Different Ways Of Expressing Politeness In Male And Female Speech

Generally speaking, the major reason why people make friends lies in their drive of expressing amicability for each other. According to Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory (1987), such kind of behaviour is called ’positive politeness" which is contrasted by’negative politeness’ that focuses on quelling the threat of a potenial face loss. Numerous studies have found out that male and female differ in the ways they express friendliness.A compliment is one of the most obvious speech acts to express politeness in our daily communication. That is why, the questionnaire analysed in this paper include a series of compliments that the respondents were to match with the gender of compliments’givers and receivers. The questionnaire is based on the analysis of answers provided by 100 Chinese males and females. The survey states that both Chinese males and females belive that compliments are exclusively associated with female speech. The results conducted on Chinese respondents match those with Polish ones (Grzybowski,2005) and the others (Holmes, 1986,1998;Herbert 1989,1990).In another form of study, the thesis analyses the male and female talk though conducting a series of concealed recordings followed by discourse analysis.16 Chinese people, aged between 24 and 31 that either study at one of Shanghai universities or work in a trade company took part in the study, among them there were 8 males and 8 females, altogether four recordings have been made. Through the analysis of topic development, minimal responses, simultaneous speech, monologues and topic shifts, silences and lack of verbal feedback as well as verbal aggressiveness, the thesis concludes that there are differences between Chinese male and female speech:the first three are distinctive features of all female speech, while the last three features belong to male speech. As a result the conclusion has been made about the different styles of having a conversation between genders:a cooperative and a competitive talk. That is why, many sociolinguists believe that women are better at observing principles that guide the theory of politeness proposed by Brown and Levinson(1987) whearas male speech is often in stark contrast to the theory. Nevertheless, challenging each other verbally is the symbol of male speech.The aim of this thesis is to manifest that women and men observe two distinct types of politeness behaviour with overt versus covert prestige. In Chinese sociolinguistic research field, this thesis is the first attempt at bringing the reader closer to the differences between male and female speech in the way they express politeness in every-day speech.