Women, Men and Politeness

by Janet Holmes

Women, Men and Politeness focuses on the specific issue of the ways in which women and men express politeness verbally.

Using a range of evidence and a corpus of data collected largely from New Zealand, Janet Holmes examines the distribution and functions of a range of specific verbal politeness strategies in women's and men's speech and discusses the possible reasons for gender differences in this area. Data provided on interactional strategies, 'hedges and boosters', compliments and apologies, demonstrates ways in which women's politeness patterns differ from men's, with the implications of these different patterns explored, for women in particular, in the areas of education and professional careers.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction, Gender

264 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1995

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Janet Holmes (b. 1947) is a professor of linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). She specializes in sociolinguistics, language and gender issues, workplace communication, and in New Zealand English.

Reviews

[Anastasia Tuple]

'Power in society and language' (the book's title is self-explanatory). Interesting read with good and sound examples and a balanced analysis.

[Rajpreet]

Book covers wide literature and basics of many areas of politeness theory but is riddled with basic typos which is a little annoying.