Gender Differences Of Appraisal In Friends

Investigations of differences in language used by women and by men are not new across various disciplines. In sociolinguistics, many significant achievements have been made on this topic. However, some systematic and detailed empirical researches emerged from the second climax of Women's Rights Movement in the 1970s in the United States. Subsequent theories fall into two groups: the theory emphasizing language differences between female and male, and the theory emphasizing male's dominance in language use. In the 1970s, it was generally believed that gender is an abstract, static and polarizing social identity. Influenced by the development of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), linguists embedded social practice into the research on language and gender later on. After social context is taken into consideration, more people begin to believe that gender is a dynamic process constructed according to changing social contexts. Recent scholarship focusing on language and gender has started to introduce a newly-developed approach of SFL—Discourse Analysis (DA). In Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), insightful findings have been achieved by analyzing oral conversations (e.g., the analysis of the sexism in oral conversation).Appraisal theory is a new approach to DA in SFL, originating from Halliday's Interpersonal Framework. Halliday's evaluative system includes Modality, Polarity, and some wordings with evaluative meanings. The core system of Halliday's evaluative system is a bulky framework of Modality which is mainly realized on the plane of grammar, whereas Appraisal theory built by Martin and his colleagues is mainly embodied by lexical items. It is a system of semantic resources per se, which is concerned with the types of attitudes, the graduation of feelings, and the management of interpersonal relationships in the text. It is a hierarchical system which includes three main sub-categories: Attitude, Graduation and Engagement. This thesis intends to explore the different distribution patterns and frequencies of Appraisal resources in the female language and the male language by analyzing the scripts in situation comedy Friends.The data in this thesis are drawn randomly from the first five episodes of Friends, Season one, with a total of 17,673 words in the original scripts. Then the male and female languages of main characters in the play are grouped separately with a female text totaling 6,402 words and a male text amounting to 6,145 words. The text in the case study (female language) is from episode 7, 9 and 10 with 3,272 words after being processed. With the help of statistical tool Systemic Coder, both qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed to make a detailed analysis. The results show that this comedy involves almost all the features in Appraisal system. Striking similarities of the use of Appraisal resources in the female text and the male text are: in Attitude, the values of Affect make up the biggest proportion (24.9% in female, and 18.7% in male); in Graduation, both texts prefer Intensification (22.1% in female, and 16.9% in male); in Engagement, the most frequently used bottom categories are Deny (9.8% in female, and 10.2% in male) within Contraction and Modality (12.3% in female and 9.6% in male) within Expansion.This thesis deals with the striking female-male differences in the bottom categories of Appraisal Scheme: in Attitude, though the favored resources are centered on Affect, more Cheerful (female 5.8% > male 2.9%) and Antipathy (female 3.8% > male 1.8%) expressions are employed by women than by men after Affect system is further classified, whereas more Judgements are found in the male text than in the female text ( 10.0% vs 4%); in Graduation, the female text uses much more exclamations than the male text (6.9% vs 1.7%), and the male text tends to import more Intensification as Metaphor than the female text (1.4% vs 0.7%); in Engagement, the focus falls on Modality and Evidence—after these two categories are further classified, statistics indicate that while more evidence-based Postulations appear in the male text than in the female text (4.3% vs 1.1%), more Modal Auxiliaries and Mental Verb projections are employed by the female text than by the male text (8.0% vs 6.4%, and 3.2% vs 2.1%).At the same time, tentative explanations of the similarities and differences are offered in this thesis. The genre of situation comedy determines the characteristics of its language—frequent use of verbal humors and various rhetorical methods makes the language more emotional and attitudinal. Thus, either the female text or the male text is full of resources of Affect. Furthermore, the traditional sociolinguists' claim that women like to use emotional expressions and amplifiers can be evidenced by women's favor of Intensification in Appraisal system in this study. In addition, some other findings in this thesis agree partly with the arguments in traditional sociolinguistics: some sociolinguists remark that women are inclined to apply Modal Verbs, Mental verbs and Hedges to express uncertainties and make their speech less assertive and overconfident, but this study only finds a higher frequency of Modal Auxiliaries and Mental verbs in the female text than in the male text and does not find enough evidence to confirm that women use more Hedges than men.This thesis explores the gender differences with Appraisal approach in DA, which provides a brand-new perspective for both the study of language -gender relation and the science of DA. It is also hoped that the findings in this study can be contributive to comedy analysis. Moreover, with regard to English teaching by multi-media, its pedagogical implications are to deepen students' understanding of gender differences in English language.