Gender Differences In Conversational Interaction

Sociolinguistics emerged as a subdiscipline of linguistics studying all aspects of the relationship between language and society in 1960s. The study of language in its social contexts means crucially the study of language variation. And one of the primary objectives of sociolinguistic research is to investigate linguistic variation as it relates to sociological factors like race, nationality, social class, religion, region, gender, etc. In socioliguistic research, gender has attracted more and more attention.The present thesis studies gender differences in word choice, pronunciation, intonation, conversational styles and strategies and explores the consequences and causes. Males and females feature different choice of words owing to their different social activities. Men tend to use more slang, swearing words and other non-standard varieties of the English language. Differences in early socialization and access to power considerably differentiate males and females' use of intonation patterns and way of pronunciation. Conversations among women tend to be cooperative and elaborative, more expressive of personal emotions; men's conversational style tends to be competitive and impersonal, more concerned with topics than with feelings. In mixed-sex interactions, men's verbosity and their frequent interruption of female speakers are signs of social dominance. The two sexes differ from each other in their use and interpretation of conversational strategies, which may cause miscommunication. Scholars have proposed various theories to account for the observed results. Based on these theories, the present thesis puts forward a multi-dimensional social context model that takes all the important factors into consideration. Gender differences and cross-sex miscommunication are therefore seen as the result of power differences, cultural differences and psychological differences.