| The observation that men and women speak differently can be traced back to ancient Greek in 55BC. The extensive studies on male and female linguistic distinctions were not conducted until the beginning of the last century. Following the upsurge of women's liberation movement in the 1960's, the investigations and studies in this field were conducted more thoroughly and systematically than before. Many scholars had made great contributions including Otto Jesperson, Peter Trudgill, Robin Lakoff, Don Zimmerman, Candace West, etc.This thesis discusses gender differences in verbal communication from the perspective of social factors. It includes three chapters.Chapter 1 introduces the definition of gender. Besides giving the definition, the author also makes a distinction between gender and sex. Generally speaking gender is a social acquisition, whereas sex is biologically given. Then the author explains the definition of verbal communication. Finally the author elaborates on what gender differences are in verbal communication from seven aspects. The first aspect is the differences in phonology. In verbal communication, sometimes men and women pronounce in different ways. As far as modern English is concerned, women are more likely to use standard pronunciation than men. The second aspect is the differences in intonation. Women like to use rising tones and speak with a variety of pitches but men's intonation is more appreciated than women's. The third aspect is the differences in vocabulary: a. gender taboo, women are forbidden to use some vocabularies; b. euphemism and swearing words: women like to use euphemism and avoid using swearing words; c. descriptive words: women's good command of descriptive words is demonstrated in their good use of precise color words, empty adjectives, and adverbs of intensity. The fourth aspect is semantic differences that masculine forms of words tend to have more positive connotations than feminine ones. The fifth aspect is grammatical differences. When the labels for male and female are paired, the usual word order is to place the male term first. When referring to people in general or a person whose gender is unknown or unspecified, masculine forms are used. Female gender is marked in English by the use of suffixes and adjuncts. The sixth aspect is the address differences. The addressing rights of women and men are not equally distributed. The titles for men and women are different. Women are more likely than men to be addressed by their first names. Men, however, are more likely to be addressed by titles plus last names. The seventh aspect is the differences in speech style. Generally speaking, men's conversational style is based on competitiveness, whereas women's on cooperativeness. In verbal communication, men interrupt more than women and women like to overlap. Women raise topics but men control them. Women not only give more back channel support than men, but also know when it is appropriate to give. Besides cooperativeness and competitiveness, women are deemed to be more talkative than men. But studies suggests, it depends on the situation and topics. What's more, due to women's frequent use of rising tones, tag questions, apologies and so on, women's speech style seem more polite and unconfident than men's. In Chapter 2, social factors, which contribute to gender differences in verbal communication, are discussed. The first part is social status. Generally speaking, in our society men still hold higher status than women. Gender differences in verbal communication are an inflection of their different social status. In this part, the factor of social status is divided into two aspects: male domination and female subordination as well as male appreciation and female depreciation. The second part is social value. Men and women possess different social values. Men value independence, asymmetry, distance, power and competition, whereas women value intimacy, symmetry, solidarity and cooperation. Male and female different social values result in ge...
|
PDF Full Text Request