A Conversation Analysis Study On Gender Difference In Conversational Interaction Of A Contemporary Chinese Marriage Television Series-Chinese Style Divorce

The study of gender difference in language has become more and more important in the field of sociolinguistics at the present time. The relationships of men, women and language attract unprecedented interest from the late 1960s when contemporary women's movement sprang up. At the beginning, the emphasis was chiefly on the form of language, such as phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax. As long as the research develops, the attention has diverted to the differentiation on conversation strategies, discourse style and other related aspects. Comparatively speaking, the detailed studies on language and gender have witnessed a shorter history in China. And most of the statistics on this field are adopted from the west. Furthermore, most of scholars both at home and abroad are interested in studying gender differences in ordinary interactions, such as: talk shows on television, talks in the internet and speeches in the hospital. Few of them adopt the language of TV series, especially of contemporary Chinese marriage TV series as the data. The language of this kind of TV series is not only analogous to real life, but also has its own features. The study about it will certainly improve the comprehension on the gender differences of language.This study takes Conversation Analysis theory proposed by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) as the foundation and chooses the lines of Chinese Style Divorce as the data. It qualitatively analyses the conversations from seven perspectives, which are amount of speech, interruption, overlap, minimal response, silence, topic choice and topic control in order to study gender differences in conversational interaction in Chinese Style Divorce.The results display that: in Chinese Style Divorce men and women exactly use different conversational strategies in their daily life and their language styles also exist differentiation. It can be mainly concluded like that: male characters are more competitive while female ones are cooperative. Besides, the thesis contradicts some social prejudices against men and women such as: "men support more interruptions in the mixed-sex conversations while women are always interrupted by men." Depending on the previous findings, the thesis attempts to explain the results from the aspect of society. Furthermore, the theoretical and practical significance of the thesis are further expounded, and some valuable implications are provided in the hope of that they can assist other scholars in making the related researches.