An Exploration And Analysis Of Female Characters' Lexical Features And Their Causes In Downton Abbey

Downlon Abbey, aired by Britain Independent Television, is an excellent costume drama about the ups and downs of Grantham's family at the beginning of the twentieth century. In consideration of its intriguing stories, unexpected plots, vivid characters and most importantly, delicate conversations, this costume drama is quite suitable for serving as linguistic data for the related researches.Female language with its own features has long captured the attention of linguists. A lot of researches have indicated that women's language possesses its distinctive features in many aspects such as phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, pragmatics and so on. Language and Woman's Place written by Robin Lakoff is regarded as a milestone among the researches in this field. Lakoff summarized certain characteristics of women's language at both lexical and syntactic levels respectively, making people realize the striking female language features. However, Lakoff's theory is merely based upon her intuitions and random, informal observations, which requires further certification.Based on Lakoff's theory, this thesis adopts quantitative and qualitative approaches to make a comparative study of all female and male characters' utterances in season 1 of Downton Abbey. According to the study results, this thesis summarizes the distinct female lexical features and explores the related causes that account for these features from the perspective of sociolinguistics, aiming at testifying Robin Lakoff's theory on female lexis.With the help of table statistics and several typical examples, six distinct lexical features of female characters in season 1 of Downton Abbey are summarized as follows: Women are inclined to use intensifiers in their utterances; Women tend to adopt extravagant adjectives in their speech; Women are apt to employ weak expletives to express their strong feelings; Women prefer to use interjections at the beginning of a sentence; Women would like to use diminutives to maintain intimacy and connection; Women are fond of adopting plausibility shields to show their uncertainty as well politeness. The first four lexical features are in accordance with Lakoff's theory while the last two features are the particular findings of this study. Besides, this thesis makes a detailed analysis of the reasons that attribute to the striking features. Firstly, from a macro perspective, physiological, psychological, social and cultural factors are taken into consideration, labeled as the general reasons. Secondly, from a micro perspective, the particular reasons that account for each specific lexical feature are listed out in consideration of the given background setting of Downton Abbey.