On Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand And The Dual-culture Theory

Language is the living fossil to record the social life, the historical painted scroll toknow the social changes and the encyclopedia to research social behaviors. Long since,gender-differentiated language has been one of the issues in which human scientistswere interested very much. Perhaps gender-differentiated language is the oldest form oflanguage difference as social varieties. From this point of view, the research of languageand gender becomes much important and valuable.You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation is a sociolinguisticwork by Deborah Tannen, who is a famous professor of sociolinguistics at GeorgetownUniversity. In this book, Deborah Tannen uses numerous lively examples of realconversations to show why men and women, especially husbands and wives, havemiscommunications and contradictions in everyday conversations. With a popular andstraightaway writing tone, Tannen explains to us different communicative styles ofwomen and men and discusses its influence to interpersonal relationship. You Just Don'tUnderstand: Women and Men in Conversation is a book which not only has academicvalue, but also can be helpful for readers to deal with communicative problems betweenmen and women.However, some linguists also present their ideas toward the dual-culture theorywhich is different from that of Tannen. They have criticized Tannen's representation ofthe research she cites and faulted her for ascribing the effects of inequities in socialpower to mere differences in language. They think Tannen's points are dishonestpolitically and that the theory she provided in this book is some kind of anti-feminism.Tannen's book and her dual-culture theory have evoked worldwide repercussionsIn this paper, the author primarily uses the methodology of literature search toreview the development of the study of language and gender. The author analyzesTannen's work You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation based onthe dominance theory to raise the awareness on gender-differentiated language. Thethesis finds that the theory reflected in Tannen's work is dual-culture theory. Theunderstanding of the theory can help us understand the different communicative styles of men and women, deepen their mutual understanding so as to improve themale-female relationship and communication. It should be noticed that Tannenemphasizes that the study of language and gender should be connected with the study ofcontext and that it is one-sided to attribute all the communicative problems to politicalreasons.The thesis also points out that different sub-cultures and communicative styles doexist between men and women. However, on the other hand the criticism of dual-culturetheory makes us realize it is not fair to deny the fact that women and men are notprovided with equal rights in our daily life and it is one-sided to attribute all thecommunicative problems to mere male-female misunderstanding. To look forward to areally equal society between women and men, what we should do is not only to makepeople be aware of the gender differences in language use, but also we should be awareof the reasons leading to these differences. What's more important is to be aware of theneed to take actions to change the unequal situation.