Email This Post
Have you, like, listened to yourself speak lately?
When you speak, is it with confidence and clarity? Or do fillers such as you know, like and umm undermine your message and drive your listener crazy? Linguistics professor Robin T. Lakoff talks to Kathleen about the dynamics of language and effective communication. From annoying filler words to “uptalk”—raising your voice at the end of a sentence so it sounds like a question—Lakoff addresses our most common and annoying speech habits, and tells us how to break them.
Lakoff also shares highlights from her years of research on gender and language (women speak in question marks while men speak in periods). For women in the public eye, speech can make or break our perception of them. Citing real life examples, Lakoff makes the case that speech is one of the biggest indicators of our personality and confidence—for better or for worse.
Robin T. Lakoff is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University. Lakoff has been especially interested in the comparative syntax of Latin and English; the relation between linguistic form and social and psychological context; language and gender; discourse strategies (e.g. indirectness and politeness); and discourse genres (e.g. psychotherapeutic and courtroom discourse). Her current research includes the connections between the politics of language and the language of politics. The book Kathleen discussed on air is Language and Woman’s Place (which was re-released in 2004).
