Gender Differences In University Students’ Performance Of Disagreements In Chinese

Language and gender is one of the most important researches in social pragmatics. Particularly since 1970s, with the publication of Lakoff’s Language and Women’s Place, language politeness and gender differences have been researched from different areas, such as phonetics, lexicons, syntax and speech acts. Recently, as complementary to the researches of politeness, the impolite speech act disagreement catches scholars’ eyes abroad. However, with respect to disagreements in Chinese, very few studies are found. What’s more, disagreement is one of the speech acts that damage to the hearers’face. Thus, speakers have to take a series of language strategies to perform this speech act. Therefore, this thesis sets out to explore the gender differences in performing disagreement in Chinese.This thesis takes Brown & Levinson’s (1987) and Gu’s (1990) politeness theory as theoretical framework. Taking sex of hearer, social status and social distance into account, the author designs eight situations and collects 108 (54 males and 54 females) juniors’answers in Nanjing University of Science and Technology by the WDCT as the data. Then the collected data is analyzed through the chi-square test. The analysis shows that first, males and females tend to use more softened disagreement strategies in overall situations and females use more of them than males. As to the softened disagreement sub-strategies, some are preferred by males (such as inclusive first person) and others are preferred by females (such as giving or asking for reasons). Second, males and females are prone to take more softened disagreement strategies regardless of sex of hearer. What’s more, female speakers are observed to employ more softened disagreement strategies to females than male speakers do. Third, there’re no gender differences in using the disagreement strategies to people who are in higher position and in lower position. Fourth, female speakers are found to employ a higher number of softened disagreement strategies to close friends and strangers than male speakers. Therefore, females are more polite than males in showing disagreements to others. As to the sub-strategies, sex of hearer and social distance make lots of differences on them, but social status makes a few differences on them. The present study provides great implications for gender differences and impolite speech acts in Chinese and it’s conducive to the teaching Chinese as a foreign language.