A Study Of Politeness Strategy In Female Conflict Talk In Desperate Housewives

Gender differences in language use have been researched for many years, andscholars have been focusing on the features of female speech; politeness strategy isone of the focuses. Taking Brown and Levinson’ s politeness strategy as the analysisframework, this paper will make a study of how and why these strategies are appliedby the women in Desperate Housewives when women are in conflict talks.The paper aims to conduct quantitative analysis to examine the frequencies ofdifferent politeness strategies and adopt qualitative analysis to find out the possiblereasons for women’s uttering politeness strategies.The paper aims to answer the following questions: What politeness strategies areused by the housewives when they are in conflict talks in Desperate Housewives?What are the possible reasons for women’ s application of these strategies?The results show that in order to ease conflicts, women employ both positivepoliteness strategies and negative strategies with quite similar proportions. Threepositive strategies are favored by women in Desperate Housewives, which are “usingin-group identity maker”,“avoiding disagreement” and “including both speaker andhearer in the activity”. And two salient strategies of negative strategies are “hedges”and “apologizing”.Reasons for women’ s uttering politeness strategies can be summarized as:Biologically, men are more powerful than women, and weakness in biological natureand vocal organ lead women speaking with less vigor; Since women are more inclinedto sense the flow of the communication in advance than men, women are more willingto emphasize their emotions and more sensitive, and their strong sense of self-imagelead them to speak in a more indirect and polite way; Women have been forced to beat a marginal position in society due to the long-term control of patriarchy, and their powerless status in society leads them to avoid expression of feeling yet to favorexpression of uncertainty.