Submitted To The Graduate School And College Of English In Partial Fulfillment Of Requirements For The Degree Of Master Of Arts

"Language and gender"has been an important topic in the field of sociolinguistics ever since the 1970s. The initial focus was on the formal structure of language, such as pronunciation, morphology and grammar, and shortly was shifted to such higher levels as conversational strategies and discourse style. Based on the turn-taking mechanism established by Sacks et al. in 1974, which accounts for the complex system by which parties engaged in talk manage to take turns at speaking, this thesis aims to find out whether male and female take turns differently.The present study takes the English sitcom Friends as the corpus. It analyzes altogether 82 two-party (16 male-male, 17 female-female and 49 male-female) conversation segments concerning amount of speech, interruption, minimal response and silence. All of the conversations are interactions gathered from 10 episodes, which were randomly selected by the author out of 236 episodes of Friends.The results reveal that: men and women take turns differently in the aspects of amount of speech and silence, but not in interruption and minimal response. Specifically speaking, men talk more than women in conversations both within and between the genders, but women are more likely to be silenced than men.The present study contributes, to a certain extent, to the study of gender differences at the level of conversational interaction, but it has limitations based on the following three facts: (1) most literature on gender-related language differences deals with white, middle and upper-middle-class segments of the western population. So does this study. (2) Though language in modern dramas is believed to be very close to actual language practices, they inevitably have differences. (3) The real protagonists in Friends are girls instead of boys. It is hoped that further studies can make improvements in these respects.