Robin Lakoff Research

Robin Lakoff wrote a study based on Language and the way in which Women use language. It was called, "Language and Woman's place." It points out how women tend to hedge a lot more in their language and use very vague language but in polite forms such as, "Would you mind?" and "sort of" , "maybe" so they want you to do something but are saying it in a very polite and vague form. It is also said that women give indirect commands such as "its cold in here" meaning they want you to do something about how cold it is. Females also use modal verbs to suggest and hint to people what they want to happen such as "shouldn't we turn up the heat?" etc. The way in which this compares to men's language is that men tend to just ask directly what they want and are not so polite in the way they go about it compared to women. This makes the women seem more weak and shy compared to the men are are confident when asking for things and are not as polite.

The study also outlines how women use lots of adjectives to describe things but they have no meaning because of how often they are used. For example, it is said that the word "adorable" is used often by women and because they call lots of things adorable, it has no meaning behind the word and they in fact do not think it is adorable because the adjective is in fact empty. Women tend to put more emotion into their language as well by adding intensifiers and adjectives into their language to show how happy or sad they are feeling.
Whereas men tend to paraphrase more and if they use an adjective it tends to have more meaning behind it because they do not go into detail about things as regularly as women do. Men tend to get to the point more instead of showing emotion through their language. Men also tend to create more punchlines and find them more funny compared to women who apparently lack a sense of humor and apparently do not tell as great jokes as men do.