A Pragmatic Study Of Gender Differences In Conversation

AbstractBased on the theories of sociolinguistics and pragmatics, this thesis provides acontrastive analysis of gender differences in conversation from the perspectives ofCooPerative Principles, Politeness Principles, and face stYategies. It demonstfateswhat different pragInatic rules men and women tend to obey in conversation. Insuccessful conversation, participants rnust be cooperative, i.e., they should obey thecooperative principles, and othendse, the conversation is hard to proceed. Bat inmixed conununication, males tend to be less cooperative than females. They arelikely to flout the quantity maxim and relevant maxim. So females are lesssuccessful in conununication although they are talk-suPPorters. Politeness showsawareness of another person'S public self image or the awareness of others'expectations that their public self image will be respected. Politeness phenomenonis universal. In conimunication with each other, people need to be polite in order tosave one's own or the other's face, and thus gives rise to the fOrmation of politenessprinciple. In inter-gender communication, men are inclined to flout the PolitenessPrinciple by insisting on their own opinions. Women tend to observe the PolitenessPrinciple so as to maximize benefit to others. ln communication, males and femalesnot only obey different principles, but also employ different face strategies. Face isthe public self image that every member wants to claim fOr himself An individual'sface consists of tWo desires f the desire to be aPproved by others (termed positiveface), and the desire to be unimpeded by others in one's actions (termed negativeface). The tWo aspects of face can be shown through different linguistic strategies.In this chaPtef, we'll focus our attention on the differeDt strategies employed by menand women.In addition to the differences mentioned in the previous partS, men and womenseem to be differeni even in the things they talk abollt, and in the way of condollingtopics. Men are more interested in abstr3ct and impersonal topics as politics,religion, and economy. Women are more concemed about personal affairs as family,food, housework, etc. And men are more successful in controlling topics.Pragmatics is concerned about factors governing our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others. Communication is a process of problem-solving. A speaker has to solve the problem ?if I want to bring about such-and-such a result in the hearer抯 consciousness, what is the best way to accomplish this aim by using language? For the hearer, there is another kind of problem to solve ?if the speaker said such-and-such, what did the speaker mean me to understand by that? The speaker tries to achieve his aim within constraints imposed by principles and maxims of 慻ood communicative behavior?(Leech, 1983). In this Grice抯 Cooperative Principle and Leech抯 Politeness Principle play an important role. But in male-female communication, because of their different stereotypes, they may obey different principles. Now under this title, we are going to analyze gender differences in conversation from perspectives of Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle, face strategies, so as to accomplish two specific goals. One is to analyze how males and females use language differently, and what account for their different abilities to adapt to the social world that surrounds them so as to enhance awareness of the relationship between gender and communication behavior. Another is to develop suggestions for improving the effectiveness of women抯 communication activities. To achieve these goals, the author makes a contrastive analysis of the mixed-sex conversations. The analysis is based on the theoretical achievements in sociolinguistics and pragmatics, in the contrastive analysis of languages and cultures. The research materials are the dialogues from literature works, text-books, or those collected by the author in daily life.This thesis not onl...