A Study Of Gender Language In Grey’s Anatomy From The Perspective Of Constructionism

Gender language is a special social phenomenon and it is dominated by the cultural system. It can give us some information about social culture and background; mirror the relationships and concepts in the society. The study of the gender language makes us learn more about the society.The relationship between language and gender has been a hot topic in linguistics since the emergence of women’s social movement in1960s. A lot of scholars have made great efforts on the study of language and gender. However, the data and results they got from the study seem to suggest that they have neglected the specific characteristics of each speech activity, which makes the results of the researches too general. In addition, the reason for the difference in gender language is still under discussion and thus there is no way to reach a conclusion on this topic. This thesis aims to make a specific study of two highly gendered speech activities:gossip and argument in TV series Grey s Anatomy from the perspective of constructionism. And by this study we can, on the one hand, understand the characteristics of gender language in this TV series, which will to some extent reveal the trend of gender language; on the other hand, understand the underlying reasons for these characteristics.The ideas that men and women are equal have been greatly advocated in modern society, and women’s way of thinking has become increasingly open. Therefore, the society has to reconstruct their gender identity. In Grey’s Anatomy, all the girls are elites in the society. They dare to express their own opinions with sharp words, which indicates that in modern society, women are getting more and more discourse power. Gender language has certain generality, but it also has its particularity. The usage of language is influenced not only by gender, but also by other factors such as individual cognitive pattern, psychological emotions and personality. We cannot deny that there are men who speak like Lin Daiyu and women who speak like Zhang Fei.This thesis consists of six chapters:Chapter One provides a brief introduction to the background of the study and the organization of the thesis. In addition, the purpose and significance of the study are also presented.Chapter Two gives the definition of some basic and important terms in the thesis. It also gives an overview of previous studies on language and gender both at home and abroad.Chapter Three presents a detailed introduction to constructionism, especially social constructionism, which is the main theory used in the thesis, including the development, different schools of constructionism, and social constructionists’ideas on language and gender.Chapter Four makes an explanation of the research methodology, including data collection and data analysis. In this chapter, sixty mixed gender conversations are chosen randomly from the TV series Grey’s Anatomy. Half of them are gossip examples and the other half are argument examples. This thesis adopts quantitative method. It makes an analysis of the randomly-chosen sixty conversations in terms of interruption, silence and amount of speech which are three rules in conversation based on the analytical framework of conversation analysis and distribution calculation.Chapter Five focuses on two speech activities:gossip and argument which are highly gendered. And meanwhile, conversation principles are employed to analyze the characteristics of these two speech activities. What the analysis shows is as follows:In the speech activity gossip, men and women are both relatively cooperative. They use fewer interruptions and are likely to obey the norms of conversation. In argument both men and women do not seem so friendly and cooperative. Men use more interruptions as a strategy to get the floor in argument. What is more, the use of interruption is not only influenced by gender, but also by power.As to the amount of speech it is surprisingly found that in the13randomly-chosen gossip examples men speak more than women. This is totally against the former stereotype in people’s mind. Men do gossip and sometimes they gossip more than women do. But in argument sample analysis, the result seems to conform to the stereotype that women speak more than men and women are chatterboxes. From another perspective it shows that women get more and more discourse power in argument and they are as reasonable and intelligent as men.Also, it is found that the total amount of their use of silence is almost the same, but the purpose differs a lot. Men tend to use silence to show their strong emotions or their understanding while women use silence more frequently when they do not know what to say.Chapter Six summarizes the major findings of the study, points out the limitations of the research and gives further suggestions for the future study on language and gender.