Women Talk: Conversation Between Women Friends - Hardcover

Coates, Jennifer

4.08

13 ratings by Goodreads

9780631182528: Women Talk: Conversation Between Women Friends

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0631182527 ISBN 13: 9780631182528

Publisher: Blackwell Pub, 1996

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

This work challenges the age-old myth that women's talk is trivial and unimportant. Drawing on a corpus of spontaneous conversation between friends, Jennifer Coates demonstrates the richness and complexity of the language used in such talk, focusing on women's use of hedges, questions and repetition. She shows how women use story-telling as a focus for discussing and re-evaluating social norms, and for the construction and maintenance of personal identity. At the level of conversational organization, Coates makes the claim that women friends draw on a collaborative model which enables them to construct talk jointly. She draws on post-structuralist theory to show the ways in which women's talk constructs and maintains gender, and constructs and maintains friendship. Overall, the book builds up a picture of women's friendship in the late-20th century, and of the vital role played by language in these friendships.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Jennifer Coates isis Professor of English Language and Linguistics at University of Surrey, Roehampton.

Review:

"Coates's book is an extraordinary study of the discourse of female friendships, based on recordings of a large number of naturally-occurring same-sex conversations among female and (for comparison) male friends, supplemented by ethnographic interviews with the same and other women, and analyzed by means of discourse analysis ... In empirical terms, Coates has provided a detailed analysis of the linguistic strategies making up this discourse of solidarity, the collaborative floor." Bent Preisler, University of Roskilde

"While this text is important reading for specialists in discourse, it is accessible to lay readers as well, so it is both an important research text as well as a good tool to use in introducing students to discourse analysis" Timothy Frazer, Western Illinois University

"Jennifer Coates celebrates and describes friendships and talk among women; at the same time, she provides an argument for feminist ethnographic research methods. She writes a clear, detailed and rich study based on the transcripts of 20 conversations among women, and on the transcripts of interviews with 15 women .... Women Talk is likely to become a pivotal publication.....This book offers a very useful conversation about women friends' talk." Cheris Kramarae, University of Illinois

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.