A Study On Features And Pragmatic Failures Of Gender Language In Cross-gender Communication

In China, the study of gender language began in the1970s, mainly focusing onpsychology, philosophy, sociolinguistics and pragmatics. But researches from theperspective of cross-cultured communication were a little bit limited. However, in theWest, in the early20thcentury, people began to pay much attention to the genderlanguage problem and have more interest in it. A Denmark linguist, O. Jespersen, tookthe initiative in studying the gender language from the perspective of linguistics.Compared with studies by Chinese researchers, the previous study of gender languageby the westerners was insightful. Thus, with those abundant linguistic materials andsophisticated equipments, westerners obtained many achievements in the study ofcharacteristics of gender language and reasons why gender language came into being.In pragmatic failures, Thomas firstly divided pragmatic failures into twocategories: one is the pragma-linguistic failure and the other is the socio-pragmaticfailure. And some Chinese researchers ever argued in their essays that pragmaticfailures could include two aspects, that is, inter-lingual pragmatic failure andintra-lingual pragmatic failure. In this way, people continued the study of pragmaticfailures in China.With the increasing exchanges around the globe, the world has become a smallvillage. Therefore, cross-cultured communication in the recent years has got muchdevelopment and researchers in respective fields began to study and analyze their ownproblems from the perspective of cross-cultured communication. The differencesbetween man and woman are rooted in different physiological structures, and men andwomen are the two main groups in the world with their own cultural backgrounds andthinking patterns. In other words, the cross-gender communication can be counted asa kind of cross-culture communication. So cross-gender communication has become abranch of cross-cultured communication, and has gotten more and more attentionfrom researchers.This thesis, in accordance with cross-gender communication, applies Grice’scooperative principle and Leech’s politeness principle to the study the gender language, based on a lot of statistics and materials from life, and analyzes the culturaldifferences and causes resulting from male and female sexual ideology incross-gender communication, as well as ways to avoid intra-lingual pragmatic failuresin cross-gender communication. Only in this way can we overcome the difficultiesand miscommunication between males and females, and make our cross-gendercommunication successful.This thesis is divided into four chapters.Chapter One mainly focuses on the overview of gender language and pragmaticfailures and the theoretical foundation of this thesis.Chapter Two mainly analyzes the features of gender language in communicationand the similarities and differences of gender language, based on different materialsfrom different contexts.Chapter Three studies the intra-lingual pragmatic failures and their differentcauses in cross-gender communication.Chapter Four mainly discusses and tries to find different ways to avoidmiscommunication in cross-gender communication.Through the study of gender language in cross-gender communication and itspragmatic failures in gender language, this thesis tries to find the strategies to avoidintra-lingual pragmatic failures and reduce the communication failures to furtherfoster the success of cross-gender communication from the perspective of psychologyand intercultural communication. Thus, it is of significance to study the pragmaticfailures，by which we can avoid the miscommunication to enhance successfulcross-gender communication.