Deborah Frances Tannen (born June 7, 1945) is an American author and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Best known as the author of You Just Don't Understand, she has been a McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences following a term in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Tannen is the author of thirteen books, including That's Not What I Meant! and You Just Don't Understand, the latter of which spent four years on the New York Times Best Sellers list, including eight consecutive months at number one and has been translated into multiple languages.
Education
Tannen graduated from Hunter College High School and completed her undergraduate studies at Harpur College (now part of Binghamton University) with a B.A. in English literature. Tannen went on to earn a master's in English literature at Wayne State University. Later, she continued her academic studies at UC Berkeley, earning an M.A. and a Ph.D. in linguistics (1979) with a dissertation entitled "Processes and consequences of conversational style". She took up a position at Georgetown in 1979 and subsequently became a Distinguished University Professor in Linguistics there.
Writing career
Tannen has written and edited numerous academic publications on linguistics, discourse analysis, and interpersonal communication. She has published many books including Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends; Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue and Imagery in Conversational Discourse; Gender and Discourse; and The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Her major theoretical contribution, presented in Talking Voices, is a poetics of conversation. She demonstrates that everyday conversation is made up of linguistic features that are traditionally regarded as literary, such as repetition, dialogue, and imagery.
Tannen has also written nine general-audience books on interpersonal communication and public discourse as well as a memoir called Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow . She became well known in the United States after her book You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation was published in 1990. It remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for nearly four years, and was subsequently translated into 30 other languages. and cultural background, as well as speech that is tailored for specific listeners based on the speaker's social role. In particular, Tannen has done extensive gender-linked research and writing that focused on miscommunications between men and women, which later developed into what is now known as the genderlect theory of communication. However, some linguists have argued against Tannen's claims from a feminist standpoint.
Tannen's research began when she analyzed her friends in everyday discourse while working on her Ph.D. Since then, she has collected several naturally occurring conversations on tape and conducted interviews as forms of data for later analysis. She has also compiled and analyzed information from other researchers in order to draw out notable trends in various types of conversations, sometimes borrowing and expanding on their terminology to emphasize new points of interest.
Gender differences in US family interaction
Tannen highlighted the "Telling Your Day" ritual that takes place in many U.S. families, in which, typically, the mother in a two-parent family encourages a child to share details (about their day which the mother has typically already heard about) with the father. – as a strategy for integrating connection maneuvers into other types of interactions. As an example of this, she cites an exchange recorded by her research team in which a mother attempts to convince her son to pick up his toys by ventriloquizing the family's dogs: "[extra high pitch] We're naughty, but we're not as naughty as Jared". This was surprising to her, since she had just made the comments in the spirit of small talk. Tannen observed this same tendency of Greeks and Greek-Americans to interpret statements indirectly in a study
Agonism in written academic discourse
Tannen analyzed the agonistic framing of academic texts, which are characterized by their "ritualized adversativeness". She argued that expectations for academic papers in the US place the highest importance on presenting the weaknesses of an existing, opposing, argument as a basis for bolstering the author's replacement argument.