Conversational Dominance and Gender

This book investigates the notion of conversational dominance in depth, and seeks to establish a systematic method of analysing it. It also offers a new insight into the role of gender and the pragmatic transfer of conversational norms in the first and second language conversations among native speakers of Japanese.
Drawing upon a critical synthesis of insights from several different fields, including Conversation Analysis, the Birmingham school of discourse analysis, and dialogical analysis, the author proposes an innovative analytical framework for operationalising the concept of dominance in conversation. She then applies this framework to the empirical analysis of Japanese speakers’ L1 and L2 conversations, finding direct evidence for the important role of gender and pragmatic transfer in conversational dominance.
By integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches to discourse analysis, the author offers a new perspective into the pragmatic transfer of conversational norms. She does so by demonstrating how the notion of self-oriented and other-oriented conversational styles and strategies can affect the level of transfer of interactional behaviour differently for male and female speakers.

Ronald Carter, University of Nottingham, UK:
This is a highly innovative study in terms of its methodology, its insights into cross-cultural communication and its orientation to non-Western communicative contexts. It also offers fascinating data for pragmatic interaction analysis and numerous new research directions for the
study of gender, culture and language learning.