A Study On Gender Differences In Language Use About The Hero And The Heroine In EMMA

A lot of researches show that gender factors influence on people's linguistic behavior. The research on gender linguistic features helps people eliminate the people's communication problems and promote cross-gender communication.This thesis takes the novel Emma as the research object. And Austen was good at making use of describing dialogues among characters to develop the plot. In the novel Emma, all characters'striking individualism^ are portrayed vividly, and based on the main clue of love; Emma is full of conversations between men and women. The characters'languages not only highlight their own characteristics but also contain sarcasm, which provides a lot of materials for the research of gender utterance.This study has been done from two aspects:the first one is lexical and syntactical features of males and females language in the field of linguistics; the second one is to adopting some pragmatic theories, especially the Cooperative Principle, and the Politeness Principle to investigate how the pragmatic maxim are observed or violated in Emma and to find out the characteristics of characters in Emma in their speeches.Through the analyses of the language materials in Emma, the author makes the following conclusions:In linguistic system, the female characters incline to use intensifiers, expletives and extravagant adjectives more frequently than the male characters. Secondly, the female characters prefer to hedges and tag questions. Besides, the author also finds that the female characters selected like to use interjections to express the emotions. Compared with the female characters, the male characters are more direct and less to express feelings. Pragmatically speaking, the female characters can give sufficient and relevant response to the question of the other party and can observe the Cooperative Principle, while the male characters cannot give response in accordance with the maxims of the Cooperative Principle and often violate the CP. It indicates that females are more cooperative than males in their communication.