applied in studying of such courses as practical course of translation, theoretical course of translation, practicum on culture of speech communication, etc. The analysis made in this diploma work will help to predict mistakes while speaking, will help to practical exercises for development of skills of linguistics.

The main task is to reveal peculiarities of the womens and mens language, find similarities and differences between the womens form and mens form of speaking, to define difficulties which encounter the students while reading and analyzing the texts, which are necessary to overcome, and also to study the theoretical basis of English linguistics in order to understand the structure of Modern English language.

The structure of the degree work. The present diploma work consists of the introduction, two chapters, the conclusion and bibliography.

Chapter 1. Language and Gender Studies

.1 Gender and Linguistic Stereotyping

Gender stereotyping in the linguistics is a well-established fact. Nowhere is it more obvious than in advertising, where the authoritative male voice-over is a regular feature.'Perhaps the most telling evidence of sexism in advertising is not to be found in 'what happens', but in the ubiquity of the male in the voice-over, even in ads portraying or aimed at women, or which pay lip-service to the modern liberated women!' [Cook G., 1992] The attribution of specific and indeed limited gender roles by the advertising industry and by society in general is a fascinating subject in its own right. We propose to look initially at just one element of it, i.e. the portrayal of women's language and communicative skills as a component of their general behaviour patterns. Usually, references to women's linguistic behaviour are implicit rather than explicit. There are occasions when deep-rooted expectations and prejudices come to the fore, displaying a stereotypical picture of women as creatures who talk a lot, interrupt men and are illogical and changeable.Quiet! Didn't your husband teach you not to interrupt when a man is talking?' - Pieter Botha, President of South Africa, responding to a female heckler. [Werner M., 1993].can we have an invasion when the troops storm ashore and then change their minds!' - Bob Hope, entertainer, about women in combat. [Werner M., 1993].further example relates to the stereotype that women talk a lot. It is taken from the British Telecom advertising campaign called 'It's good to talk':.g. Why can't men be more like women?.g. Women and men communicate differently..g. Have you noticed?.g. Women like to sit down to make phone calls..g. They know that getting in touch is much more important than what you actually say..g. Men adopt another position..g. They stand up.body language says this message will be short, sharp and to the point. 'Meet you down the pub, all right? See you there'. That's a man's call..g. Women can't understand why men are so abrupt. [The Sunday Times]service is paid to women's role in maintaining social harmony. However, it is abundantly clear that what women say is unimportant, if 'getting in touch is much more important than what you actually say' and women's conversation is irrelevant if it is 'not to the point'. Interestingly, the two accompanying pictures show a man and a woman on the phone, wearing no clothes with the caption strategically positioned. The suggestion is obviously (and dangerously) that such behaviour is biologically determined. What might be represented elsewhere as a disadvantage is here turned to advantage for raw commercial purposes: how else could 'talking-time' be sold other than by reference to the stereotypical high-achievers in the area, i.e. women?

Linguistic stereotypes

Since the publication of Robin Lakoff's stereotypes about women's speech have percolated through from linguistic circles to the general public. [Lakoff R, 1975]. It is almost impossible to look through a women's magazine nowadays without finding some article popularising descriptions of women's speech, largely based on linguistic research. [U Magazine; September, 1995]. Lakoff drew up a list of features of women's speech, relating mostly to vocabulary, but also to syntactic structures. Until then, few outside hallowed linguistic circles had even heard of the tag-question or had any idea what it was. The following are examples of tag questions:.g. John is here, isn't he?.g. They will be arriving shortly, won't they?then, there has been furious debate about whether women use more tag-questions than men and if so, what it means. Various women's magazines offer advice on how to rid oneself of this and other female forms of speech, with the result that a further set of stereotypes has emerged, this time based on the research of linguists. The following is part of the most recent list provided by Lakoff:

·Women's intonational contours display more variety than men's.

·Women use diminutives and euphemisms more than men.

·Women make more use of expressive forms (adjectives, not nouns or verbs and in that category, those expressing emotional rather than intellectual evaluation) more than men: lovely, divine.

·Women use hedges of all kinds more than men.

·Women use intonation patterns that resemble questions, indicating uncertainty or need for approval.

·Women's voices are breathier than men's.

·Women are more indirect and polite than men.

·In conversation, women are more likely to be interrupted, less likely to introduce successful topics.

·Women's communicative style tends to be collaborative rather than competitive.

·More of women's communication is expressed non verbally (by gesture and intonation) than men's.

·Women are more careful to be 'correct' when they speak, using better grammar and fewer colloquialisms than men. [Lakoff R, 1990]

Debate currently rages about most of the features mentioned above. Much work has been done on pitch, intonation, hedges, politeness and `correctness'. Sociolinguists such as Peter Trudgill and William Labove have consistently shown that, on average, women speak a form of language more approaching the standard (i.e. more `correct') than men of a similar social background. [Labov W., 1972]. Again, the problem is, how should this be interpreted? Does it mean that women are linguistically more conservative than men? Attempting to answer such questions is another day's work.Let us turn to the area that has received most attention in recent times, that of 'communicative styles' or 'strategies'. Initially research was carried out on private conversation but more recently attention has focused on women's linguistic behaviour in the workplace and whether, at least in part, it can be blamed for the existence of the 'Glass Ceiling'. Tannen's work has excited considerable controversy among linguists. Her views can be summarised as follows: men tend to employ 'contest' strategies and women 'community' strategies. [Tanner D., 1994]. If we accept such a dichotomy, it provides an easy explanation for women's lack of advancement in the workplace: women are too busy establishing 'community' or 'rapport' instead of climbing the ladder by engaging in the 'contest' strategies which are more successful in organisations founded on hierarchy. Of course, it is not as simple as that. It is not enough to study male patterns of linguistic interaction, adopt them and succeed where others have failed. Some women have done so: Margaret Thatcher lowered her pitch, spoke more slowly and reduced the variability of her intonation patterns. One has also to contend with society's expectations of women as ladies who speak politely and the fact that lower pitch is associated with greater credibility. (Studies have shown that the lower the news reader's voice, the more people are inclined to believe the news!).

Language in academe

Let us turn to the role of language in an academic institution of which Lakoff gives some fascinating examples in Talking Power. Lakoff considers the university a hierarchical institution par excellence, where vertical divisions are rigorously maintained, starting with the lecturer's dominance over a class of undergraduates, going on to the staff meeting where she considers that amount of talk is directly proportional to status. On the surface, it appears the rules are the same for women and men: from the students' perspective, whoever is on the podium has the floor whether male or female. It is only when you look at the administration of universities that the rules are different. [Lakoff R, 1975]. Lakoff describes her experience of committee meetings as follows: 'Here I was at one of the world's greatest universities, (The University of California at Berkeley) in the company of distinguished colleagues, and after listening to the latter for two hours or so, could not recall a single thing of substance that had been said. Worse, it would sometimes occur to me that my respected confrÀres (almost always men) were spending hours on a point that could be summarised and concluded in a sentence or two. I would attempt to provide that sentence. But once I had spoken, the discourse would close over me like the ocean enveloping a pebble. It was as if I had not spoken - in fact, did not exist. What did it mean? After a while I figured it out. My colleagues were playing by men's rules: what was important was to gain turf, control territory. That goal was achieved by spreading words around. [Lakoff R, 1975].puts her finger on one of the dilemmas facing women: how to deal with the expectation that it is men not women who will occupy the floor. However eloquent or convincing a woman is, it is difficult for her to gain and maintain the floor in a public fora, (of which the university committee meeting is a prime example) because of the expectation that public fora are men's, not women's domains. The public/private divide still operates: the more public the forum, the less women are likely to speak. So it is not just a question of women acquiring new speech strategies in order to succeed, it is also a question of overcoming the expectation of less talk - or even silence. A university is no different in this respect than any other institution based on hierarchy. We are indeed a long way from the societal stereotype of the loquacious woman.

There is considerable divergence between conventional stereotypes and the reality of women's speech. Since linguistic behavior is not rigidly divided along sex lines, it is easy to discount differences as non-existent or unimportant. Linguistic research in the last twenty years has done nothing if not prove that variation does exist and that women are linguistically, as well as socially, at a disadvantage. Researchers have shown consistently that women speak less than men in public for a and that men interrupt women more than the other way round.

The problem is whether it is possible or desirable for women to alter their speech patterns so that they may be judged more direct and convincing; Deborah Cameron refers to such a process as 'verbal hygiene for women' [Cameron D., 1994]. <file:///D:\Диск%20D\Рабочий%20стол\Рабига\дипломные%202010\Gender%20and%20Linguistic%20Stereotyping%20-%20M_Conrick-.htm>This kind of linguistic training seems like a modern equivalent for women of the old elocution lesson from the days when a particular class accent was a marker for upward social mobility. In the context of the Glass Ceiling, upward mobility for women is a far more complex affair.

Changing women's linguistic strategies is not terribly difficult in certain areas: one can, for example, (possibly with a modicum of training), adopt lower pitch, reduce the range of intonation patterns and avoid disclaimers like: 'I'm not sure if this will work but...' Some women may have philosophical objections to being expected, yet again, to change their behaviour to fit in with a male norm. They may favour a `celebrating difference' approach, though this seems particularly unlikely to succeed in a hierarchical workplace.

Whatever one's position on the 'if you can't beat them, join them' debate, at least the time has come when doing research in language and gender and mediating it to the public is considered worthwhile, in contrast to twenty years ago when it would have been considered an unworthy, if not frivolous, subject of academic debate. More and more women appear to have cultivated elements of what some refer to as 'powerful' language, related to level of attainment rather than gender determined. One hopes that the more women participate in public life the more they will develop individual styles that no longer surprise because of their rarity. That will be progress.

