Investigating Negotiability In Romantic Conversations From An Interpersonal Perspective

“Gender and Language” has long been the research focus in sociolinguistics. Initially gender was regarded as a default category and much emphasis was put on genderlect differences. As the exploration into this field was being deepened, the relation between gender and language turned to be investigated in different contexts and then, under the influence of constructivism, was no longer thought of as onefold or invariable, but as a re-occurring achievement constructed in interactions. Along with the perception of genderlect nature evolved, research perspectives shifted from traditional grammar to socio-psycholinguistics and to Conversation Analysis.A new angle the present study takes—from Interpersonal Function in Systemic Functional Grammar—to extend the interpretation of gendered language, a kind of social construct in interactions, for this theory particularly concerns the interactive part of language and relates lexico-grammatical resources to a way of reflecting social relations and exerting interpersonal functions. As genderlects vary with contexts, this research only explores the conversations between the two genders in romantic relationship, which can be called “romantic conversations”, with respect to negotiability, one essential part in Interpersonal Function.The daily conversations between men and women in all stages of love in the film He’s Just Not That into You are selected to establish the corpus for the current study. Quantitative, qualitative as well as comparative methods are adopted to analyze resources of negotiability in type, amount, distribution and effect, and structure of negotiability within the turn and in the conversational process. With the characteristics of negotiability in the romantic conversations being revealed, the similarities and differences between the two genders are compared, and their contributions to negotiations are investigated.The major findings in this thesis are as follows:Firstly, the grammatical resources to realize negotiability are in variety, relatively large quantity and extensive distribution. Overall, the resources to increase negotiability are slightly more than the ones to decrease it, while the frequency of each resource varies. As to the different types of negotiable structure within the turn, “saturation” tops in four horizontal types, while “antagonism” is more employed compared to another vertical structure. The structure of negotiability in the conversational process is presented as an irregular wave.Secondly, the general picture of males? negotiability utilization and that of females? are essentially the same. For example, they both draw upon interpersonal metaphors most. However, they differ in the use of some resources. For instance, the most frequently adopted Finite modal operator is “will” in male use, while “can?t” in female use. The two genders make almost equal contributions to their negotiations. Consider the case: they both contribute roughly 50% to negotiability increase.Since probing into gender-language relation in a specific tenor, this investigation widens the research scope of genderlects, and breaks the stereotypes of alleged striking gender differences. Furthermore, it can testify the feasibility of applying Interpersonal Function to analyze the discourse of romantic conversations, and on the other hand may offer a new perspective for the research of gendered language. Finally, it is hoped that some enlightenment and references could be given to couples concerning how to conduct negotiations well in daily life. Although there are some implications provided by this thesis, a great deal of room is still left for further exploration into negotiability in romantic conversations.