On The Trend Of Convergence And Similarity In Gender Language

The study of gender language is mainly concerned with how gender affects the ways people of different genders use language. With the development of sociolinguistics and the rise of feminist movement, the systematic study on this issue has begun since 1960s. Robin Lakoff's Language and Women's Place (1975) raised people's awareness of how closely related language might be to female and male identities. From then on, the study on gender language has attracted more and more attention and has been discussed in depth.In the past few decades, scholars tried to interpret why men and women spoke differently from the perspectives of power, culture and society, and formed three prevailing theories to account for gender differences in language, namely, deficit theory, difference theory and dominance theory. These theories take gender as a simple binary opposition, put men and women at completely opposite sides, and regard gender differences in language as the inevitable. However, with the development and changes of society, there are also changes in language use. In some cases and to some extent, it is difficult for such theories to be able to explain new linguistic phenomena. Consequently, Bergvall, Ecket & Mc Connell-Ginet, and Bulter put forward the idea of social constructionist gender theory to reject dichotomous ones and argue that gender is a social construction implicated with other social identities in a complex way. Gender is an ideological, symbolic and dynamic aspect of language.This thesis intends to investigate gender and language in a dynamic process and select data from the popular American television series Sex and the City. It aims at examining language and gender from the angle of social constructionism in the framework of conversational analysis and stylistic analysis. And both quantitative and qualitative methods are applied. The thesis tries to explore whether the existing dichotomous theories on gender and language can still fully reflect and explain the present language and communication reality, analyze the phenomena of similarity and trend of convergence.