1.2Gender Language and its subdivisions

a) Womens language) mens language

Possible gender differences in language usage have recently attracted a lot of attention., we need to sort out whether women really do speak differently from men. People's impressions are not necessarily correct: it is often assumed, for example, that women talk more than men, whereas almost all research on the topic has demonstrated the opposite, that men talk more than women. Similarly, it is sometimes claimed that women use 'empty' adjectives, such as divine, charming, cute, yet this type of description is possibly more usually used by (presumably male) writers in popular newspapers to describe women. [Aitchison J., 1992], some characteristics which have been attributed to women turn out to be far more widespread. For example, women have been claimed to use tentative phrases such as kind of, sort of in place of straight statements: 'Bill is kind of short', instead of 'Bill is short'. They have also been accused of using question intonation in response to queries: 'About eight o'clock?' as a reply to: 'What time's dinner?' Yet this insecure style of conversation seems to be typical of 'powerless' people, those who are somewhat nervous and afraid of antagonizing others. Powerless people come from either sex.

1.Observations of the differences between the way males and females speak were long restricted to grammatical features, such as the differences between masculine and feminine morphology in many languages. In earlier usage, the word gender was generally restricted to these grammatical distinctions. They cause problems for speakers of languages like English, where grammatical gender is marked mainly in pronouns, when they learn a language like French, where non-sexed items like table (la table) can be grammatically feminine. [Spolsky B., 1998].

The most consistent difference found between men and women within the western world is a tendency for women to speak in a way that is closer to the prestige standard. In colloquial terms, they speak 'better' than men. No one is quite sure why this is so, and several explanations have been proposed, which may all be partially right. [Aitchison J., 1992]. For example, women may be pressurized by society to behave in a 'ladylike' manner, and 'speaking nicely' may be part of this. Or because they are the main child-rearers, they may subconsciously speak in a way which will enable their children to progress socially. Or they may tend to have jobs which rely on communication, rather than on strength. All these factors, and others, appear to be relevant. Of the social causes of gender differentiation in speech style, one of the most critical appears to be level of education. In all studies, it has been shown that the greater the disparities between educational opportunities for boys and girls, the greater the differences between male and female speech.

Historically, these differences sometimes seem to have arisen from customs encouraging marriage outside the community. If there is a regular pattern of men from village A marrying and bringing home to their village women from village B, then it is likely that the speech of women in village A will be marked by many features of the village В dialect. [Spolsky B., 1998].The preservation of these introduced features depends on the maintenance of social differentiation in occupations, status, and activities.soon pick up the social stereotypes that underlie this discrimination. They learn that women's talk is associated with the home and domestic activities, while men's is associated with the outside world and economic activities. These prejudices often remain in place in the face of contrary evidence. Thus, while there is a popular prejudice that women talk more than men, empirical studies of a number of social situations (such as committee meetings and Internet discussion groups) have shown the opposite to be true.

In recent years, particularly among employed women, the differences between men's and women's speech appear to be diminishing. Such studies, then, provide further evidence of the importance of language in reflecting social attitudes and social changes.If the pattern of females relying on an abstract language network and of males relying on sensory areas of the brain extends into adulthood - a still unresolved question - it could explain why women often provide more context and abstract representation than men. For men the focus is on sharing information, while women value the interaction process. Men and women possess different interactive styles, as they typically acquired their communicative competence at an early age in same-gender groups. [ Montgomery, 1995].Ask a woman for directions and you may hear something like: "Turn left on Main Street, go one block past the drug store, and then turn right, where there's a flower shop on one corner and a cafe across the street.

"Such information-laden directions may be helpful for women because all information is relevant to the abstract concept of where to turn; however, men may require only one cue and be distracted by additional information. Studies of gender differences have shown the power of stereotyping. A poet is taken more seriously than a poetess; women's status is lowered by references to the girls. In Hebrew, only the lower ranks in the army (up to the rank of lieutenant) have feminine forms. The use of generic masculine ('Everyone should bring his lunch, we need to hire the best man available'), however well- meaning and neutral the speaker's intention may be, reinforces the secondary status of women in many social groups. [Spolsky B., 1998].

With the growth of social awareness in this area over the past decades, there have been many attempts to overcome this prejudicial use of language.The idea that men and women "speak different languages" has itself become a dogma, treated not as a hypothesis to be investigated or as a claim to be adjudicated, but as an unquestioned article of faith. Our faith in it is misplaced. If we examine the findings of more than 30 years of research on language, communication and the sexes, we will discover that they tell a different, and more complicated, story. The idea that men and women differ fundamentally in the way they use language to communicate is a myth in the everyday sense: a widespread but false belief. But it is also a myth in the sense of being a story people tell in order to explain who they are, where they have come from, and why they live as they do. Whether or not they are "true" in any historical or scientific sense, such stories have consequences in the real world. They shape our beliefs, and so influence our actions. For example, the workplace is a domain in which myths about language and the sexes can have detrimental effects. A few years ago, the manager of a call centre in north-east England was asked by an interviewer why women made up such a high proportion of the agents he employed. Did men not apply for jobs in his centre? The manager replied that any vacancies attracted numerous applicants of both sexes, but, he explained: "We are looking for people who can chat to people, interact, build rapport. What we find is that women can do this more ... women are naturally good at that sort of thing." Moments later, he admitted: "I suppose we do, if we're honest, select women sometimes because they are women rather than because of something they've particularly shown in the interview." The growth of call centres is part of a larger trend in economically advanced societies. More jobs are now in the service than the manufacturing sector, and service jobs, particularly those that involve direct contact with customers, put a higher premium on language and communication skills. Many employers share the call-centre manager's belief that women are by nature better qualified than men for jobs of this kind, and one result is a form of discrimination. Male job applicants have to prove that they possess the necessary skills, whereas women are just assumed to possess them. But it is not only men who stand to lose because of the widespread conviction that women have superior verbal skills. Someone else who thinks men and women are naturally suited to different kinds of work is Baron-Cohen. [Cameron D., 1998].

In The Essential Difference he offers the following "scientific" careers advice:

1)"People with the female brain make the most wonderful counsellors, primary school teachers, nurses, carers, therapists, social workers, mediators, group facilitators or personnel staff.

2) People with the male brain make the most wonderful scientists, engineers, mechanics, technicians, musicians, architects, electricians, plumbers, taxonomists, catalogists, bankers, toolmakers, programmers or even lawyers." The difference between the two lists reflects what Baron-Cohen takes to be the "essential difference" between male and female brains. The female-brain jobs make use of a capacity for empathy and communication, whereas the male ones exploit the ability to analyse complex systems. Baron-Cohen is careful to talk about - "people with the female/male brain" rather than "men and women". [Cameron D., 1998].

He stresses that there are men with female brains, women with male brains, and individuals of both sexes with "balanced" brains. He refers to the major brain types as "male" and "female", however, because the tendency is for males to have male brains and females to have female brains. And at many points it becomes clear that in spite of his caveats about not confusing gender with brain sex, he himself is doing exactly that. Baron-Cohen classifies nursing as a female-brain, empathy-based job (though if a caring and empathetic nurse cannot measure dosages accurately and make systematic clinical observations she or he risks doing serious harm) and law as a male-brain, system-analysing job (though a lawyer, however well versed in the law, will not get far without communication and people-reading skills). [Cameron D., 1998].

These categorisations are not based on a dispassionate analysis of the demands made by the two jobs. They are based on the everyday common-sense knowledge that most nurses are women and most lawyers are men. At its most basic it is simply the proposition that men and women differ fundamentally in the way they use language to communicate. All versions of the myth share this basic premise; most versions, in addition, make some or all of the following claims:

1.Language and communication matter more to women than to men; women talk more than men.

2.Women are more verbally skilled than men.

.Men's goals in using language tend to be about getting things done, whereas women's tend to be about making connections to other people. Men talk more about things and facts, whereas women talk more about people, relationships and feelings.

.Men's way of using language is competitive, reflecting their general interest in acquiring and maintaining status; women's use of language is cooperative, reflecting their preference for equality and harmony.

.These differences routinely lead to "miscommunication" between the sexes, with each sex misinterpreting the other's intentions. This causes problems in contexts where men and women regularly interact, and especially in heterosexual relationships.

Perhaps men have realised that a reputation for incompetence can sometimes work to your advantage. Like the idea that they are no good at housework, the idea that men are no good at talking serves to exempt them from doing something that many would rather leave to women anyway. (Though it is only some kinds of talking that men would rather leave to women: in many contexts men have no difficulty expressing themselves - indeed, they tend to dominate the conversation.) This should remind us that the relationship between the sexes is not only about difference, but also about power. The long-standing expectation that women will serve and care for others is not unrelated to their position as the "second sex". But in the universe of Mars and Venus, the fact that we (still) live in a male-dominated society is like an elephant in the room that everyone pretends not to notice. The tag question, similarly, can be interpreted as a hedging device which weakens womens speech. Of all the linguistic forms originally listed by Lakoff, the tag has come to hold the position of archetypal womens language feature [Coates 1989].the different functions of the tag-question, Holmes [1992] reported the following results:

Figure 1

Function of tagWomenMenExpressing uncertainty35%61%Facilitative59%26%Softening6%13%Confrontational----Total100%100%N5139

As can be seen, men use question tags more often to express uncertainty while women use them largely to facilitate communication. Furthermore, she claims that downtoning a statement shows lack of confidence. Support for this position comes from those situations in which either verification of the statement can be made by mere inspection: John is here, isn't he? or where it reflects the opinion of the speaker: The way prices are rising these days is horrendous, isn't it? Clearly, these sentences need not be questioned and, thus, demonstrate the speaker's insecurity.There are instances as tag questions, two by the woman and one by a man:

Andy: You dont have a phone right now…do you? (falling intonation)

Jody: Mmhm.

Jody: Looks good…huh? (falling intonation)

Andy: Mmm.

