An Empirical Study On Influence Of The Other’s Gender On Speaker’s Conversational Style In Two-perwon Conversations

The chief founder of conversation analysis school, Harvey Sacks (1974),argues that the conversation is the most common form of human behaviorsand the study of real conversational material could reveal more social rulesthan traditional introspective method. Linguists should understand the finestructure of conversation, and pay attention to language structures of theactivities in which participants engaged through the analysis of conversationswhich are taking place in communication.The relationship between language and gender is always a hot topicstudied by linguists, and the studies about it mainly focus on the followingaspects: the difference between women’s speech and men’s speech,conversations between women and men, sex-related differences in languageuse by children and so on. However, there is hardly any research studying onthe relationship between the gender and the conversational analysis.In this thesis, the influence of the other person’s gender on the speaker’s conversational style in two-person conversations is studied based on thetheory of Conversation Analysis put forward by Sacks by three conversationalstyle variables: the interruption and overlap, the minimal feedback and theamount of talks.The conversations in Ming Xing Zai Xian and Fei Chang Jing Ju Li werechosen as the subjects to study the influence of the other’s gender on theconversational style of male/female.15groups of conversations between thesame gender and other15between different genders were collected, andmean value and independent T-test were done through SPSS17.0to study theinfluence of the other’s gender on the conversational style of male. The sameapproach was used to analyze impact on female ones. In the hope of figuringout the reason for this influence,10guys and10girls in library of the NorthUniversity of China were interviewed and here comes the conclusion: thereare influences of the other’s gender on the three conversational style variables,the interruption and overlap, the minimal feedback and the amount of talks ofboth male and female; the influences of the other’s gender on the amount oftalks of both male and female are significant, and the the influences of the other’s gender on the other conversational style variables are not significant;the main reasons for the influence are social factor, cultural factor andpsychological factor.