Deborah Tannen

Um, and this is partly a personal preference, partly a cultural preference, and a regional preference.

So, um, Deborah Tannen in this great book, Talking From 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work, she talks about, uh, the difference between what she calls high considerateness conversation styles and high involvement conversation styles.

So high involvement styles, they're trying to provide feedback and show like, "Hey, I'm there with you," and they're doing what we call back channeling and they're giving you, like, "Uh-huh, yeah, okay," and they're following up, they're asking questions.

They're kind of interjecting to show like, "Hey, I'm engaged and I'm involved.

It's from 1994, but I still think it's absolutely relevant.

It's, it's highly useful.

Um, so Deborah Tannen, the author, talks about just kind of different conversational styles between men and women in general and how that causes issues at work sometimes.

Uh, and it- both men and women report feeling like they're interrupted more by the opposite gender.

We feel like we're sort of asking or, like, hoping that the client does something.

And in our methodology, that's called being in a one down position, which is something that sociologist Deborah Tannen identified.

And it's a big principle of our methodology is to sort of shift from being in one down position to being at a peer level.

And I think it's really important in this conversation because when you come out of corporate or nonprofit or just early in your career, I mean, I think you have some degree of, like, the one down-ness, but what you shared with me early on in our conversations is, like, it's that times a thousand in government.

So this concept of one down and, you know, its opposite, one up, it refers to basically your status relative to someone else.

Being in a one-down position means you're kind of in a lower status position, and being in the one-up position means that you're in this higher status position.

And the concept comes from Deborah Tannen, who's a sociolinguist, who spent years studying how the words we choose, even small ones, can signal who has more status in a conversation or in a relationship.

And one of the things she found is something I think about a lot, which is that status, whether it's in one conversation or a whole relationship, it isn't fixed.

I'm not rewarded for going outside my tribe.

I'm rewarded for demonizing people in the other tribe, and welcome to what Deborah Tannen called the argument culture today that...

I mean, she mentioned that in the 1990s.

Mm-hmm.

Half of an entire generation is just comfortable evaporating into the ether.

To understand the mechanics of this mass evaporation, we have to look at the work of sociolinguist Deborah Tannen.

Tannen focuses on why humans choose silence over articulation.

It's really interesting.

Each frame arrives with a built-in cast of roles and a set of expectations about who acts, what counts as relevant, what can be assumed.

Deborah Tannen took the same idea into live interaction.

A frame is what makes an utterance sound normal or odd, fitting or offensive.

And speakers read it continuously to decide what to say next.

A quick side note on this.

Goffman comes from sociology and uses the word frame.

While Goffman's frame isn't linguistic in its entirety, both Fillmore and Tannen are linguists who use frame to explore and analyze language across cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics.

And we see this a lot in linguistics.

I'm Erin Erickson here with my mom, Marty, and my daughter, Clara, for this special episode on mothers and daughters.

Our guest, Dr. Deborah Tannen, is the author of the New York Times bestseller, You're Wearing That, a book about mothers and daughters that is just out in paperback.

She is also the acclaimed author of You Just Don't Understand, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly four years.

She also is the author of You Were Always Mom's Favorite, a book about sisters, and her most recent book, a memoir, Finding My Father.

Oh, that's wonderful.

Well, we'll definitely check out that book.

I want to thank you so much, our guest today, Dr. Deborah Tannen, the acclaimed author of You Just Don't Understand.

And today we discussed her book.