Jody: You didnt get scissors, ehh? (rising intonation)

She obviously had this spiel…It is not hard to see about the way men and women use language, provided those generalizations fit with already familiar stereotypes. An anecdote illustrating the point that, say, men are competitive and women cooperative conversationalists will prompt readers to recall the many occasions on which they have observed men competing and women cooperating - while not recalling the occasions, perhaps equally numerous, on which they have observed the opposite. If counter-examples do come to mind ("What about Janet? She's the most competitive person I know"), it is open to readers to apply the classic strategy of putting them in a separate category of exceptions ("of course, she grew up with three brothers / is the only woman in her department / works in a particularly competitive business"). In studies of verbal abilities and behaviour, the differences were slight. This is not a new observation. In 1988 Hyde and her colleague Marcia Linn carried out a meta-analysis of research dealing specifically with gender differences in verbal ability. [Hyde J.,1995]. The conclusion they came to was that the difference between men and women amounted to "about one-tenth of one standard deviation" - statistician-speak for "negligible". Another scholar who has considered this question, the linguist Jack Chambers, suggests that the degree of non-overlap in the abilities of male and female speakers in any given population is "about 0.25%". That's an overlap of 99.75%. It follows that for any array of verbal abilities found in an individual woman, there will almost certainly be a man with exactly the same array. As well as underplaying their similarities, statements of the form "women do this and men do that" disguise the extent of the variation that exists within each gender group. Focusing on the differences between men and women while ignoring the differences within them is extremely misleading but, unfortunately, all too common. If we are going to try to generalise about which sex talks more, a reliable way to do it is to observe both sexes in a single interaction, and measure their respective contributions. This cuts out extraneous variables that are likely to affect the amount of talk, and allows for a comparison of male and female behaviour under the same contextual conditions. Numerous studies have been done using this approach, and while the results have been mixed, the commonest finding is that men talk more than women. One review of 56 research studies categorises their findings as shown here:

Pattern of difference found / Number of studiestalk more than women / 34 (60.8%)talk more than men / 2 (3.6%)and women talk the same amount / 16 (28.6%)clear pattern / 4 (7.0%) [Tannen D. 1989]reviewers are inclined to believe that this is a case of gender and amount of talk being linked indirectly rather than directly: the more direct link is with status, in combination with the formality of the setting (status tends to be more relevant in formal situations). The basic trend, especially in formal and public contexts, is for higher-status speakers to talk more than lower-status ones. The gender pattern is explained by the observation that in most contexts where status is relevant, men are more likely than women to occupy high-status positions; if all other things are equal, gender itself is a hierarchical system in which men are regarded as having higher status. "Regarded" is an important word here, because conversational dominance is not just about the way dominant speakers behave; it is also about the willingness of others to defer to them. Some experimental studies have found that you can reverse the "men talk more" pattern, or at least reduce the gap, by instructing subjects to discuss a topic that both sexes consider a distinctively female area of expertise. Status, then, is not a completely fixed attribute, but can vary relative to the setting, subject and purpose of conversation. That may be why some studies find that women talk more in domestic interactions with partners and family members: in the domestic sphere, women are often seen as being in charge. In other spheres, however, the default assumption is that men outrank women, and men are usually found to talk more. In informal contexts where status is not an issue, the commonest finding is not that women talk more than men, it is that the two sexes contribute about equally. Sometimes, there are very clear differences between the forms of language typically used by women and those typically used by men. It is not an accident that all the traditionally "female" nouns have the polite or honorific prefix /o-/; this is one of many ways in which Japanese female speech has been characterized as being more polite than male speech. These days, many younger Japanese women would no longer choose to use the specific female forms. For instance, here are a few of the many cases where Japanese men and women traditionally use different lexical items to express the same meaning: [Janet Shibamoto, 1998].

Figure 2

Men's formWomen's formGlossharaonakastomachtukemonookookoopicklesmizuohiyawaterbentooobentoobox lunchkaneokanemoneyhasiohasichopsticksumaioisiideliciouskuutaberueatkutabaru/sinunakanarudie

Figure 3

Women's formMen's formEnglish glosslakawlakawshe is lifting itlakawwitaklakawwitakslet me lift itmolmolshe is peeling iti:pi:pshe is eating ittacilwtacilwsyou are singinga few languages show lexical and morphological differences like those exemplified above for Japanese. In some Native American languages, grammatical forms of verbs are inflected differently according to the sex of the speaker. Examples from the Muskogean language Koasati are given below:, explicit and categorical grammatical and or even lexical marking of speaker gender is not the norm. Instead, we usually find differences in the frequency of certain things (words, or pronunciations, or constructions, or intonations, or whatever), especially when the circumstances of utterance are taken into account. This has been explained by Trudgill as follows:

Linguistic gender varieties arise because ... language ... is closely related to social attitudes. Men and women are socially different in that society lays down different social roles for them and expects different behaviour patterns from them. Language simply reflects this social fact.... What is more, it seems that the larger and more inflexible the differences between the social roles of men and women in a particular community, the larger and more rigid the linguistic differences tend to be. ... Our English examples have all consisted of tendencies ... The examples of distinct male and female varieties all come from ... communities where sex roles are much more clearly delineated.has often been observed that (other things equal) female speech tends to be evaluated as more "correct" or more "prestigious", less slangy, etc. Men are more likely than women to use socially-stigmatized forms (like "ain't" or g-dropping in English). On the other hand, women are usually in the lead in changes in pronunciation, typically producing new pronunciations sooner, more often, and in more extreme ways than men. A number of stylistic differences between female and male speech have been observed or claimed. Women's speech has been said to be more polite, more redundant, more formal, more clearly pronounced, and more elaborated or complex, while men's speech is less polite, more elliptical, more informal, less clearly pronounced, and simpler. In terms of conversational patterns, it has been observed or claimed that women use more verbal "support indicators" (like mm-hmm) than men do; that men interrupt women more than than they interrupt other men, and more than women interrupt either men or other women; that women express uncertainty and hesitancy more than men; and that (at least in single-sex interactions) males are more likely to give direct orders than females are. For nearly all of these issues of stylistic and conversational differences, there are some contradictory findings, and it seems that one must look closely at the nature of the circumstances in order to predict how men and women will behave verbally. Nevertheless, it is clear that in many circumstances, women and men tend to use language differently. Within the domain of culture, two broad classes of explanations for such gender effects have been offered: difference theories and dominance theories. According to difference theories (sometimes called two-culture theories), men and women inhabit different cultural (and therefore linguistic) worlds. To quote from the preface to Deborah Tannen's 1990 popularization You just don't understand, "boys and girls grow up in what are essentially different cultures, so talk between women and men is cross-cultural communication." [Tannen D., 1989]

According to dominance theories, men and women inhabit the same cultural and linguistic world, in which power and status are distributed unequally, and are expressed by linguistic as well as other cultural markers. In principle, women and men have access to the same set of linguistic and conversational devices, and use them for the same purposes. Apparent differences in usage reflect differences in status and in goals. The general consensus is that both sorts of explanations are appropriate to some degree, but the discussion is sometimes acrimonious and political. For instance, Tannen has been criticized by some feminist writers as a "deeply reactionary" "apologist for men", who "repeatedly excuses their insensitivities in her examples and justifies their outright rudeness as merely being part of their need for independence." Those who criticize Tannen in this way argue that the behavior of the men in her examples reflects a desire for domination rather rather than a different set of cultural norms. [Tannen D., 1989]

c) Childrens language

To develop ones speech means to acquire essential patterns of speech and grammar patterns in particular. Children must use these items automatically during speech-practice. The automatic use of grammar items in our speech (oral and written) supposes mastering some particular skills - the skills of using grammar items to express ones own thoughts, in other words to make up your sentences.

One point in particular has become clearer: language has all the hallmarks of maturationally controlled behaviour. It used to be thought that animal behaviour could be divided into two types: that which was inborn and natural (for example, dogs naturally bark), and that which was learned and unnatural (dogs may be taught to beg). It turns out, however, that this division is by no means clear-cut and may be misleading. Many types of behaviour develop 'naturally' at a certain age, provided that the surrounding environment is adequate. Such behaviour is maturationally controlled, and sexual activity is a typical example. Arguments as to whether it is inborn or learnt are futile. Both nature and nurture are important. Innate potentialities lay down the framework, and within this framework, there is wide variation depending on the environment. When individuals reach a crucial point in their maturation, they are biologically in a state of readiness for learning the behaviour. They would not learn it at this time without a biological trigger, and conversely, the biological trigger could not be activated if there was nobody around from whom they could learn the behaviour. Human infants pay attention to language from birth. They produce recognizable words at around 12-15 months, and start putting words together at around 18 months. The urge for language to emerge at this time is very strong, and only very extraordinary circumstances will suppress it - as in the case of Genie, a Californian teenager who from the age of twenty months had been confined to one small room, and had been physically punished by her father if she made any sounds. Naturally, she was without speech when she was found. But all normal children, and some abnormal ones, will begin to speak if they hear language going on around them. [Aitchison J.,1992].realization that language is maturationally controlled means that most psycholinguists now agree that human beings are innately programmed to speak. But they cannot agree on exactly what is innate. In particular, they cannot decide to what extent (if any) language ability is separate from other cognitive abilities.researchers agree that there is extraordinary similarity in the speech development of English children. Children who could not possibly be acquainted go through similar stages in their development, and also make similar mistakes. The implications of this coincidence are hotly disputed. On the one hand, there are those who consider that this uniformity of speech development indicates that children innately contain a blueprint for language: this view represents a so-called content approach. Extreme supporters of this view suggest that children may have a universal framework imprinted on their brains.the other hand, there are those who support a process approach, and argue that children could not possibly contain specific language universals. Instead, they are innately geared to processing linguistic data, for which they utilize a puzzle-solving ability which is closely related to other cognitive skills.further group of people point to the social nature of language, and the role of parents. Children, they argue, are social beings who have a great need to interact with those around them. Furthermore, all over the world, child-carers tend to talk about the same sort of things, chatting mainly about food, clothes and other objects in the immediate environment. Motherese or caregiver language has fairly similar characteristics almost everywhere: the caregivers slow down their rate of speech, and speak in slow, well-formed utterances, with quite a lot of repetition. People who stress these social aspects of language claim that there is no need to search for complex innate mechanisms: social interaction with caring caregivers is sufficient to cause language to develop.

