A Survey Of Directives Used By High-rank Chinese Women Professionals In Present Day TV Dramas

Given that these days more and more women are promoted to positions of authority and leadership in the workplace in Chinese society, it has been suggested that high-rank Chinese woman professionals in positions of authority are suffering from a sociolinguistic dilemma in choosing between a conventionally prescribed feminine way of communication and the masculine powerful ways of communication from the requirement of their high occupational status. The aim of this paper is to explore the realization of the directive speech act in the speech of high-rank Chinese woman professionals. Conceptually and methodologically the study is rooted in the research practices developed in sociolinguistics and pragmatics. It analyzes a large number of high-rank Chinese woman professionals' directives that are extracted from workplace interactions in present-day TV dramas in China. Moving beyond the traditional sentence-level analysis of the use of feminine (or masculine) morphosyntactic elements, the study draws the following conclusions: (1) high-rank Chinese woman professionals generally persist in their traditional feminine communicative ways. (2) While persisting in their traditional feminine communicative ways, high-rank Chinese woman professionals manage to maintain their authority and accomplish their illocutionary intent successfully. Their preference to effective structures, such as direct head acts plus modifiers and their frequent and skillful use of supportive moves and terms of address greatly empower their indirect and polite framing of directives. (3) The traditional view that feminine linguistic behavior equals to powerlessness is insufficiently elaborated. Through skillful uses of polite language especially some rapport builders along with the moment-to-moment changes of the ongoing interaction, high-rank Chinese woman professionals strategically activate their multiple identities such as the leader and one of us during the interaction and establish and manipulate their power successfully. Overall, high-rank Chinese woman professionals adopt both positive- and negative politeness strategies, especially positive norms which promote the rapport-building and style-shifting. With such help, they can solve their(?)dilemma, using prescribed, polite and deferential way of communication to control the power and manage to position their subordinates in ways that contribute to the success of their own agenda in workplace interaction. The conclusions of the study indicate that, first, Chinese women have...