A Study Of Gender Differences In Language Use In Pride And Prejudice

Previous studies mainly take Pride and Prejudice as a whole to analyze, forexample, they investigate the personalities of characte rs by analyzing what they havedone and what information they convey but not focusing on what typical features oflanguage they use. It finds that the language used by characters in Pride and Prejudiceindicates gender differences which can reveal typical personalities of characters tosome extent. Thus, this thesis aims to analyze gender differences embodied in thelanguage used by male and female characters and probe into the diversifiedcharacteristics of main characters from the view of sociolinguistics, which can helpreaders have a more comprehensive understanding about the classic English novel.In the early1960s, the studies concentrated on language and gender have beengetting more and more attentions with the foundation and development ofsociolinguistics and prosperity of feminism. At that time, Language and Woman’sPlace written by Robin Lakoff has become milestone in the process of research,making people realize the striking features of female language and the closerelationship between language and gender. This thesis will select Lakoff’s theory andConversation Analysis as theoretical foundation, adopting quantitative and qualitativeapproaches, to explore the gender differences in language use in Pride and Prejudicefrom static and dynamic aspects.In order to make a relatively comprehensive study, the data of this thesis is madeup of108sentences uttered by male and female characters and10different stagesexcerpted from61chapters. The former data is used for static analysis and the latter isfor dynamic analysis. The results of discussion show, compared with daily utterancesand conversations, the gender differences in language use in Pride and Prejudice arethe combination of “similarity” and “particularity”. The similarity is the differences inthe novel mainly keep the accordance with the previous studies on social interactionsfrom the static perspective. In this way, the features of genders are portrayed typicallyto present a real country life to some extent for readers. The particularity is the original dualistic opposition of gender differences is broke by rebuilding andchanging characters’ speech styles to highlight the unique personalities in the novel.