This latter view is turning out to be something of an exaggeration. The fact that parents make it easier for children to learn language does not explain why they are so quick to acquire it: intelligent chimps exposed to intensive sign language rarely get beyond 200 words and two-word sequences. Furthermore, language seems to be due to something more than a desire to communicate. There is at least one strange child on record who acquired fluent language, but did not use it to communicate. He spoke only monologues to himself, and refused to interact with others.

The whole controversy is far from being solved, though psycholinguists hope that the increasing amount of work being done on the acquisition of languages other than English may shed more light on the topic. It seems likely that children use an inbuilt linguistic ability to solve general intelligence problems, and also their natural puzzle-solving abilities to solve linguistic problems. With this kind of intertwining, the various strands may be inextricably interwoven.

In spite of the numerous controversies surrounding child language, psycholinguists are at least in agreement on one major point. Children are not simply imitating what they hear going on around them as if they were parrots. The learning processes involved are far more complex. From the moment they begin to talk, children seem to be aware that language is rule-governed, and they are engaged in an active search for the rules which underlie the language to which they are exposed. Child language is never at any time a haphazard conglomeration of random words, or a sub-standard version of adult speech. Instead, every child at every stage possesses a grammar with rules of its own even though the system will be simpler than that of an adult. For example, when children first use negatives, they normally use a simple rule: 'Put no or not in front of the sentence.' This results in consistent negative sentences which the child could not possibly have heard from an adult:

No play that.

No Fraser drink all tea.

This rule is generally superseded by another which says: 'Insert the negative after the first NP.' This also produces a consistent set of sentences which the child is unlikely to have heard from an adult:

Doggie no bite. no mummy.

A rather more obvious example of the rule-governed nature of child language are forms such as mans, foots, gooses, which children produce frequently. Such plurals occur even when a child understands and responds correctly to the adult forms men, feet, geese. This is clear proof that children's own rules of grammar are more important to them than mere imitation.do not, however, formulate a new rule overnight, and suddenly replace the old one with this new one. Instead, there is considerable fluctuation between the old and the new. The new construction appears at first in a limited number of places. A child might first use the word what in a phrase with a single verb,

What mummy doing?

What daddy doing?

What Billy doing?only gradually extend it to other verbs, as in

What kitty eating?

What mummy sewing?process is somewhat like the way in which an alteration creeps from word to word in language change. Attention to the ways in which children move from one rule to another has shown that language acquisition is not as uniform as was once thought. Different children use different strategies for acquiring speech. For example, some seem to concentrate on the overall rhythm, and slot in words with the same general sound pattern, whereas others prefer to deal with more abstract slots. Of particular interest is work which looks at how children cope with different languages. This enables researchers to see if children have any universal expectations about how language behaves, or whether they wait and see what their own particular language offers.

Children have to learn not only the syntax and sounds of their language, but also the meaning of words. This turns out to be more complicated than some people suppose. For a start, it probably takes some time for children to discover that words can refer to separate things. At first, they probably think that a word such as milk refers to a whole generalized ritual, something uttered as a mug is placed in front of them. Later they, discover that words have meanings which can be applied to individual objects and actions.

At first, children may be able to use words only in a particular context. One child agreed that snow was white, but refused to accept that a piece of paper was also white. This tendency to undergeneralize usually passes unnoticed. But it is probably commoner than over- generalization, which attracts much more attention.

People often remark on children's over-generalizations. Youngsters may call any type of small thing a crumb: a crumb, a small beetle, or a speck of dirt, or they may apply the word moon to any kind of light. An idea popular in the last century was that children see the world through a mental fog. They are able only to grasp broad outlines, which they then narrow down. But this turns out to be an oversimplification, because children's overgeneralizations are often quite specific, and quite odd. One child referred to a shiny green leaf as a moon! A possible explanation is that she was working from a prototype which was unlike the adult's prototype. This child had apparently taken a picture of a shiny yellow crescent moon as a prototypical moon, and re-applied the word moon to anything which had the approximate shape of the original, as well as one of its other characteristics. The leaf was vaguely crescent shaped, and also shiny. This interesting idea is currently being explored by researchers.

For the first time researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Haifa show both that areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys during language tasks, and that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing these tasks

Our findings - which suggest that language processing is more sensory in boys and more abstract in girls - could have major implications for teaching children and even provide support for advocates of single sex classrooms," said Douglas D. Burman, research associate in Northwestern's Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers measured brain activity in 31 boys and in 31 girls aged 9 to 15 as they performed spelling and writing language tasks.tasks were delivered in two sensory modalities - visual and auditory. When visually presented, the children read certain words without hearing them. Presented in an auditory mode, they heard words aloud but did not see them.

Using a complex statistical model, the researchers accounted for differences associated with age, gender, type of linguistic judgment, performance accuracy and the method - written or spoken - in which words were presented.

The researchers found that girls still showed significantly greater activation in language areas of the brain than boys. The information in the tasks got through to girls' language areas of the brain - areas associated with abstract thinking through language. And their performance accuracy correlated with the degree of activation in some of these language areas.

To their astonishment, however, this was not at all the case for boys. In boys, accurate performance depended - when reading words - on how hard visual areas of the brain worked. In hearing words, boys' performance depended on how hard auditory areas of the brain worked.

If that pattern extends to language processing that occurs in the classroom, it could inform teaching and testing methods.boys' sensory approach, boys might be more effectively evaluated on knowledge gained from lectures via oral tests and on knowledge gained by reading via written tests. For girls, whose language processing appears more abstract in approach, these different testing methods would appear unnecessary.

This could result simply from girls developing faster than boys, in which case the differences between the sexes might disappear by adulthood. Or, an alternative explanation is that boys create visual and auditory associations such that meanings associated with a word are brought to mind simply from seeing or hearing the word.

While the second explanation puts males at a disadvantage in more abstract language function, those kinds of sensory associations may have provided an evolutionary advantage for primitive men whose survival required them to quickly recognize danger-associated sights and sounds.

d) Age-graded language - (old-graded language)

Understanding speech is not the simple matter it appears to be at first sight. Most people assume that comprehension involves being a passive recipient of someone else's message. Hearers, it is often supposed, behave like secretaries taking down a mental dictation. They mentally record the message, then read it back to themselves.

This assumption turns out to be quite wrong. For a start, it is physically impossible to recognize each separate sound, speech is just too fast. Understanding language is an active, not a passive process. Hearers jump to conclusions on the basis of partial information. This has been demonstrated in various experiments. For example, listeners were asked to interpret the following sentences, in which the first sound of the final word was indistinct:the fence and the ?ate.the calendar and the ?ate.'s the fishing gear and the ?ate.subjects claimed to hear gate in the first sentence, date in the second, and bait in the third.

Since recognizing words involves quite a lot of guesswork, how do speakers make the guesses? Suppose someone had heard 'She saw a do -'. Would the hearer check through the possible candidates one after the other, dog, doll, don, dock, and so on (serial processing)? Or would all the possibilities be considered subconsciously at the same time (parallel processing)?

The human mind, it appears, prefers the second method, that of parallel processing, so much so that even unlikely possibilities are probably considered subconsciously. A recent interactive activation theory suggests that the mind is an enormously powerful network in which any word which at all resembles the one heard is automatically activated, and that each of these triggers its own neighbours, so that activation gradually spreads like ripples on a pond. Words that seem particularly appropriate get more and more excited, and those which are irrelevant gradually fade away. We now know quite a lot about word recognition. But it is still unclear how separate words are woven together into the overall pattern. To some extent, the process is similar to word recognition, in that people look for outline clues, and then actively reconstruct the probable message from them. In linguistic terminology, hearers utilize perceptual strategies. They jump to conclusions on the basis of outline clues by imposing what they expect to hear onto the stream of sounds. For example, consider the sentence:boy kicked the ball threw it.people who hear this sentence feel that there is something wrong with it, that there is a word left out somewhere, and that it would preferably be:boy who kicked the ball threw it. The boy kicked the ball, then threw it., they realize that it is in fact perfectly well-formed when shown a similar sentence:boy thrown the ball kicked it. (The boy to whom the ball was thrown kicked it).problem arose because when interpreting sentences, children tend to impose a subject-verb-object sequence on them. It is hard to counteract this tendency, and accounts for a number of garden-path sentences, situations in which hearers are initially led 'up the garden path' in their interpretation, before realizing they have made a mistake, as in:who cooks ducks out of the washing-up.

(Anyone who cooks tries to avoid or ducks out of the washing-up).other cases, however, people's interpretation varies depending on the lexical items. In:girls and boys go to university.usually assume that clever refers both to girls and boys. But in:dogs and cats do not need much exercise.is usually taken to refer to the dogs alone.relationship between lexical items, the syntax, and the overall context therefore is still under discussion. A further problem is that of gaps, situations in which a word has been brought to the front of the sentence, and left a 'gap' after the verb, as in:wombat did Bill put in the cage?hearers mentally store which wombat until they find the place in the sentence which it slots into (in this case, after the verb put)? Or what happens? This matter is still hotly disputed.

Speech production involves at least two types of process. On the one hand, words have to be selected. On the other, they have to be integrated into the syntax.

Slips of the tongue - cases in which the age-graded speaker accidentally says something such as par cark instead of 'car park' - provide useful clues to these processes, and so do pauses: they can tell us where a speaker stops to think - though it is difficult to separate out pauses caused by searching for lexical items, and pauses due to syntactic planning. Slips of the tongue are part of normal speech. Everybody makes them. There are two main kinds of slips: on the one hand, there are selection errors, cases in which a speaker has picked out the wrong item, as in:hand me the tin-opener (nut-crackers). Your seat's in the third component (compartment).On the other hand, there are assemblage errors, cases in which a correct choice has been made, but the utterance has been wrongly assembled:is being served at wine (Wine is being served at dinner).poppy of my caper (A copy of my paper).first sight, such slips may seem haphazard and confused. On closer inspection, they show certain regularities, so much so that some people have talked about tongue slip 'laws' - though this is something of an exaggeration. We are dealing with recurring probabilities, rather than any real kind of 'law'.

