Critical Analyses On The Power Relationship In Cross-sex Conversation-in The Speech Community Of A Dream Of Red Mansions

The relationship between language and gender has been proposed and argued constantly in the vicissitudes of history. It was once related to the religious factors, becoming a mysterious phenomenon, difficult to ascertain. It was once the result of wars among the tribes, providing historical witness for the nations' bloody conquest. In the eyes of modern feminists, language is full of the evidences that men enslave women; while the post-modern philosophers hold that the display of the relationship between language and gender offers completely new train of thought to the academic research, which overturns the traditional concept in a fairly large scale. Up until today, the research on the differences between language and gender is still a focusing point argued and concerned in sociolinguistics and has became an irreplaceable independent branch.The research on the gender style as a variation of language began in the early 70s, 20th century. The representative of that period was the paper Language and Women's Places written by R.Lakoff in 1973. Lakoff held that men's speech act was strong, resolute, advantageous and convincing. On the contrary, women's was subordinate, self-denial and depreciated. The research pointed that compared with men's language style, women like using some special words for emphasis; frequently using words with emotion to show their love and sorrow; using more standard pronunciation and foreign intonation; and also using some hedges or ambiguous modifiers, etc.This thesis beginning with the traits of women's style, depending on the theoretical knowledge in linguistics of feminism, sexism, speech community, power relationship and the extension of framework of interpersonal function in functional grammar etc, further studies the complicated language phenomena in cross-sex conversation.A Dream of Red Mansions is the highest peak of art in Chinese classical novels. Her language, takes the official language, Beijing Dialect at that timeas its base, extensively absorbs living slang, vulgarism as well as some regional dialect. Besides, the traditional language achievements in poesy, essay and other useful components are skillfully applied. This language is highly mature and perfect, embodies the greatest accomplishment of classical novels. Taking the speech community of A Dream of Red Mansions as the concrete research target, adopting the methods of comparison and contrast, quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, with a number of examples and objective statistics, this thesis critically analyzes the abnormal situation in cross-sex conversation in the concrete language environment.Chapter Five is the core of this thesis. With statistics, the author finds out that in the speech community of A Dream of Red Mansions, the total of the direct cross-sex conversation is 511. From the content of the conversation, the number that men and women are in the equal position in the cross-sex conversation is 301, occupying 58.9% of the total; the number that women have more power is 194, occupying 38% of the total; the number that men have more power is 16, occupying 3.1% of the total. Moreover, women's language presents some traits of men's language and even taboo words are used. This is complete contradictory to the traditional opinion that men take a leading role in the cross-sex conversation.Therefore, the author deems that the differences of gender language are extremely complex and fairly flexible. Nothing is absolute in real conversation and concrete context is quite important. Language and society are interdependent. The criterion of social behavior determines the guide line of language use, while the use of language from the other side reflects the thought, attitude and culture of society. Society is multi-dimensioned, and everyone in it will form certain kind of social relationship with other people around according to age, profession, sex, etc, which constitutes different but comparatively stable social groups. In each social group, the social behavior and language use have their unique rules, to certai...