Interpersonal Meaning Of Genderlect Differences In Political Debates

Gender-linked linguistic difference is a hot topic which attracts the attention of the scholars in all the fields. Some researchers (Lakoff,1975; Crosby&Nyquist,1977) contend that there are significant differences in linguistic forms and communication styles used by males and females. However, some other researchers (Bradley,1981; Tannen,1984) argue that no sufficient evidence suggests that there are striking differences in the ways that women and men use language. It is suggested that the previous research findings are inconsistent and contradictory to each other. The reason why scholars draw the contradictory conclusions is that the impact of other factors on the choice of linguistic forms and speech styles such as social status, power relation and situational context is ignored when they conduct the investigation of language and gender. Thus, the author investigates the features of language used by females and males who are at the same status and of equal power in the same context of situation. Besides, more and more women take part in the political fields, occupying the same important positions as men. There are many researches on linguistic forms and communication styles used by female politicians. However, there are few scholars conducting the comparative analysis of linguistic features of female politicians and male politicians. As Lakoff (2004) mentioned that women who lack power by comparison with men tend to use powerless language. Therefore, it is assumed that women who have the same power as men will use the language in a similar way like men. Considering the above factors, the author explores the gender differences in language used by female politicians and male politicians. In order to fulfill the present study, the author extracts the data from the language used by Obama and Hillary in their debates for vying for Democratic presidential nomination in2008, and the language utilized by Biden and Palin in the vice-presidential debate, and speeches of Bachmann and Gingrich in2012Republican presidential primary debates. Through the analysis of the texts mentioned above, the paper investigates the question whether there exist differences between male politicians’and female politicians’linguistic styles and linguistic forms in political debates.Language, as a communication tool, can realize many functions. Halliday summarizes these functions of language as three meta-functions:ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Interpersonal function indicates that language is used to interact with other people, to establish and maintain social relations with them, to influence their behavior, to express our own viewpoint on things in the world, and to elicit or change theirs (Hu Zhuanglin, Zhu Yongsheng, Zhang Delu,&Li Zhangzi,2008). Interpersonal function can be realized by three ways:mood, modality, and key. Modality is the main method of realizing the interpersonal function. The main method of realizing modality is modal verbal operators. Apart from above methods, person system can also realize the interpersonal meaning, representing the relationship between speaker and listener. Interpersonal function provides a new angle for the analysis of political discourse and the theoretical framework for the study of gender differences in political debates. Therefore, the thesis investigates the distribution of the modal verbal operators and the person pronouns in female politicians’and male politicians’speeches, the interpersonal meanings conveyed by them, and the differences in the communication styles of male politicians and female politicians.Through the quantitative and the qualitative analyses of the data and the texts about the political debates held by female politicians and male politicians, the thesis obtains the following conclusions: Firstly, most of the modal verbal operators are similarly distributed in female and male speeches, among which, median value modal operators are much more preferred than modal verbal operators with high value and low value. Besides, first-person singular pronoun Ⅰ is used most frequently in both females’ and males’ discourse.Secondly, low value modal verbal operators are preferred by women than high value modal verbal operators in women’s discourse, meanwhile, female politicians use high value modal verbal operators less frequently than male politicians. On the contrary, high value modal verbal operators are preferred than low value modal verbal operators in males’ discourse. Besides, women favor the use of the personal pronoun exclusive-we while men prefer the use of the personal pronoun inclusive-we.Thirdly, concerned with similarities and differences, it is found that in the situation such as political debate where there is no significant difference in female politicians’ and male politicians’ discourse; gender character is relatively blurred; there is no clear boundary between women’s linguistic style and men’s linguistic style, their linguistic styles take on the tendency of neutralization and sometimes exchanged. The reason is that in political debates, male politicians and female politicians play the similar roles, endowed with similar political power or social status, debating around the similar or the same topics.