Selection errors usually involve lexical items, so they can tell us which words are closely associated in the mind. For example, people tend to say knives for 'forks', oranges for 'lemons', left for 'right', suggesting that words on the same general level of detail are /tightly linked, especially if they are thought of as a pair. Similar sounding words which get confused tend to have similar beginnings and endings, and a similar rhythm, as in antidote for 'anecdote', confusion for 'conclusion'.

These observations were possibly first made by the two Harvard psychologists who devised a now famous 'tip of the tongue' experiment, first carried out over 25 years ago. The experimenters assembled a number of students and age-graded people, and read them out definitions of relatively uncommon words. For example, 'A navigational instrument used in measuring angular distances, especially the altitude of sun, moon and stars at sea'. Some of the students and age-graded people were unable to write down the word sextant immediately. The word was on the tip of their tongue, but they could not quite remember it. Those in a 'tip of the tongue state' were asked to fill in a questionnaire about their mental search. They found that they could provide quite a lot of information about the elusive word. They could often say how many syllables it had, what the first letter was, and sometimes, how it ended. They could think up similar-meaning words such as astrolabe, compass, and also similar-sounding words such as secant, sexton, sextet. This suggests that adults store and select words partly on the basis of rhythm, partly by remembering how they begin and end.

A considerable number of selection errors tend to be similar both in sound and meaning, as in component for 'compartment', geraniums for 'hydrangeas'. This suggests that an interactive activation theory, of the type proposed for speech recognition, may also be relevant in speech production. The mind activates all similar words, and those that have two kinds of similarity, both meaning and sound, get more highly activated than the others, and so are more likely to pop up in error.

Whereas selection errors tell us how individual words are stored and selected, assemblage errors indicate how whole sequences are organized ready for production. For example, mistakes nearly always take place within a single 'tone group' - a short stretch of speech spoken with a single intonation contour. This suggests that the tone group is the unit of planning. And within the tone group, items with similar stress are often transposed, as ingas of tank (a tank of gas)., when sounds are switched, initial sounds change place with other initials, and final with final, and so on, as inofhubbish (heap of rubbish).orgrash (hash or grass).this suggests that speech is organized in accordance with a rhythmic principle - that a tone group is divided into smaller units (usually called feet), which are based (in English) on stress. Feet are divided into syllables, which are in turn possibly controlled by a biological 'beat' which regulates the speed of utterance. The interaction between these rhythmically based tone groups and syntactic constructions is a topic which still needs to be carefully examined.

gender language grammatical verb

Chapter 2. Linguistic peculiarities of translation of gender graded languages

2.1 Difficulties of translation of childrens speech

The nature of translation is characterized by that psychological structure of the action which adopts to the conditions of performing the action owing frequent experience. The action becomes more frequent, correct and accurate and the number of the operations is shortened while forming the skill the character of awareness of the action is changing, i.e. fullness of understanding is paid to the conditions and quality of performing to the control over it and regulation.form some skills is necessary to know that the process of the forming skills has some steps:

-Only some definite elements of the action are automatic.

-The translation occurs under more difficult conditions, when the child cant concentrate his attention on one element of the action.

-The whole structure of the action is improved and the translation of its separate components is completed.

The characteristic feature of the reproductive grammar skills is their flexibility. It doesnt depend on the level of translation, i.e. on perfection of skill here mean the original action: both the structure of sentence, and forms of the words are reproduced by the speaker using different lexical material. If the child reproduces sentences and different words, which have been learnt by him as a ready-made thing he can say that there is no grammar skill. Learning the ready-made forms, word combinations and sentences occurs in the same way as learning lexis.grammar skill is based on the general conclusion. The grammar action can and must occur only in the definite lexical limits, on the definite lexical material. If the pupil can make up his sentence frequently, accurately and correctly from the grammatical point of view, he has got the grammar skill.main difficulty of the reproductive (active) grammar skills is to correspond the purposes of the statement, communicative approach (a question an answer and so on), words, meanings, expressed by the grammatical patterns. In that case we use basic sentences, in order to answer the definite situation. The main factor of the forming of the reproductive grammar skill is that pupils need to learn the lexis of the language. They need to learn the meanings of the words and how they are used. We must be sure that our pupils are aware of the vocabulary they need at their level and they can use the words in order to form their own sentence. Each sentence contains a grammar structure. The mastering the grammar skill lets pupils save time and strength, energy, which can give opportunity to create. Learning a number of sentences containing the same grammatical structure and a lot of words containing the same grammatical form isnt rational. But the generalization of the grammar item can relieve the work of the mental activity and let the teacher speed up the work and the children realize creative activities.automatic perception of the text supposes the reader to identify the grammar form according to the formal features of words, word combinations, sentences which must be combined with the definite meaning. One must learn the rules in order to identify different grammatical forms. Pupils should get to know their features, the ways of expressing them in the language. We teach children to read and aud by means of grammar. It reveals the relation between words in the sentence. Grammar is of great important when one teaches reading and auding.forming of the perceptive grammar and reproductive skills is quite different. The steps of the work is mastering the reproductive skills differ from the steps in mastering the perceptive skills. To master the reproductive grammar skills one should study the basic sentences or models. To master the perceptive grammar skills one should identify and analyze the grammar item. Though training is of great importance to realize the grammar item.

Before speaking about the selection of grammar material it is necessary to consider the concept grammar, i.e., what it meant by grammar.

By grammar one can mean adequate comprehension and correct usage of words in the act of communication, that is, intuitive knowledge of the grammar of the language. It is a set of reflexes enabling a person to communicate with his associates. Such knowledge is acquired by a child in the mother tongue before he goes to schools.grammar functions without the individuals awareness of technical nomenclature; in other words, he has no idea of the system of the language, and to use all the word-endings for singular and plural, for tense, and all the other grammar rules without special grammar lessons only due to the abundance of auding and speaking. His young mind grasps the facts and makes simple grammar rules for arranging the words to express carious thoughts and feelings. This is true because sometimes little children make mistakes by using a common rule for words to which that rule cannot be applied. For example, a little English child might be heard to say Two mans comed instead of Two men come, because the child is using the plural s rule for man to which the rule does not apply, and the past tense ed rule for come which does not obey the ordinary rule for the past tense formation. A little Russian child can say instead of ножей using the case-ending for to which it does not apply. Such mistakes are corrected as the child grows older and learns more of his language.selecting grammar material for reading the principle of polysemia, for instance, is of great importance.should be taught to distinguish such grammar items which serve to express different meanings.example, -s (es)selection of grammar material involves choosing the appropriate kind of linguistic description, i.e., the grammar which constitutes the best base for developing speech habits. Thus the school syllabus reflect a traditional approach to determining grammar material for foreign language teaching, pupils are given sentences patterns or structures, and through these structures they assimilate the English language, acquire grammar mechanisms of speechcontent of grammar teaching is disputable among teachers and methodologists, and there are various approaches to the problem, pupils should, whatever the content of the course, assimilate the ways of fitting words together to form sentences and be able to easily recognize grammar forms and structures while hearing and reading, to reproduce phrases and sentences stored up in their memory and say or write sentences of their own, using grammar items appropriate to the situation.grammatical systems of Russian and English are fundamentally different. English is an analytical language, in which grammatical meaning in largely expressed through the use of additional words and by changes in word order. Russian is a synthetic language, in which the majority of grammatical forms are created through changes in the structure of words, by means of a developed system of prefixes, suffixes and ending. [Brown C. and J., 1983].should know that the method by which children are taught must have some effect on their motivation. If they find it deadly boring they will probably become de-motivated, whereas if they have confidence in the method they will find it motivating. Child learners differ from adult learners in many ways. Children are curious, their attention is of a shorter duration, they are quite differently motivated in, and their interests are less specialized. They need frequent of activity; they need activities which are exciting and stimulating their curiosity; they need to be involved in something active.chief difficulty in learning a new language is that of changing from the grammatical mechanism of the native language to that of the new language. Indeed, every language has its own way of fitting words together to form sentences. In English, word order is more important than in Russian. The word order in Tom gave Helen a rose indicates what was given (a rose), to whom (Helen), and by whom (Tom). If we change the word order and say Helen gave tom a rose, we shall change the meaning of the sentence. In Russian, due to inflexions, which are very important in this language, we can say Том дал Лене розу or Лене дал Том розу without changing the meaning of the sentence, as the inflexion e in the word Лене indicates the object of the action.

The inversion of subject and finite verb in Are you… indicates the question form. In speaking English, Russian pupils often violate the word order which results in bad mistakes in expressing their thoughts.English tense system also presents a lot of trouble to Russian-speaking pupils because of the difference which exists in these languages with regard to time and tense relations. For example, the pupil cannot at first understand why we must say I have seen him today and I saw him yesterday. For him the action is completed in both sentences, and he does not associate it in any way with today or yesterday.sequence of tenses is another difficult point of English grammar for Russian speaking pupils because there is no such phenomenon in their mother tongue. Why should we say She said she was busy when she is busy?use of modal verbs in various types of sentences is very difficult for the learner. For example, he should differentiate the use of can and may while in Russian the verb may covers them both. Then he should remember which verb must be used in answers to the questions with modal verbs. For instance, May I go home? No, you mustnt. May I take your pen? Yes, you may. Must I do it? No, you neednt.most difficult point of English grammar is the article because it is completely strange to Russian-speaking pupils. The use of the articles and other determiners comes first in the list of the most frequent errors. Pupils are careless in the use of these tiny words and consider them unimportant for expressing their thoughts when speaking English.grammar must begin, therefore, with pupils learning the meaning of these structural words, and with practice in their correct use. For example: This is a pen. The pen is red. This is my pen and that is his pen.

Younger age (7-13 year olds) is related to higher English and English-related uses primarily because children in this age range are exposed regularly to great quantities of English in English-dominant schools. They have English-speaking teachers and predominantly English-speaking classmates with whom they interact in English several hours each weekday. English is also the language of greater prestige in the community.

