Deborah Tannen Quotes
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Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone.
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The study of gender and language might seem at first to be a narrowly focused field, but it is actually as interdisciplinary as they come.
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I would say 'woman' used to be a noun, and now it is a noun and also an adjective. And words change their functions in that way. It's one of the most common phenomena about words. They start as one thing, and they end up as something else.
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The effect of dominance is not always the result of an intention to dominate.
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It's an interesting point about sisters not getting the same attention as parents and children, and even brothers. I suspect it's just because women didn't count that much and weren't the ones writing the accounts.
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For many women, and a fair number of men, saying 'I'm sorry' isn't literally an apology; it's a ritual way of restoring balance to a conversation.
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When daughters react with annoyance or even anger at the smallest, seemingly innocent remarks, mothers get the feeling that talking to their daughters can be like walking on eggshells: they have to watch every word.
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A sister is like yourself in a different movie, a movie that stars you in a different life.
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Much of my work over the years has developed the premise that women's styles of friendship and conversation aren't inherently better than men's, simply different.
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Many mothers and daughters are as close as any two people can be, but closeness always carries with it the need - indeed, the desire - to consider how your actions will affect the other person, and this can make you feel that you are no longer in control of your own life.
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When Clinton first appeared on the national stage back in 1992, the young wife of the Arkansas governor running for president, she kept her natural-brown hair off her face with a headband.
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Asian cultures... place great value on avoiding open expression of disagreement and conflict because they emphasize harmony.
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You're not from Puerto Rico, so you should say Puerto Rico like all the other people from the place that you come from.
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The trickiest thing about the double bind is that it operates imperceptibly, like shots from a gun with a silencer.
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My writing is about connecting ways of talking to human relationships. My purpose is to show that linguistics has something to offer in understanding and improving relationships.
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There are those who believe that the existence of gender differences at very early ages is evidence that these differences are biological or generic in origin.
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I am the youngest of three girls. My first linguistics book was a study of 'New York Jewish conversational style'. That was my dissertation.
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I'm a linguist. I study how people talk to each other and how the ways we talk affect our relationships.
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Sister relationships span a huge range, from best friends to worst enemies. From 'I adore her; I talk to her five times a day' to 'I decided to cut her out of my life.' For most women, it's in between.
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I was one of those daughters who saw my mother as my enemy when I was a teen.
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Our spirits are corroded by living in an atmosphere of unrelenting contention - an argument culture.
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Now I am married to a man who is a partner and friend. We come from similar backgrounds and share values and interests. It is a continual source of pleasure to talk to him.
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Where the daughter sees power, the mother feels powerless. Daughters and mothers, I found, both overestimate the other's power - and underestimate their own.
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Everything we say has metamessages indicating how our words are to be interpreted: Is this a serious statement or a joke? Does it show annoyance or goodwill? Most of the time, metamessages are communicated and interpreted without notice because, as far as anyone can tell, the speaker and the hearer agree on their meaning.