ABSTRACT
Deborah Tannen’s work has often centred on the implications of issues of gender for interpersonal communication with particular emphasis on spoken language. As such her work bridges the gap between verbal and non-verbal communication and the slightly more formal work on language while at the same time pointing up the artificiality of these kinds of divisions. Tannen herself works in the formal academic context of a university linguistics department and seems a little bemused at those of her students who have given her course on cross-cultural communication credit for saving their marriages. She frames the obvious question ‘What can linguistics have to do with saving marriages?’ and then goes on to tell us.
