On Conversational Gender Differences Between Chinese Parents And Children

In recent years, the study of language gender difference has been paid more and more attention by sociolinguists. However, according to the research of CNKI and Science Direct, there are few researches on Chinese parents and children. Therefore, it is necessary to do the tentative study on conversational strategies of them with respect to the gender variable.The corpora of dissertation are daily conversations of Tangshan parents and children.And the conversational manners are interviews and free talks. There are 16 corpus samples: 8 same gender conversations and 8 mixed gender conversations. On the base of the theories of conversational analysis of Sacks etc, the thesis has made qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis on the six aspects: amount of talks, response tokens,repetition, silence, insertion and repair to study the gender difference of them.The research results show that there are significant gender differences on using conversational strategies; female prefers to use insertion, and male likes to use repetition more frequently. Male’s amount of talks is larger than female in both same and mixed gender conversations. But female’s amount of talks changes more largely than male in same gender conversations, and male’s amount of talks changes more largely than female in mixed gender conversations. In same gender conversations, there are differences on using response tokens, repetition, silence and insertion between male and female, but there is no gender difference on using repair; male prefers to choose response tokens,repetition and silence, while female likes to use insertion more frequently. In mixed gender conversations, gender difference exists in repetition, insertion and repair, but not in response tokens and silence; male prefers to choose repetition and repair, but female likes to use insertion more frequently.Synthesizing the above research conclusion, the thesis makes explanations on the results from the aspects of biology, psychology and society. At last, the author presents the limitation and expectation of the study, which may give a light to the future research.