Pamela Fisherman (1983) and the dominance model

Exert from text book

In the year following Cheshires study, Fisherman, in her paper Interaction:The work women do Looked specifically at aspects of language that can be linked to Lackoff's research, but came to very different conclusions. She focused, for example, on tag questions , listening to 52 hours of pre recorded conversations between young american couples. She agreed with Lakoff's findings that tag questions were more commonly used by women (4x more than men) however the conclusion she drew was very different. While Lakoff claimed that tag questions represented uncertainty, Fisherman argued that, for females. questions are actually used to start conversations with males and to subsequently continue and sustain dialogue.  She claims that men often do not always respond to declarative statements or will only respond minimally, whilst females use tag questions to gain conversational power, rather than show signs of tentativeness. Women are the ones who are trying to initiate the conversation and keep it going, an action she deems 'conversational shitwork' because of what they perceive to be their dominant role.

This links to another gender theory: The dominance model. The majority of research which supports this model was carried out in the 1970s and early 1980s.  It focuses on how men are dominant in speech through, for example, speaking more, interrupting, holding the floor and initiating and shifting topics.