A Conversational Analysis Of Social Class Language

From 1960 s, the study of social class language has become a hot topic in the field of sociolinguistics. And the focus of different social classes’ linguistic features has been transformed from single phonetics, word classes to conversational structures, discourse styles and other related aspects. Most studies are almost concerned daily interactions, like speech in large shopping mall, and few of them adopt the language, which especially comes from China’s dating programs as the research data. The language in dating programs is truly reliable, closer to life, and has its own features. This kind of research may be helpful to the research of social classes in the sociolinguistic field.The study takes conversational analysis as the theoretical framework, which is from three aspects of conversational structure, conversational strategies and conversational styles. And it chooses the men’s language of If You Are the One as the research data. According to the Contemporary China’s Social Class Report, the author makes a classification of social classes about the men in this dating program. Then the author analyzes the men’s language of this TV Program from many aspects, which are interruptions, overlaps, discourse markers, silence, hedges, minimal responses, and humor, politeness as well as face to study men’s linguistic features of China’s different social classes in the conversational interaction of specific context of dating programs.The research results show that 1) the professional class uses more interruptions, overlaps, silence, hedges, minimal response and humor than the other two social male classes, while the manager class is the first one using politeness in conversations; 2) the manager class and private entrepreneur class have no big difference in using humor and minimal response; 3) there exist commonalities among them, and each man of the three social classes is likely to use cooperative interruptions and cooperative overlaps in his communications, also including positive politeness. And each social class uses hedges to show his uncertainty and applies low humor and positive politeness to make fun and avoid conflicts; 4) as for the functions of minimal response and politeness, men of the three social classes have the tendency to express agreements, compliments and avoiding offence in conversations.According to the results the author has achieved, the thesis also attempts to give a discussion of the reasons that cause the different linguistic features about different social class in China. And at last, the author doesn’t shun the limitations and shortcomings of this thesis, which may be helpful to the further research of social class language.