Gender Differences In Multimodal Expression Of Attitudinal Meanings

The study on the relationship between gender and language has developed rapidly since Women’s Rights Movement in the 1970 s in the US.More and more linguists realize that non-language modalities including sound,body movement and facial expression also play an important role in human communication as the studies develop.More and more studies on non-language modalities appear because of the rise of Multimodal Discourse Analysis.Attitudinal expression is an important part in both language communication and non-language communication.Attitude is the core subsystem of Appraisal Theory.Then,can AT be applied to non-language? Which modalities does non-language include? Is there any difference between multimodal expressions of different genders?In order to solve these problems,all the expressions including language and non-language of attitude in the first 10 episodes of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory(Season 9)have been collected.Both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed in this thesis.The data collected will be analyzed by corpus software Concapp and the examples will be explained in detail.AT can be the framework of non-linguistic resources.Non-language includes kinetics and paralanuage.The data analysis shows that when people express attitudes,the percentage of male using language is bigger than that of female using language;the percentage of male using paralanguage is similar to that of female using paralanguage;the percentage of male using kinetics is smaller than female.This study has broadened the scope of the application of AT and will also help readers know more about gender differences in communication.What’s more,this study can help people interpret the other gender’s attitudes better so that they can have a better communication with the other sex.