2.2 Linguistic features of womens speech

Some of the earliest work on gender differences suggested that women's speech isn't as effective as men's because women tend to use certain negatively evaluated forms more than men do. The next wave of linguistic research suggested that often linguistic forms that were negatively evaluated when used by women were sometimes positively evaluated when used by men, and that where linguistic forms were consistently negatively evaluated, people of lesser status (whether male or female) used such forms more than people of greater status (male or female).this suggested that it isn't a linguistic form itself which should be considered to have an inherent meaning, but rather the social position of the speaker, and the context in which that speaker is speaking. Recently this has been used as evidence for the necessity of studying the use and interpretation of linguistic forms within the norms of a given community by scholars like Penny Eckert, Marjorie Goodwin and Cindie McLemore. They've suggested that the categories of 'men' and 'women', unless defined within the context of a given community, are too abstract to be useful in understanding why people use a given linguistic form and what it means. Coates surveys studies of a number of linguistic forms (intonation, hedges, tag questions) associated with sex differences in English. [Coates, 1989].

It is quite easy to make the claim that men and women differ in their linguistic behavior. Assumed gender roles are contrastive, with men often thought as dominant speakers, while women are placed in a subordinate role during the conversation process. Important to realize in this issue, however, is the different perspectives the two sexes have in casual speech. If women speak and hear a language of connection and intimacy, a clash of conversation styles can occur, when confronted with a mens language concerned with status and independence. [Tannen D. 1990]. Misinterpretation of the use of linguistic functions, thus, often arises.

Sociological studies have shown that women are more likely to use linguistic forms thought to be better or more correct than those used by men. Trudgill (1983) provides two reasons for this. Firstly, women in our society are generally more status-conscious than men, and therefore more sensitive to linguistic norms- an idea known as hyper-correction. Secondly, working-class speech…has connotations of or associations with masculinity, which may lead men to be more favorably disposed to non-standard linguistic forms than women. [Trudgill, 1983]. This lower-class, non-standard linguistic variety has been defined by sociolinguist W. Labov as covert prestige. Linked to social class, the differences in how men and women gain, or attempt to gain status through opposing speech patterns is noticeable. There are two cases in which the woman has self-corrected herself as a show of sensitivity toward standard speech, while the men show no such effort. According to Montgomery, self-correction can be defined as the various ways utterances are reworked in the process of uttering them.

Jody: Ummm. I have to do gas…uh…call Mira and get them to do thegas…uhh…electricity…water…What else is there? I dont know.

Jody: Telephone. Everything has to be about six. I mean…I get six billsevery month…so I guess all the bills have to be…Studies in hyper-correction and covert prestige are generally concerned with gender in relation to social class. [Trudgill 1972, 1983; Macaulay 1977; Milroy 1980; Nichols 1983].

Two participants are of equal social status, all working at the same university as language teachers. It is difficult, therefore, make the claim that Jodys self-corrections are a reflection of being status-conscious. A more likely explanation is that her standard language use stems from the social role that are expected from men and women, and the behavior patterns that fit those assumptions. As Trudgill states, womens language is not only different, it is better, and is a reflection of the fact that, generally speaking, more correct social behavior is expected of women. (1983).

Early attempts to distinguish speech norms of different communities focused on sociological factors such as economic status, ethnic minorities and age. Through this research, the belief that male and female speakers may somehow differ in their communicative behavior, and thus compose different speech communities, became the focus of researchers in the early 1970s. Although lacking in empirical research, and influenced by bias about gender roles [Coates, 1989], this initial work on womens language, specifically the usage of several linguistic features, proved influential toward becoming an important issue in the study of linguistics.Sociolinguistics provided mechanisms for the scientific investigation of language variation on the basis of both socio-economic and gender factors. With respect to a number of sociolinguistic factors including gender these studies investigated linguistic features such as phonological variability of male and female differences. The goal, on the one hand, was to determine the stratification of these variables and, on the other hand, to find support for a mechanism of synchronic change. The differential use of these variables was interpreted as constituting a gender pattern. Women were found to be closer to a prestige norm (i.e. received pronunciation) than men. In particular, studies by Martin (1954), the Norwich studies by Trudgill (1972, 1978, 1998) and Portz (1982), and Fasold (1990) provided support for this position. As Martin [1954] put it: Women, it seems, are considerably more disposed than men to upgrade themselves into the middle-class and less likely to allocate themselves to the working-class - a finding which confirms the common observation that status consciousness is more pronounced among women. [Martin 1954].[1975] claimed that the differential use of language needed to be explained in large part on the basis of women's subordinate social status and the resulting social insecurity. Lakoff observed that women's use of color terms (mauve, ecru, lavender), of adjectives (divine, adorable), their frequent use of tag-questions (John is here, isn't he?) and weak expletives (Oh fudge I've put the peanut butter in the fridge again!) differed radically from male use. Taking her cue from Bernstein's [1972] theory of language codes she claimed that women's linguistic behavior is deficient when contrasted with male speech behavior. As one explanation for this deficiency she pointed to the differences in the socialization of men and women. At the same time another qualitative approach to male-female speech variation developed [Thorne/Henley 1975, Maltz/Borker 1982]. Cultural rather than factors of socialization were seen as being responsible for speech differentiation. Women and men are seen as constituting subgroups of the speech community. Minimal responses (also known as back-channel speech, positive feedback and assent terms) can be defined as the brief, supportive comments provided by listeners during the conversation interaction. They are a feature of jointly produced text, and show the listeners active participation in the conversation. [Coates 1989]. Common examples include mmm, uh huh, yes, yea and right.examples:

Ian: Its laying on my mind

Jody: Mmm.

Jody: Yea…I have to.

Ian: Pay ever after the phone.

Jody: Mmm.

Andy: High energy…You probably know him…Australian.

Ian: Mmm.

Andy: Is he a national hero or…does anyone really care?

Ian: Uhmm…He was for a while but…I dunno. I think hes more popular outside Australia now

Andy: Mmm…an export.

Ian: Yea.

Jody: How do you think about this now? Do you think its ready?

Ian: It probably is ready and its beef so…

Jody: Yea.researchers have found that, in casual conversation, it is women who take on the role as facilitator. [Zimmerman and West 1975; Fishman 1980; Holmes 2001; Tannen 1990].

Men, it has been demonstrated, are less sensitive to the interactional process. One study which Holmes recounts found that women gave over four times as much of this kind of positive feedback as men [Holmes 2001]. For women, then, talk is for interaction. [Tannen 1990].

A deeper analysis of this view, however, should consider the influence of context. Being a small group conversation in a casual context, the goals of this conversation sample are most likely focused on group solidarity (rather than control), which follows womens strategy of being cooperative conversationalists. According to Holmes, the norms for womens talk may be the norms for small group interaction in private contexts, where the goals of the interaction are solidarity stressing maintaining good social relations. Agreement is sought and disagreement avoided. [2001].

It is now understood that men and women differ in terms of their communicative behavior [Coates, 1989]. In explaining these differences, however, Montgomery [1995] warns that there is a sense of variation in speech differences between men and women. One sociological point to be remembered, he states, is that speech differences are not clear-cut and a set of universal differences does not exist. [Montgomery, 1995]. Gender, as a dimension of difference between people should always be thought of in relation to other dimensions of difference, such as those of age, class, and ethnic group. A second point hestresses is that linguistically one must be clear as to what is being identified as adifference between the sexes. Unless examining identifiable linguistic behavior, such as interruptions or tag questions, it is difficult to validate generalized claims of dominance, politeness or subordinance. Even then, the formal construction of utterances is no consistent guide to what function they might be performing in a specific context. [Montgomery, 1995]. Reinterpretations of gender-differentiated language fall into one of two approaches, which reflect contrasting views of women in society. The dominance approach considers language differences to be a reflection of traditional social roles, that of mens dominance and womens subordination. The difference approach, in contrast, focuses on sex speech differences as outcomes of two different subcultures. Women, it is claimed, come from a social world in terms of solidarity and intimacy, while men are more hierarchal and independent minded. Contrasting communicative styles are born out of these two subcultures.

The dominance approach to sex differences in speech is concerned with the imbalance of power between the sexes. Powerless speech features used by women help contribute to maintaining a subordinate position in society; while conversely, mens dominance is preserved through their linguistic behavior.

Early research that regards imbalance of power as a main factor toward gender speech differences can be attributed to Robin Lakoff, and her influential work Language and Womans Place [1975]. Although relying heavily on personal observation, and later criticized for its feminist bias and lack of empirical research, Lakoffs definition of womans language-both language used to describe women and language typically used by woman [cited in Fasold 1990], created an initial theoretical framework which would be critiqued and expanded by future researchers. Lakoff provides a list of ten linguistic features which characterize womens speech, as follows:

. Lexical hedges or fillers, e.g. you know, sort of, well, you see.

2. Tag questions, e.g. shes very nice, isnt she?

3. Rising intonation on declaratives, e.g. its really good?

4. Empty adjectives, e.g. divine, charming, cute.

5. Precise color terms, e.g. magenta, aquamarine.

6. Intensifiers such as just and so, e.g. I like him so much.

7. Hypercorrect grammar, e.g. consistent use of standard verb forms.

8. Superpolite forms, e.g. indirect requests, euphemisms.

9. Avoidance of strong swear words, e.g. fudge, my goodness.

10. Emphatic stress, e.g. it was a BRILLIANT performance. [cited in Holmes 2001].

As in English, the Kyrgyz employ many wordless sounds to express meanings :… as they listen to somebody else they make sounds like un hun, aah or mmm. … to indicate No, they may utter uh uh and shake their heads … oy is used like oops in English to indicate a mistake … ahyee or oy voy yuy is used to express surprise or amazement - equivalent to really or wow in English … erah is used to show disappointment, … hunh indicates pain, … oof suggests that they are tired, and … erf that something is terrible or disgusting.

