| This thesis is not going to focus on the gender differences as most gender-language studies have done. The author wants to draw readers' attention to the negative effect of the stereotypical differences between men and women. Therefore, the challenge to gender stereotypes is the main point of this paper.Gender is a social constructed category, a joint achievement in interaction. Conversation Analysis (CA) is based fundamentally on interaction as a joint activity. In interaction, CA is concerned with how participants produce joint achievements such as conversational openings and closings, requests and responses, etc. Based on the theories of sociolinguistics and pragmatics this thesis approaches gender interactions from the perspectives of conversation structure, conversation strategy and conversation style. All linguistic data under scrutiny are derived from dialogues in movies and TV series.Conversation structure is the natural structure that language follows. This paper challenges the former studies of more turns offered by women. The analysis in the thesis shows that under certain circumstances, men could also offer more turns than women in inter-gender conversations.Conversation strategy refers to the verbal, paraverbal and non-verbal signs that help speakers understand the full meaning of their interlocutors' utterances in context. It is assumed that men tend to use more bold disagreements, and less rising tones in inter-gender conversations. Statistics in this thesis show that the assumptions are not so absolutely accurate.Conversation style is the speaker's natural way of speaking. The previous researches seem to hold that men prefer more impersonal topics and less backchannels than women. However, in this paper, data are collected to show inconformity with the previous researches.This thesis relates the pragmatic features to social roles assigned to women and men in the society. The ultimate goal of this analysis is to minimize the... |
