Power and Solidarity in Same-sex and Cross-sex Talk: Investigating Linguistic Strategies in Conversational Practise

Introduction Man and woman talk: different worlds, different words, different styles. Each person‟s life is lived as a series of conversations. Analysing everyday conversations and their effects on relationships within people is the focus of my research. In this paper I report a corpus analysis of recorded conversations between men and women of different social statuses or/and backgrounds. My purpose is to show that a man and a woman can interpret the same conversation differently, even when there is no apparent misunderstanding. I also explain how-and whether-the gender and status dimensions influence individuals‟ way of speaking and use of linguistic strategies, i.e. „doing things‟ with words. Finally I consider the importance of expressing Power or Solidarity through communicative strategies, and in relation to this how people might deal with such strategies. Conversational style, that is „the way of speaking and acting‟ in conversation, is made up of use of specific devices, leading to linguistic strategies; the use of these devices is habitual and may be more or less automatic. Moreover, the goal of all conversation is to make clear to others the intentions of the speaker: the degree to which one‟s meaning is understood by the hearer as intended by the speaker often depends upon the degree to which conversational strategies, and hence use of devices, are similar. On the other hand, the use 3