Study Of The Changes Of Gender Language In American Films And TV Series

Since the Second-wave Feminism, language and gender has been the focus oflinguistic study. In the 17th and 18th centuries, some scholars had found some differentlinguistic forms between men's and women's speech, however, it was Lakoff'sLanguage and Women's Place which marked the beginning of the real study on genderand language, after which social linguists conducted various studies on differentorientations. These studies fall into three aspects: sexual discrimination of language towomen; differences in gender language; the study of the factors that lead to sexualdiscrimination and differences of gender language. Whereas most of the studiesoveremphasized the differences of gender language and were done in a static statewithout seeing gender language as a variable, which went against one rule of Dialecticsof Nature: Matter is always in motion and change. Therefore, this paper adopts bothstatic and dynamic method to explore the differences and similarities of genderlanguage and its changes by putting it into a historical background--- three feministmovements which are closely related to the changes of gender language. The studymaterials are collected from several representative American movies and TV series.Based on Lakoff's(1975)assumptions about women's language features and othersocial linguists'famous theories, this paper explores the features of gender language inthose materials, and concludes the similarities, differences and changes of Americanpeople's language, from the aspects of lexicon, syntax and conversation style. Theresults show that some findings are contradictory to Lakoff's assumptions. Although afew features before the Second-wave Feminism are different from Lakoff's assumption,most of them are basically consistent with it. But after 1960s, the features of genderlanguage vary a lot: women tend to say swear words, no less than men do; euphemismsand tag questions can be hardly found in women's speech; in conversation style, womenare no longer implicit and indirect and share topics with men. As for men, they are morelikely to talk like women, because they would use more and more tag questions toexpress their uncertainty and abundant adjectives to describe things, etc. Males andfemales have the tendency to share the same features. However, the differences betweenmales and females still exist.The author gives a comprehensive explanation to the differences, similarities andchanges of gender language, and then analyzes some examples of cross-gender miscommunication, ending with presenting some feasible solutions.