Consistent in Lakoffs list of linguistic features is their function in expressing lack of confidence. Holmes [2001] divides this list into two groups. Firstly, those linguistic devices which may be used for hedging or reducing the force of an utterance, such as fillers, tag questions, and rising intonation on declaratives, and secondly, features which may boost or intensify a propositions force [Holmes, J., 2001], such as emphatic stress and intensifiers. According to Lakoff, both hedging and boosting modifiers show a womens lack of power in a mixed-sex interaction. While the hedges lack of assertiveness is apparent, boosters, she claims, intensify the force of a statement with the assumption that a women would not be taken seriously otherwise.The use of compliments and apologies by women showed that women are more personal-oriented and show greater concern for the other, while men are more task oriented and assert more power than the other. Many researchers also agree that polite and collaborative styles of communication are powerless when they are not reciprocated such as how women could not easily compliment men as men could do to them. Women also use apologies more than men, showing their intention to restore the balance between speaker and hearer, whereas men prefer formal strategy or some ambiguous explanation type of apology to maintain their one-up position.

Herbert [1992] found that womens compliments were more personal in focus, whereas mens compliments were more impersonal, especially when speaking to men. He also suggested that subjective compliments such as I really like your shirt, have less force than the objective form such as Thats a nice shirt.When seen from the syntactic structure both men and women were generally consistent with the patterns:

1. NP is/looks (really) ADJ (e.g., That shirt is so nice)
2. I (really) like/love NP (e.g., I love your hair)
3. PRO is (really) (a) ADJ NP (e.g., This was really a great meal)

The adjectives nice, good, pretty, beautiful, and great are more often used. Verbs such as like and love are also more prominent. However, women rely more heavily than men on the I like NP pattern which indicates a personal focus, while men use ADJ NP pattern more often. Herbert mentioned that there is a general belief that women prefer personalized to impersonalized forms, parallel with the characterization of womens style as social, affiliative, other-oriented, socioemotional, and supportive. He also states that compliments from females are longer than compliments from males.What is more interesting in the study of compliments is to see how compliments are responded by the addressees. Herbert [1990], based on his study done in 1986 and 1989 distinguished 12 types of compliment responses:

1. Appreciation token. A verbal or non verbal acceptance of the compliment. (e.g. Thanks, Thank you, [nod])
2. Comment acceptance. Addressee accepts the complimentary force and offers a relevant comment on the appreciated topic (e.g., Yeah, its my favorite too).
3. Praise Upgrade. Addressee accepts the compliment and asserts that the compliment force is insufficient (e.g., Really brings out the blue in my eyes, doesnt it?).
4. Comment history. Addressee offers a comment(s) on the object complimented. (e.g., I bought it for the trip to Arizona).
5. Reassignment. Addressee agrees with the compliment assertion, but the complimentary force is transferred to a third person (e.g., My brother gave it to me) or to the object itself (e.g., It really knitted itself).
6. Return. As with number 5 except that the praise is shifted (or returned) to the first speaker (e.g., Sos yours).
7. Scale down. Addressee disagrees with the complimentary force, pointing to some flaw in the object or claiming that the praise is overstated (e.g., Its really quite old).
8. Question. Addressee questions the sincerity or the appropriateness of the compliment (e.g., Do you really think so?).
9. Disagreement. Addressee asserts that the object complimented is not worthy of praise (e.g., I hate it).
10. Qualification. Weaker than number 9: addressee merely qualifies the original assertion, usually with though, but, well, etc. (e.g., Its alright, but Lens is nicer).
11. No acknowledgment. Addressee gives no indication of having heard the compliment: The addressee wither (a) responds with an irrelevant comment (i.e. topic shift) or (b) gives no response.
12. Request interpretation. Addressee, consciously or not, interpretes the compliments as a request rather than a simple compliment. Such responses are not compliment responses per se as the addressee does not perceive the previous speech act as a compliment (e.g., You wanna borrow this one too?)

For women, she argued, compliments are positively affective speech acts, serving to increase or consolidate the solidarity between speaker and addressee. Across cultures, ones perception on compliments also varies. In Indonesia, for instance, a compliment on someones possession may indicate the complimenters envy to what the addressee has. The recipient of the compliment may also feel obliged to offer the complimented object to the complimenter. As to how the perception differs between mens and womens in Indonesian, there has not been any published research found so far. [Johnson, D.M. & Roen, D.H., 1992].According to Maltz and Borker [1982], who introduced this view which values womens interactional styles as different, yet equal to mens, American men and women come from different sociolinguistic subcultures, having learned to do different things with words in a conversation [cited in Freeman and McElhinny1996]. They cite as an example the different interpretations of minimal responses, such as nods and short comments like umhm and yes. For men, these comments mean I agree with you, while for women they mean Im listening to you - please continue Rather than a womens style being deficient, as Lakoffwould believe, it is simply different. Inherent in this position is that cross-culturalmisunderstanding often occurs in mixed-sex conversation, as individuals wrongly interpret cues according to their own rules. [Lakoff, 1975]. Like compliments, apology is also another form of politeness strategy. Holmes [1990] differentiates compliments and apologies as: Compliments focus on the addressees positive face wants, whereas apologies are generally aimed at face redress associated with face threatening acts (FTA) or offences which have damaged the addressees face in some respect and can therefore be regarded as what Brown and Levinson called as negative politeness strategies. There have been a number of classification systems of apology devised by many researchers. Holmes [1990] formulated them based on her naturally occurring data in her New Zealand corpus as follows:

1. An explicit expression of apology
2. Offer apology, e.g., I apologize
3. Express regret, e.g., Im sorry
4. Request forgiveness, e.g., excuse me; forgive me
5. An explanation or account, an excuse or justification
6. e.g., I wasnt expecting it to be you; were both new to this
7. An acknowledgment of responsibility
8. Accept blame, e.g., it was my fault
9. Express self-deficiency, e.g., I was confused; I didnt see you
10. Recognize H as entitles to an apology, e.g., youre right; you deserve an apology
11. Express lack of intent, e.g., I didnt mean to
12. Offer repair/redress, e.g., well replace it for you; Ill bring you another
13. A promise of forebearance
14. e.g., I promise it wont happen again

Holmes found that apologies used more frequently by women in speech to other women, and least frequently in the speech of men to other men. Women apologize more to other women is a mark of positive politeness but it is realized through negative politeness strategy. In unequal and distant relations, mens apologies are to assert the position of social authority, hierarchy and control. Women therefore use more strategies which focus on a harmonious relationship with the other person by expressing lack of negative intent and recognizing the other persons right to an apology.

Tannen [1990] provides much research on the concept of misunderstanding in the dual-culture approach. According to her, the language of women is primarily rapport-talk, where establishing connections and promoting sameness is emphasized. Men, on the other hand, use language described as report-talk, as a way of preserving independence while exhibiting knowledge and skill. [Tannen D.1990]. The contrasting views of relationships are apparent: negotiating with a desire for solidarity in women, maintaining status and hierarchical order in men.The function of a command can be described as an utterance designed to get someone else to do something [Montgomery, 1995]. Several studies [Goodwin 1980; Cameron, McAlinden and OLeary 1989; Tannen 1990, 1994; Holmes 2001] have commented on the different ways men and women phrase commands. Men tend to use simple, direct statements, whereas women rely on couching their commands as inclusive suggestions for action. [Montgomery 1995]. Consider the following examples:

Jody: Mmm…home phone.Andy: What home?Jody: My home. Whats my phone number? Are you gonna plug it in?Jody: Mmm…How many? Do you want it small?Andy: Smallish.Ian: I like this stuff.Jody: Like that?Andy: Mmm…even smaller.Jody: Smaller? Do you want to put it here? Why dont you just bite it?has chosen to couch her commands in the form of questions. Rather then stating the bald commands, Heres my phone number. Plug it in, and Put ithere. Bite it, she opted for a more indirect approach. Lakoff [cited in Tannen 1994] describes two benefits of indirectness: defensiveness and rapport. Defensiveness refers to the speakers preference not to go on record with an idea in order to be able to disclaim, rescind, or modify it if it does not meet with a positive response Rapport refers to getting ones way not by demanding it, but because the listener is working toward the same end, indirectly encouraging the common goal.

Sociological studies have shown that women are more likely to use linguistic forms thought to be better or more correct than those used by men. Trudgill [1983] provides two reasons for this. Firstly, women in our society are generally more status-conscious than men, and therefore more sensitive to linguistic norms- an idea known as hyper-correction. Secondly, working-class speech…has connotations of or associations with masculinity, which may lead men to be more favorably disposed to non-standard linguistic forms than women. [Trudgill, 1983]. This lower-class, non-standard linguistic variety has been defined bysociolinguist W. Labov as covert prestige. Linked to social class, the differences in how men and women gain, or attempt to gain status through opposing speech patterns is noticeable. [Labov W., 1972].

