A Pragmatic Approach To Male & Female Languages In Conversation

The application of a pragmatic approach to the study of male and female languages as reflected in conversations in fictional text is a new and efficient way. Male and Female languages refer to that which is usually used by men and women or that which is characteristics of gender differences. It is a widely studied subject and the differences between male and female languages have been recorded in almost all languages at all linguistic levels. Since the early 20th century, linguists have made systematic studies on male and female linguistic distinctions and identified similar tendencies: men tend to make relatively direct speech while women make comparatively indirect speech; men make status and independence-oriented speech while women make friendship-oriented speech.In the late 1970's and early 1980's, researches on the relationship between language and gender entered China. Chinese linguists introduce the overseas studies and lucubrate into how women and men deal with language effectively with the theories and approaches of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and cross-cultural communication. This thesis addresses the question of male and female languages as reflected in conversations in fictional text Jane Eyre with a pragmatic approach.The purpose of this thesis is threefold: Firstly, I will present some theoretical preliminaries and basic assumption to the study of male and female languages and mixed-sex conversations in fictional text so as to explain the feasibility of adopting a pragmatic approach in the study of male and female languages and choosing a fictional text as the research target. Pragmatics is the study of language use which concerns conventions of speech interactions. It is illustrated that the basic theories and principles of pragmatics can be fruitfully applied to the study of literature. As a matter of fact, the highly refined literary texts provide a special kind of data for linguistic studies.Secondly, on the basis of the theoretical preliminaries and assumption, I will build a tentative framework for a case study of Jane Eyre at the pragmatic level so as to see how women and men differ in complying with or violating the pragmatic conventions, such as Speech Act Theory, Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle, etc. as well as how men control conversations and how women play the supporting role and make contributions to mixed-sex conversations. All the analyses are intended to illustrate how the differences between women's and men's speeches generate, and ultimately affect their social positions, political and economic achievements respectively.Thirdly, I will apply the framework to Jane Eyre through detailed demonstration analyses of examples excerpted from the fictional text. The case study of conversations between Jane and Rochester reveals that women and men adopt different conversational strategies, and play different roles in speech interactions. The reasons are that men try to draw others' attention, maintain their dignities and win powers in conversations, while women try to seek friendship in the speechinteractions. As a matter of fact, conversation, the most common social activity, is much more complicated than we reckon.