Repair Questions
October 27, 2009
by Kathryn Ciano
|The opinions expressed herein and those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.
Reading this interesting post about how men and women signal differently in conversations where they’re interested in their partners, I came across these curious lines:
Both genders convey intended flirtation by laughing more, speaking faster, and using higher pitch. However, we do find gender differences; men ask more questions when they say they are flirting, women ask fewer, although they do use more repair questions, while men do not.
The gist of those lines makes sense. Many broad gender generalizations might explain what impetus would make men assume an inquisitive, prompting position in flirtatious conversation while women tend instead towards a more direct, statement-oriented position.
Much more interesting than the gendered stuff is the definition of “repair questions”:
[R]epair questions (also called NTRIs; next turn repair indicators) are turns in which a speaker signals lack of hearing or understanding (Schegloff et al., 1977). To detect these, we used a simple heuristic: the presence of ‘Excuse me’ or ‘Wait’, as in the following example:
MALE: Okay. Are you excited about that?
FEMALE: Excuse me?
So women ask fewer curious questions about the men w/ whom we’re flirting, but we do generously deploy repair questions.
Repair questions’ main purpose appears to be slowing the conversation. They pause a conversation partner’s attention in order to repeat the same thought, perhaps more slowly or w/ more deliberate phrasing. Thus someone who uses repair questions manipulates the conversational cadence and buys more time for planning better-considered answers.
The “flirting” piece that inspired the “repair” research notes that both genders speak more quickly when flirting. So deliberately slowing the conversation w/ repair questions evidently makes the conversation feel less like flirting to the flirting man. Coquettish, thy name is always feminine, no?
Feel free to draw conclusions based on your own experience with mixed signals. But how interesting that many gender stereotypes label women “passive,” when evidently we are in fact more conversationally aggressive, more interested in employing variable tempo and flow.
Interesting.
Wait. . . Excuse me?
Of course we manipulate flirting. We have to get ahead of men somewhere.
That’s interesting. I’ve studied social linquistics and I’ve always been impressed that some cultures have more pause time between conversation. For example, in Navajo culture, the acceptable pause time before responding in conversation is much longer because the culture respects a thoughtful answer and understand the time needed to contemplate.
So our response questions allow for thoughtful responses even though the pause time in our mainstream culture is very short.
I think it’s really important to view women and men as a system and understand how they interact together. Just considering the woman’s point of view or the man’s is not going to get us very far. Also, not all women and men are the same. Some people are extremely flirtatious and some are very shy. Some are very manipulative and some are not. There are things the average “fem straight woman” does that make me want to hurl. I have been so disgusted by the manipulativeness of other women that I have considered getting a sex change over it. I think we all need to think more of our children and how we want their world to be. I want my daughter to be able to communicate with men. I don’t want her to have to chose between having a family and a career as I did. I want my nephews to know that they don’t have to prove themselves all the time to be men, especially at the expense of women. I don’t think there is any way to change the world without changing ourselves first. I was horrible to both my husbands. Yes, it was because I was insecure from living in such a sexist society but I was a participant in what happened, not a victim. We women need to examine our complicity, not let men off the hook, but to help us understand what we have to change.
I am not surprised that the resident Anti-Feminist is as obsessed with finding and talking about gender differences as most and by most I mean all anti-feminists are.
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