Gender Construction Of The Men And Women Guests In ’Let’s Go Dating’-a Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Gender and language studies have experienced a long history. Scholars dividedthe gender and language studies into four kinds according to the four differentapproaches adopted in the studies: the deficit approach, the dominance approach, thedifference approach and the social constructivist approach. The former threeapproaches are based on the common epistemology: the essentialist dichotomy of sex.According to this view, men and women are born different inherently. Scholars whohave this epistemology in the gender and language studies invariably seek thedifferences in the language used by men and women. They differ only in theexplanation of the gender differences in language use. The social constructivistapproach has a different epistemology which views gender as a social construction.According to this view, men can demonstrate femininity and women can showmasculinity; gender is not static but in constant dynamic construction. When gettingrid of the prejudice of the dichotomy of the sex, studies adopting the socialconstructivist approach find men and women are similar in language use.Appraisal theory develops from the interpersonal metafunction of the SystemicFunctional Grammar. It is concerned with the linguistic resources by whichtexts/speakers come to evaluate, express attitude, negotiate and naturalize particularinter-subjective positions. Since it comes into being, it has been applied to variousregisters and discourse domains.This thesis adopts the appraisal theory as the theoretical framework to makeanalysis of the transcript of the popular dating program ‘Let’s Go Dating’ from theperspective of the constructivist epistemology. The thesis studies whether there aresignificant differences in attitude, engagement and graduation systems in thetranscripts of men’s and women’s utterances in the program. And it also explores thevarious Chinese vocabularies to realize the appraisal.The research is done in quantitative and qualitative methods. The thesis firstly drew the tables of the amount of the attitude, engagement and graduation resources inmen and women guests’ utterances. Then the data was put in SPSS software to maketest of normality and independent sample T test to see whether there are significantdifferences in the three subsystems of the appraisal framework. Besides, as thecomplement of the quantitative method, the qualitative method is used to list andmake interpretation of the examples of the various linguistic realizations of theattitude, engagement and graduation systems.The thesis finds that there are not significant differences with regard to theamount of attitude, engagement and graduation used in men’s and women’s utterances.Because the study is done from the social constructivist perspective, it gets rid of theprejudice of the dichotomy of the sex. And the thesis focuses on the transcript of thepopular TV program ‘Let’s Go Dating’. It reveals the gender construction of the menand women guests with respect to the expression of attitude and negotiation ofinter-subjective positions in the special context of dating.