Gender Differences In Conflict Management Strategies In Television Talk Shows: A Case Study

This research tries to analyze conflict management strategies adopted by men and women and the differences manifested in this process and elaborate the reasons for gender differences from the sociolinguistic perspective. The data used in this research are video-taped from the talk show programs presentd on CCTV and some local TV stations. This paper follows the convention of conversational analysis in the collection, transcription and analysis of the data. This research integrates qualitative and quantitative research methods to support the presentation of a more complete understanding of gender differences in conflict management strategies. This study finds that males'use of direct disagreement strategy accounts for 54.55% of the total and doubles that of females. On the other hand, women participants'use of mitigation markers accounts for 45.24% of the total while male participants'use of them accounts for only 25%. Similarly, women's use of mollifiers accounting for 28.5% is also higher than that of men by 8.12%. This paper tries to elaborate these gender differences in conflict management strategies from two perspectives: power and politeness principle. The author points out that in the context of talk shows, men's employment of more direct disagreement strategies reflects their intention to impress the audience and increase their status or prestige. By contrast, women are more concerned with solidarity and connection with the addressed participants. This research makes an attempt to investigate conflict talk in a new perspective and offers a new approach to the analysis of gender differences in media discourse.