A Study Of Female Language Features In Desperate Housewives

People are inventors and users of language, so it is inevitable that there exists gender difference in language. Females'special character, such as being mothers, the main organizers and undertakers in our daily life; the majority of teachers are females, and so on, makes female language a super dour life-force. Its influence and permeability greatly surpass male language. To some extent, female language represents norms of language and the direction of the future development of language. As a result, the study on female language feature will help linguists to predict the future development tendency of language, and at the same time, it will play an instructive role in our daily language teaching.Desperate Housewives, aired by American Broadcasting Company, is a darkly comic series about the secret lives of Bree, Gabrielle, Lynette, Susan and the other ladies living on Wisteria Lane and became an instant breakthrough hit when it premiered in the fall 2004. This series is made up of three seasons and each season includes twenty-three episodes. Each one lasts 20 to 25 minutes. And every episode has its own topic; in addition, women's talk is one of the most attractive features of this TV series. So this TV show is appropriate to do linguistic researches.This paper is an interdisciplinary study of sociolinguistics, stylistics and pragmatics. The author takes Desperate Housewives, the popular American TV series, as the subject of study, and from the two levels of pragmatics and stylistics, makes deep and extensive studies on the female language feature of Desperate Housewives. From stylistic perspective, taking related theories and knowledge of stylistics, the paper analyzes the lexical and syntactical features of female language; from linguistic perspective, taking pragmatic theories, especially the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle as the analytical framework, the author intends to investigate how the pragmatic principles and their concomitant maxims are violated or observed in the conversations of the characters in Desperate Housewives, and then find out the female language features in the aspect of conversation. Methodologically speaking, the author conducts qualitative analysis as well as quantitative analysis approach to study the distributions and frequencies of characters'language in Desperate Housewives.Through complete and careful analyses of the selected language materials, the author makes the following conclusions:Stylistically speaking, firstly, female characters incline to use intensifiers, expletives and extravagant adjectives more frequently than male characters. Secondly, female characters prefer to use modulation (hedges) and tag questions. Besides, the author also finds additional features: the heroines selected like to use interjections such as oh, ah, uh, wow, and so on, the frequency of using hesitations like"I…uh…"and the repetition of the same word is higher than the two heroes.Pragmatically speaking, female characters can give sufficient and relevant response to the question of the other party and can observe the Cooperative Principle, while male characters cannot give response in accordance with the maxims of the Cooperative Principle and often violate the CP. In addition, females incline to observe the Politeness Principle by using questions, requests, embedded imperatives and indirect expressions, but males like to use more imperatives and directives and tend to violate the Politeness Principle.The innovational point of this thesis is that, the author selects the TV series Desperate Housewives as analyzing material, whose language is more approachable to our real life, which is different from the traditional and classical English novels in language forms. So the study results of this thesis are more valid and persuasive.