Language and Gender

Language and Gender
Critique of Pilkington*’*s Study
*‘“Don*’*t try and make out that I*’*m nice!*”* The different strategies women and men use when gossiping*’
Sun Kyung Lee
K0737800
* Aim…………………………………………………………*.1
* Results …………………………………………………*..2
* Pilkington’*s and other studies*…………………………*..5
3.conclusion…………………*..*…………………*……………………………*6
4. Reference *………………………………………………………………*... 8
Critique of Pilkington*’*s Study
1. Summary  
Aim
Pilkington’s study aimed at defining and describing the features of gossip. Furthermore she attempted to identify the differences in the gossip of the women’s and men’s single-sex groups. Additionally she tried to find the different aims of the gossip of each groups.
Thus she studied a number of previous studies about gossip and suggested the functions of it. For example the gossip is a kind of entertaining among the members of group and enjoyed by close social relationships with one another (Gluckman 1963: p311 as cited by Pilkington 1992) However she said such gossip is widely regarded as trivial and meaningless because it is focused on the personal rather than global, private rather than public
Methodology
Eventually, she obtained about 250 minutes of data from the group of women and 210 minutes of usable data from the group of men and found interesting results of each groups.
Results
By contrary, for the male talk the most noticeable feature were the long silences and much longer pauses between turns, and sometime the pauses occurred even when the speaker invited a response by using questioning intonation. Furthermore there were the lack of response among the speakers and long monologues were often appeared with very long pauses between utterances. Additionally Pilkington noted how direct and specific the male criticism and abuse were, furthermore males appeared to switch topic without regard for the previous speaker’s topic.
Through these results she concluded that the women...