Instrumentality Conversational Dominance REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
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lower pitch, use swears and taboo language, adopt a more assertive style in group interaction, adopt prosodic features more typical of men e.g. Falls rather
than rising intonation, and address themselves in public to the traditional male topic, such as business, politics, and economics.
Although, this is a good strategy for women, Coates 1997b finds out a problem in this strategy. The problem is women redefine themselves in terms of
men ‟s value. This is a flawed strategy because women are going for searching
their own satisfactory identity. Besides this theory, some researchers agree that there are two main
theories of gender differences in language. Both of the theories reflect the two views of women‟s status as a group. The first theory is the dominance theory. This
theory claims that the difference in language between men and women is a consequence of male dominance and female subordination Lakoff, 1975;
Fishman, 1983. Based on this theory, women are a suppressed minority group in society which is shown by the way they use language. On the other hand, men are
the superior group and the way they use language shows their power in society. The second theory is the difference theory Coates, 1986; Tannen, 1990. This
theory believes that men and women belong to different subcultures and that any linguistic differences can be attributed to cultural differences.