Gender Differences In Cross-sex Conversations In English Language Within Public Contexts

The relationship between language and gender has long been the research topic of general interest in sociolinguistics. With the growth and the development of the feminist social movement in the 1960s, western scholars and sociolinguists have done a lot of researches on the gender-differentiated use of language. Despite the various kinds of researches concerning gender differences in language in the past few decades, most researchers seem to neglect the importance of the context in which communications take place. As a result, the studies of gender and language seem to suffer from the problem: abstraction or generalization. What's more, how to explain speech differences between men and women still remains a question in dispute among sociolinguists. What the present dissertation intends to do is to carry out a contextualized research of speech differences between men and women in the English language, to explore the origins of the speech differences and to discuss the significance or practical implications of the study.Thirty conversations involved with one man and one woman in each conversation (all are from public places such as bars, restaurants, streets, exhibition halls, supermarkets, etc) are chosen randomly from modern American movies. They are deemed to be examples of cross-sex conversations in public places. The approach of the combination of conversational analysis and inferential statistics as a new analyzing method is applied to the corpus in hope of conducting a quantitive study of speech differences between men and women in public contexts. In this dissertation, some basic features of conversational analysis are employed to set up an analytical framework of four-dimensions: amount of talk; turns or turn-taking; interruption; minimal response. The statistical analysis is applied to the corpus within the analytical framework. Under each framework two numbers are figured out. Two stands for male and female respectively; therefore we can obtain2-dimentional numbers on the basis of each framework. Under each category, men's data are compared with women's data statistically. The comparison with the result of the previous studies shows that the speech differences demonstrated by men and women in public contexts are: men do a greater share of talking than women, take more turns and therefore control the topic of the conversation, interrupt more, and give less minimal responses in their interactions with women. The author found that communicative context may, to some degree, have some influence on gender-differentiated use of language. Take amount of talk as an example. Many researchers claim that women are found to talk much more than men in more private contexts. In public contexts, however, women are found to contribute much less talk than men. The dissertation then tries to explore the reasons that may account for the speech differences between men and women. The author holds that men and women seem to experience different socialization process and therefore they come from different sociolinguistic subcultures, which results in their different demonstrations in their speech differences.With the analysis and discussions above, the author offers some considerations with regard to the significance of the study. On the one hand, the communicative problems between men and women can be avoided with better understandings of the different conversational patterns. On the other hand, men and women can benefit a lot from learning from each other. Finally the author points out that the present study is one of the attempts to represent the new direction of gender difference studies in language, hoping that the present study may bring some new insight in the study of gender difference language studies.