A Study Of Female Language Expression Features In Sex And The City

Language comes into being, exists and develops in order to meet therequirements of social communication. Human beings are creators and users oflanguage as well, so it is undoubted that there exist differences in gender language,which have aroused wide concern in the linguistics circle. During the process ofprevious studies, researchers found that compared to male’s language, female’slanguage has its unique form of expression due to the special roles they played indaily life, such as being mothers, central organizers and undertakers in daily life; mostteachers are females, etc. Consequently, women’s language stands for lingualstandards as well as the direction of future development in aspect of language to someextent. In other words, the study on expression features of female language willfacilitate linguists predicting the growing trend of language development.Sex and the City, aired by Home Box Office (HBO), depicts the story of Carrie,Miranda, Charlotte and Amanda, four30-year-old ladies living in Manhattan, NewYork City to find true love and experience happiness and sorrows of life in metropolis.In this TV series, the four fashionable and charming heroines exude full-bodied tingeof modern urban single ladies, and their setbacks and problems confronted inrelationships are reflected as well. Therefore, Sex and the City has caused intense andwidespread resonance among more and more urban population since it premiered inthe summer1998. This series is composed of six seasons with each one includingabout twelve episodes. Every episode lasts20to25minutes. And women’s talk is oneof the most fascinating features of this TV series, which is quite suitable for linguisticresearches. Considering the required length of the thesis, the author has selected thelines appeared in the Season I of the TV series Sex and the City as linguistic data. The author takes Sex and the City as the study object and carries out theextensive and deep study on expression features of female language in it from twoaspects of sociolinguistics and pragmatics respectively. Meanwhile, the presentresearch also belongs to the category of multidisciplinary study. First of all, throughidentifying the purpose of daily communication for women, four features of womentalks concerning equality, the presence of questions, responsiveness, tentativenessobserved by Wood has been used as theoretical basis to explore the expression featureof female language in the TV series. This can be regarded as the analysis fromsociolinguistic perspective. Equality indicates that women would like to share thesimilar experience or have identical opinions in order to make the other party feelrelieved during interaction. Besides, the talks among the four female characters arequite common in the series which signifies nowadays females have the tendency toexpress themselves straightforward especially in the conversations of their owngender. Since they know each other very well, the friendship and intimacy will not beaffected even if any of them speaks out the different voices during communication. Inthe presence of questions, it is found that women tend to use questions of all kindsmore frequently than men do, which help females to get a better understanding of theother party as well as to initiate a new topic or keep interaction going on smoothly.Moreover, euphemistic questions have been analyzed in detail, which also contributeto showing women’s concern for saving other’s face in conversation. The feature ofresponsiveness presents that females are inclined to provide positive feedback onwhat others have said which can make others feel valued and respected. The authoralso notices the frequency of interjections appeared in women’s replying words suchas “Ah”,“Oh”,“Eh” and so on facilitates in expressing their strong feelings. However,the employment of strong expletives embodies the trend of women’s languagebecoming gradually masculine and much more approachable to male’s. In terms oftentativeness, it consists of three sub-sections concerning hedges, intonation and tagquestion, which further explains the phenomenon that women prefer to expressthemselves in an implicit way. It can be inferred from the thesis that verbal hedgesoccur more frequently in females’ language, which is consistent with the findings observed by Lakoff. The second part verifies females’ language differ from male’sgreatly in terms of intonation. It has been proved that women feel like using risingintonation so as to exemplify their heartfelt kindness to the other party. The study oftag questions are more frequently adopted by women to make certain of what they aresaying as well as leave the conversation open for further discussion.As to pragmatic analysis, since females usually take active part in the talks andoffer response sufficiently, authentically and correlatively, they tend to abide byCooperative Principle. On the contrary, males fail to offer proper answers to thequestion of the other party in many cases, so they are more likely to flout the CP.Speaking of Politeness Principle, on the one hand, female characters are used to makea request or suggestion by raising a question in euphemistic way, on the other hand,they often prefer to give and receive compliments during interpersonalcommunication. Moreover, females are expert in expressing agreement and sympathyto show their courtesy. However, males generally do not possess the abovecharacteristics. Thus we can say women tend to observe the Politeness Principlewhereas men violate it. In addition, through the investigation the author also finds thatwomen attach a great deal of importance to save other’s face in daily conversation.That is to say, they try to avoid touching sensitive topic in which embarrassment mayoccur.Although the objective of this thesis aims to study on women’s language, it isstill necessary to see the issue from broader viewpoint which refers to genderlanguage in that the features of women’s language could only be distinctive andprominent with the comparison to men’s language. That is why a lot of researcheshave been carried out to investigate the language differences between the two genders.The novelty of this thesis lies in through the combination of the traditional theoreticalframework with lines of modern TV drama, the language expression features of malesand females have been compared and analyzed from perspectives of sociolinguisticsand pragmatics, so that the results will be more real and further reflect the variety ofideology forms of today’s social life in the United States. At the same time, it is foundthat equality and the presence of questions proposed by Wood has some connections with Cooperative Principle; while responsiveness and tentativeness reflect the essenceof Politeness Principle and Face Theory. Therefore, it can be seen that the relationshipamong different subjects of linguistics is inextricably linked and complementary toeach other. The author is sincerely in hopes of making people better understandwestern thought and culture as well as familiarize with the principles and strategies incross-cultural communication according to the present research. Moreover, this thesisis expected to be beneficial to promote future study on expression features of femalelanguage and relevant field.