ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some of the things that linguists have discovered about how gender relates to turn-taking and interruption, politeness, and indirectness. One of the claims of the so-called ‘difference’ approach to language and gender is that boys and girls learn different styles of interaction when they are young. An interactional frame is an abstract idea of ‘what is going on’ in interaction. There is an ideology of interaction in which context and power is not taken into account, in which it does not matter that a larger and more powerful person is in the room, making it more difficult to say no. Interactional patterns and ideologies are therefore important to gender not just in understanding differences or seeing the effects of gender ideology, but understanding the effects of gender ideology on the interpretation of talk in high-stakes interactions like sexual encounters and trials.
