A Contrastive Study Of Female Language Features In Speech Act Between English And Chinese

Speech Act Theory is a very important theory in pragmatics. It was founded by the British philosopher J. Austin in 1950s and was developed by Searle. In this paper, Searle's classification of illocutionary act will be applied to analyze language data. Searle classifies illocutionary act into assertives, directives, commissives. expressives and declarations. In sociolinguistics, the study of gender differences in language use constitutes one very important aspect. Scholars both abroad and at home have made researches on female features in language use and have drawn conclusions mainly in the aspects of phonology, lexis and syntax.In the process of the literary survey, it was found that in the past study most efforts were made to study the theory. And most of the researches were done in the gender differences in English. Comparatively, the researches in Chinese are considerably inadequate. The originalities of this paper are: (1) This paper makes a contrastive study of the female features in language use on the basis of a case study of two typical heroines in two classical novels written by two influential female American and Chinese writers. (2) Searle's classification of illocutionary act is applied to the classification of language data. The purpose of this paper is to check the previous conclusions and to make a contrastive study of the English and Chinese female language features.This paper collects language data from the English novel The Age of Innocence written by the female American writer Edith Wharton and the Chinese novel Banshengyuan by the female Chinese writer Zhang Ailing. The two female writers share similar family background and life experiences. Moreover, the structures and the heroines' stories in the two novels are quite alike. Therefore, the language data are comparable. The speeches of the heroines' in these two novels are classified into six categories, but Searle's declaration category lacks. And the comprehensive category is specifically designed for those speeches that do not belong to any of the categories made by Searle. So, the final categories are assertives, directives, commissives, expressives and comprehensives. The comprehensive...