Deborah Tannen: How Language Affects Relationships - Essay Sample

Introduction

Deborah Tannen is a professor at Georgetown University, and she lectures linguistics, and at the same time an author of several articles and books about how relationships are affected by our everyday language conversations. One of her significant publications is "You Just Don't Understand: Women and men in conversation." The book has been in the bestseller list in the New York Times for over four years, and also number one for eight months. It has also been translated into thirty-one languages. It is the same book that brought to the public awareness of gender difference in community style (Tannen, 2018).

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In addition to scientific works, she has also written several favorite science books on communication and linguistics that are best-selling. She has also written drama, poetry, and essayistic. She acquired her first degree from the State University of New York in 1966 in BA. In 1970, Deborah Tannen graduated at Wayne State University with a master's degree. She again graduated with an additional master's degree in 1976 and finally a doctorate (Ph.D.) in 1979 in Berkeley, from the University of California (Tannen, 2018).

Some of her other iconic books include the following. You Were Always Mom's Favorite!: Sisters in Conversation Throughout Their Lives, a book that was the best seller in New York Times and which received an award from a Books for a Better Life and featured on NPR's Morning Edition and 20/20. Another one is the You're Wearing THAT?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation, a publication that spent ten weeks on the New York Times list of best-seller books. The Argument Culture: Stopping America's War of Words; a book that received the Common Ground Book award. Another iconic book by Tannen is I Only Say This Because I Love You: Talking to Your Parents, Partner, Sibs, and Kids When You're All Adults which also received awards with the Books for a Better Life Award. She has a new book titled You're the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women's Friendships which got released this fall in paperback (Tannen, 2017).

Deborah Tannen frequently visits radio news, televisions, and information shows like the 20/20, The Colbert Report, The Today Show, Good Morning America, PBS NewsHour, The Rachael Ray Talk Show, Oprah, Nightline, Charlie Rose, many shows on NPR and CNN including The Diane Rehm Show, Morning Edition, a fresh Air, and All Things Considered. She has been written for and considered in major magazines and newspapers, including The Atlantic, Time, New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Harvard Business Review, and HuffPost.

Deborah Tannen is among the six tutors at the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University holding the distinguished rank of University Professor. She has been a Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University invited by McGraw and also spent a residential term in New Jersey as a professor at the Institute of Advanced Study. She has also been a fellow twice at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford in Palo Alto in the Behavioral Sciences (Tannen, 2018). Deborah Tannen has received five honorary doctorates and is a member of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation as a member of the Board of Directors.

Apart from her eight books for the general audience, Deborah Tannen is also an editor and author of over one hundred articles and sixteen books for the scholarly audiences. She has also authored short stories, poems, and personal essays. One of her playbooks which was her first, "An Act of Devotion," is among the Americas best short plays 1993-1994. She produced this play together with some other stories like "Sisters," by a Virginia based publisher Horizons Thwarter in Arlington.

Through her book You Just Don't Understand, which was in New York Time's international bestseller list for over four years, Tannen has been able to reveal some of the underlying factors of communication that have remained unknown by people for a long time, and has been able to instill knowledge both in scholars and the general population. Tannen uses her new book in the New York Times titled You're Wearing THAT' Mothers and Daughters in Conversation to listen in on mother-adult daughter conversation, by asking why most of such relationships are so tense and asking what can be done by mothers and daughters to improve their relationships and communications.

One of her books Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work which is a bestseller at the New York Times have brought a lot of revolutions in the workplace just like her previous revolutionary book did for men and women talking at home. Tannen provides a rare blend of humorous presentations and scientific insights with her unique perspectives, well-honed analysis, and pitch-perfect example that will forever change our approach to conversations and explore what role talking plays in human relationships (Tannen, 2018).

In her primary research, Deborah Tannen focused on expanding interpersonal relationships in interactions involving conversations or talks. Deborah Tannen has done a lot of explorations in style differences and conversational interactions in various levels of life and stages and about different situations such as cultural background, conversational style differences in connection to gender, and speech directed to a given audience based on the social role of the speaker. Tennen, in particular, has worked on several pieces of research based on the links of gender, and her writings are focused on the communication between women and men; nevertheless, there are critic linguists that have presented counter-arguments against the claims by Tennen by using points from feminist perspectives.

The research profession of Tennen started at the time during her Ph.D. when she used to do a critical analysis of her friends in college. She has since then sampled a collection of different natural conversations on tapes and also conducted several interviews with the primary purpose of collecting data which she would later use later for analysis. Tennen has also done a study from secondary sources data by other researchers to enable her to draw out significant trends in the various conversation types, and at points, she has borrowed and expounded on their terminologies to make emphasis on new points of interest.

For the notion of conversational style, she describes it as a semantic process and how meaning gets encoded in and achieved from speech. Some of the works she has cited include the work of R. Lakoff and J. Gumperz stating that these are the significant brains behind her inspiration. Tennen mentions some of the conversational style features to be the topic (including s the topic types and the occurrence of transitions), pace (the speech rate, whether there is pause or not, and overlap), genre (kind of storytelling), and expressive paralinguistic (amplitude/pitch shits and other voice quality changes during conversations).

In line with a recording that Tennen did while conversing with her friends, she analyzed the two major styles of conversations among the six participants, which she evenly divided between the subgroupings of non-New Yorkers and New Yorkers. After doing an analysis of the recording, she came up with a conclusion that New Yorkers had a lot of intonation exaggerations in their speeches, short silences, overlapping speeches between two or more speakers, and machine-gun questions which according to her description implies to the questions that are asked quickly even before the other person completes saying what they are talking about. For the non-New Yorkers, their style was precisely opposite the description of the New Yorkers. Furthermore, the New Yorkers interrupting questions and exaggerated intonations caught the non-New Yorkers off-guard, and at some point, these discouraged them from finishing their conversations. According to Tennen (2018), the conversational style by the New Yorkers is "high-involvement" and unimpressive non-New Yorkers style as "high-considerateness."

Tennen has given an expression of her stance against the taking of direct speech as a lack of confidence or as a sign of weakness. She has also discredited the idea that American women are more indirect in their addresses than men. Tennen came to such conclusion by looking at the interviews and conversational transcripts, and also through the communication with her readers. A letter from one of her readers provides an example that she has used against the second idea, and the letter mentioned how superior in the navy trained his unit to give a response to the indirect request "this room is hot" as a demand to have the window opened.

References

Tannen F. Deborah (2018). Biographical Information. Georgetown University. Retrieved from https://gufaculty360.georgetown.edu/s/contact/00336000014RccLAAS/deborah-tannen

Tannen, D. (2017). You're the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women's Friendships. Ballantine Books.