An Exploration Of Cross-gender Miscommunication

The study of cross-gender communication is an essential part of intercultural communication studies. In speaking of communication between men and women, the linguist Deborah Tanmen (1981,p.92) notes, "We can usefully, at least, in a provisional fashion, say that women and men constitute two linguistic groups." Ever since the publication of Lakoff's Language and women's place in 1975, there has been an extensive study of language and gender including studies on phonological differences, vocabulary selections, conversational styles, and the studies of the issues of feminism and sexism. Recently the relationship between gender and language has become a major topic in sociolinguistic research, which has investigated the relation between gender, as an independent variable, and other linguistic variables such as status, age, ethnicity, etc.This paper, based on the theories of interactonal sociolinguistics related to discourse analysis, attempts to study cross-gender miscommunication systematically and objectively. This paper focuses on various aspects of cross-gender miscommunication, their causes and the methods to solve them in terms of two theoretical backgrounds, one Gumperz's "contextualization cues", and the other Scollons'"ideology of discourse". This study employs the corpora selected from a novel The golden notebook written by British writer Doris Lessing who won Nobel Prize in 2008. The protagonists Anna and Saul, along with their friends, families, colleagues in real life, and the figures just imagined or created, discuss their lives, causes, professions, and dreams in a relatively small world. This book is rich in description of female words, mood and attitudes which reflect the protagonists' inner struggles and spiritual conflicts where gender difference is an eternal theme of the story. Some comparatively typical texts selected from this novel will serve to help explore the cross-gender miscommunication following three parts:(i) when do cross-gender miscommunications occur?(ii) Why do cross-gender miscommunications happen and develop?(iii) In which ways do we improve cross-gender communication competence?This thesis will be composed of six chapters. Chapter One will give a brief introduction which includes the background, objectives, significance of this study, and the layout of this thesis.Chapters Two will present the literature of this study in which a historical studies on gender difference will be given. It concludes the merits and limits from the previous related studies and put forward the new angle and strengthen of this study:on the one hand, the corpora selected from The golden notebook are typical and meaningful which help to achieve dynamic study of cross-gender miscommunication; on the other hand, this thesis explores the aspects and causes of cross-gender miscommunication systemically and comes up with a good idea for the problem of cross-gender miscommunication.Chapter Three is concerned with the theoretical preliminaries focusing on theories of interactional sociolinguistic theories, or rather of Gumperz's theory of Contextualization cues and Scollons'theory of Ideology of Discourse, combining with the analysis theories of dominance approach and (Lakoff,1975) difference approach (Maltz and Borker, 1982).The most important part of this thesis lies in Chapters 4 and 5, in which a detailed analysis of cross-gender miscommunication will come out with the examples from the Golden Notebook. In these chapters, the various aspects of cross-gender miscommunication will be analyzed from perspectives of interpretive frameworks, conversational styles and conversational strategies, discussing when cross-gender miscommunications occur; and they attempt to explain the causes of cross-gender miscommunications and the methods to resolve them. There have been two aspects of causes:One is related to social contexts according to which cross-gender miscommunications are original from the Utilitarian discourse system and historical reality; the other is related to personal value inclinations including gender identity and gender gaps in communication. The ways of improving cross-gender communication competence are as follows:(i) Understanding the opposite value inclination(ii) Avoiding the influence of negative transferringIn Chapter 6 come some conclusions:(i) Cross-gender miscommunication is an inevitable phenomenon in conversations which may produce certain destructive power.(ii) Cross-gender miscommunication is mainly aroused by the cultural conflict between men and women.(iii) This study aims at arousing the people to be aware of language usage in gendered situations and helping people find proper way to improve cross-gender communication competence, and in that connection, this study is expected to promote social harmony, ensure fair education and enrich intercultural communication theory.In summary, gender difference is a part of natural phenomenon in human society, and the miscommunication should be understood in the sense of convergence of humanity spirit. Behind different communication ways, there always exists a range of similar human nature, i.e., the humanity spirit of likes or dislikes, happiness or sadness, anger or delight, etc.