2.3 Age-graded language and the way of improving it

It is well known that human culture, social behavior and thinking cannot exist without language. Being a social and national identity, and a means of human communication, language cannot help bearing imprints of ethnic and cultural values as well as the norms of behavior of a given language community. All is reflected in the vocabulary of a language. But it should be noted that the grammatical structure of a language more exactly reflects the mentality of a nation as it is closer to thinking. "While the number of words in a language represents the volume of its world, the grammatical structure of a language gives an idea of the inner organization of thinking". [Gumboldt V. 1984]. Language and man are inseparable. Language does not exist outside man and man as Homo sapiens does not exist outside language. So, man cannot be studied outside language and vice versa. Language reflects the world around us - through man and for man, language likewise reflects the culture created by man, preserves it for posterity and hands it down from generation to generation, from father to son. Language is a cognitive tool through which man perceives the universe and culture. And, finally, language is a cultural tool: it forms man, determines his behaviour, way of life, outlook, mentality, national character and ideology. Language is a strict and incorruptible teacher; it imposes upon man the ideas, concepts, models of cultural perception and behaviour that are inherent in it. In a sense, man is slave to his language: from the cradle, he is subjected to the influence and power of the language spoken by his parents and together with this language he assimilates the culture of the speech community to which he belongs through no choice of his own. A lot has been written by psychologists, culturologists and sociologists on the correlation between national culture and personality. In their book, "Language and Culture", E.M. Vereshchagin and V.G. Kostomarov, comment as follows in this connection: "A man is not born a Russian, German or Japanese etc., but becomes one as a result of living in the relevant national community of people. In its upbringing, a child is exposed to the impact of the national culture to which, the people surrounding it, belong". However, one should not forget the huge role played by language, in direct association with culture, in upbringing and personality formation. The well-known aphorism by the Soviet psychologist, B.G. Ananev, quoted by Vereshchagin and Kostomarov, "personality is a product of culture", should be altered to read: personality is a product of language and culture. As soon as man is born, he hears the sounds of his future mother tongue; language introduces him to the surrounding world and forces upon him that perception, that picture (model) "painted" before he was born and without him. At the same time, language forms a man's idea of the world and community to which he belongs, of its culture, i.e. of the rules of co-existence within this community, system of values, moral standards, conduct, etc.More than 6% of all adults in the United States have speech difficulties that involve articulation, language, voice, fluency, hearing, or swallowing. In addition, 5% of all children exhibit impaired speech, language, or hearing. Many of these individuals can be helped by speech therapy. Speech and language disorders affect the way people speak to and understand each other. These disorders may range from problems with simple sounds to not being able to speak or use language at all. Speech and language disorders include stuttering, characterized by interruptions in the regular flow or rhythm of speech; articulation disorders, involving difficulties in forming or stringing sounds together; voice disorders, characterized by inappropriate voice pitch, loudness, or quality; aphasia, or the loss of speech and language abilities resulting from stroke or head injury; and delayed language disorder, characterized by slow development of the vocabulary and grammar required to express and understand thoughts and ideas.

Older and younger adults can guess fairly accurately the chronological age of elderly individuals by listening to them speak [Caruso, Mueller, and Xue, 1994]. However, physiological age rather than chronological age may be a better predictor of who is perceived as having an aging voice [Ramig and Ringel, 1983]. Respiration and phonation are most affected by the aging process. Older people may have a restricted loudness range due to reduced vital capacity.

Similarly, consider the words: burglar, loudly, sneezed, the. Here, only three combinations are possible: The burglar sneezed loudly, Loudly sneezed the burglar and (perhaps) The burglar loudly sneezed. All others are impossible, such as *The loudly burglar sneezed, or *Sneezed burglar loudly the. Note also that had the four words been burglars, a, sneezes, loudly, there is no way in which these could be combined to make a well-formed sentence. *A burglars is an impossible combination, and so is * burglars sneezes. In brief, English places firm restrictions on which items can occur together, and the order in which they come. From this, it follows that there is also a fixed set of possibilities for the substitution of items. In the word bats, for example, a could be replaced by e or i, but not by h or z, which would give *bhts or *bzts. In the sentence The burglar sneezed loudly, the word burglar could be replaced by cat, butcher, robber, or even (in a children's story) by engine or shoe - but it could not be replaced by into, or amazingly, or they, which would give ill-formed sequences such as *The into sneezed loudly or *The amazingly sneezed loudly. Every item in language, then, has its own characteristic place in the total pattern. It can combine with certain specified items, and be replaced by others (Figure 4).

The - burglar - sneezed - loudly- robber - coughed - softly- cat - hissed - noisily

Figure 4

Language can therefore be regarded as an intricate network of interlinked elements in which every item is held in its place and given its identity by all the other items. No item (apart from the names of some objects) has an independent validity or existence outside that pattern. The elements of language can be likened to the players in a game of soccer. A striker, or a goal-keeper, has no use or value outside the game. But placed among the other players, a striker acquires an identity and value. In the same way, linguistic items such as the, been, very, only acquire significance as part of a total language network.Let us now look again at the network of interlocking items which constitutes language. A closer inspection reveals another, more basic way in which language differs among the speakers.Look at the sentences: The penguin squawked, It squawked, The penguin which slipped on the ice squawked. Each of these sentences has a similar basic structure consisting of a subject and a verb (Figure 5).

Figure 5

The penguin It The penguin which slipped on the icesquawked

The number of words in each sentence is no guide whatsoever to its basic structure. Simple counting operations are quite irrelevant to language. For example, suppose someone was trying to work out how to express the past in English. They would have no success at all if they tried out a strategy such as 'Add -ed to the end of the third word'. They might, accidentally, produce a few good sentences such as:Herbert toasted seventeen crumpets. But more often, the results would be quite absurd:

*Clarissa hatefrogs-ed.

*The girl who-ed hate frogs scream.fact, it is quite impossible for anybody to form sentences and understand them unless they realize that each one has an inaudible, invisible structure, which cannot be discovered by mechanical means such as counting. Once a person has realized this, they can locate the component to which the past tense -ed must be added even if they have never heard or said the sentence before, and even if it contains a totally new verb, as in:penguin shramped the albatross.other words, language operations are structure dependent - they depend on an understanding of the internal structure of a sentence, rather than on the number of elements involved. This may seem obvious to speakers of English. But the rarity, or perhaps absence, of this property in animal communication indicates its crucial importance. Its presence has not been proved in any animal system (though birdsong may turn out to be structure dependent, according to some researchers). Moreover, the types of structure dependent operations found in language are often quite complicated, and involve considerably more than the mere addition of items (as in the case of the past tense). Elements of structure can change places, or even be omitted. For example, in one type of question, the first verbal element changes places with the subject:

12

[That dirty child] [must] wash,the related question

21

[Must] [that dirty child] wash?in the sentence, Billy swims faster than Henrietta.is generally agreed that the sentence means 'Billy swims faster than Henrietta swims', and that the second occurrence of swims is 'understood'.

In human language, the symbols are mostly arbitrary, and the system has to be painstakingly transmitted from one generation to another. Duality and displacement - the organization of language into two layers, and the ability to talk about absent objects and events - are usual in the human society. Language is a patterned system of arbitrary sound signals, characterized by structure dependence, creativity, displacement, duality, and cultural transmission.

This is true of all languages in the world, which are remarkably similar in their main design features. There is no evidence that any language is more 'primitive' than any other. There are certainly primitive cultures. A primitive culture is reflected in the vocabulary of a language, which might lack words common in advanced societies. But even the most primitive tribes have languages whose underlying structure is every bit as complex as English or Russian or Chinese.

Conclusion

As conclusion the linguistic features in a casual conversation context has been a conscious choice, supporting the difference approach in sex speech styles. Rather than acknowledging an imbalance of power between the sexes, we have supported the claim that speech styles are different due to contrasting interaction purposes. For women this includes the payoff of connection and solidarity. Often evaluated with mens language as the norm, misunderstanding of womens speech intentions is common. There are problems, however, with any research that attempts to define characteristics of mens or womens speech. First is the interpretation of differences. Associations that are found between specific feature use and womens language should not be assumed to take place in all situations or contexts. Gender differences are not absolute. Secondly, many conversational features, such as tag questions and interruptions, do not have set functions (not to mention researchers varied definitions). An interpretation of a particular feature, in addition to a speakers intention, can only be done within the setting of the interaction.There was an interesting finding on interaction of status and gender based on non-verbal communication. Nancy Hoar [1992] pointed out that womens high pitch voices connote childhood rather than adulthood. And this connotation suggests the lower status and power, for children are typically concerned with trivial matters, whereas adults are concerned with more serious matters. Also, children are expected to defer to adults. She convinced this finding with the fact that women who aspire to influential positions are often adviced to cultivate lower pitched voices, ones that communicate authority. Other non-verbal aspects such as how often women smile, how much they listen and give more eye contact, are among other non-verbal aspects that may contribute to the studies of gender.

The most consistent difference found between men and women is a tendency for women to speak in a way that is closer to the prestige standard. In colloquial terms, they speak 'better' than men. No one is quite sure why this is so, and several explanations have been proposed, which may all be partially right. [Aitchison J., 1992]. For example, women may be pressurized by society to behave in a 'ladylike' manner, and 'speaking nicely' may be part of this. Or because they are the main child-rearers, they may subconsciously speak in a way which will enable their children to progress socially. Or they may tend to have jobs which rely on communication, rather than on strength. Women's speech has been said to be more polite, more redundant, more formal, more clearly pronounced, and more elaborated or complex, while men's speech is less polite, more elliptical, more informal, less clearly pronounced, and simpler. All these factors, and others, appear to be relevant. Of the social causes of gender differentiation in speech style, one of the most critical appears to be level of education. In all studies, it has been shown that the greater the disparities between educational opportunities for boys and girls, the greater the differences between male and female speech. Children soon pick up the social stereotypes that underlie this discrimination. They learn that women's talk is associated with the home and domestic activities, while men's is associated with the outside world and economic activities.for the childrens speech we can conclude, that different children use different strategies for acquiring speech. For example, some seem to concentrate on the overall rhythm, and slot in words with the same general sound pattern, whereas others prefer to deal with more abstract slots. Children have to learn not only the syntax and sounds of their language, but also the meaning of words. This turns out to be more complicated than some people suppose. For a start, it probably takes some time for children to discover that words can refer to separate things. At first, they probably think that a word such as milk refers to a whole generalized ritual, something uttered as a mug is placed in front of them. Later they, discover that words have meanings which can be applied to individual objects and actions.

Children may be able to use words only in a particular context. One child agreed that snow was white, but refused to accept that a piece of paper was also white. This tendency to under generalize usually passes unnoticed. But it is probably commoner than over- generalization, which attracts much more attention. Language processing is more sensory in boys and more abstract in girls.

Girls showed significantly greater activation in language areas of the brain than boys. The information in the tasks got through to girls' language areas of the brain - areas associated with abstract thinking through language.

The study of gender, however, should not suggest that women need to adopt a masculine style of communication, for one need not avoid being inferior in order to become superior, and need not be impolite in order to avoid being powerless. Gender differences in communication should be considered as alternatives rather than a powerless or ineffective style versus authoritative, assertive style. Perhaps a change in social attitude would be much more beneficial for a boy thrown the more equal approach of women and men.

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