cool sweet
neat lovely
divine Example:
a: What a sweet and charming young men you are.
2.3.1.2 Syntactical Features
Lakoff categorized tag-questions, rising intonation on declaratives and politeness in requests and orders as part of syntactical features. These features are
different from lexical features in which lexical features focuses on lexical item of an utterance. If the lexical features tend to focus on the form, the syntactical
features focus on the meaning of the utterance. 4.
Tag-questions Lakoff stated that one makes statement when one has confidence in his
knowledge and pretty certain that her or his statement will be accepted by the addressee while one asks question when one lacks knowledge on same point. A
tag question according to her is used in between these. She explained that a tag is midway between an outright statement and a yes-no question: it is less assertive
than the former, but more confident than the latter 1973:54 Example:
a John is here, isnt he?
5. Rising intonation on declaratives
Lakoff mentioned in her essay, there is a peculiar sentence intonation pattern found in English as far as she knows only among women. This sentence
has the form of a declarative answer to a question but has the rising inflection typical of a yes-no question 1973:56
Example: A:
When will dinner be ready? B:
Oh… around six o’clock?
6. Politeness in requests and orders
Lakoff claimed that the more one compounds a request, the more characteristic it is of women’s speech, the less of men’s. She explained the
concept by giving some sentences as follows: a. Close the door
b. Please close the door c. Will you close the door?
d. Will you please close the door? e
Won’t you close the door? According to her, e has been classified as a compound request. Sentence
c is closer to “are you willing to close the door?” and according to normal rules of polite conversation; to agree that you are willing is to agree to do the thing
asked of you. Lakoff also mentioned that phrasing it as a positive question makes the implicit assumption that a yes answer will be forthcoming. Sentence e acts
as a more polite request than c or d because sentence C and d put the burden of refusal on the addressee. In the sentence e the addressee is much freer
to refuse. The more one compounds a request, the more characteristic it is of women’s speech, the less of men’s. A sentence that begins with “Won’t you”
seems to have a distinctly unmasculine sound. Little girls are indeed taught to talk like little ladies, in that their speech is in many ways more polite than that of boys
or men, and the reason for this is that politeness involves an absence of a strong statement, and women’s speech is devised to prevent the expression of strong
statements 1973:57-58.
2.3.2 Functions of Women’s Linguistic Features
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