`Is there any Ketchup, Vera?': Gender, Power and Pragmatics

Abstract

This article revisits recent arguments about gender-linked variations in conversational style and the phenomenon of male-female misunderstanding to which those variations allegedly give rise. Drawing on the framework of linguistic pragmatics, I propose that `male-female misunderstanding' could fruitfully be analysed as a kind of conflict, occurring not on the surface of discourse but at the level of the assumptions about gender which conversationalists bring to bear on the interpretation of utterances in context. This kind of conflict will be most marked where gender relations are a matter of contestation rather than consensus.