Gender Differences In Criticism Speech Act

Studies on language and gender are important subject in sociolinguistics. This thesis focuses on male and female's different strategies employed in criticism and criticism response. Through discussing their different strategies, this thesis tries to reveal the regularity of male and female's speech style in criticism speech act, to expose difference in their speech style. Then the thesis tries to increase communicants' sensitivity to these regularity and difference, to help male and female communicants to explain, judge, evaluate each other's speech act correctly, communicate with each other successfully and smoothly, and reduce misunderstanding between each other. Knowing the differences in males and females' communication strategies can help teachers guide students to think actively, to inspire students', especially girls' enthusiasm, to make the atmosphere in class more lively, to overcome the inequality between girl students and boy students in class, to overcome the miscommunication between two genders, and to improve quality of class teaching.Based on theories about language and gender, using Brown and Levinson's politeness theory and Blum-Kulka's analysis model, with DCT as instrument, centering on the variable of gender, the present study totally collected 46 valid questionnaires with Americans as subjects. Research questions are:1) What strategies are preferred by male and female respectively when criticizing?2) What strategies are preferred by male and female respectively when responding to criticism?3) How do variables as age, distance and interlocutor's gender influence male and female's employment of strategies?With the help of software SPSS, applying x~2-Chi-Square test on the collected data, this study comes up with the following major findings:1) When criticizing, males' preferred strategies are bald-on-record strategy, and females' negative politeness strategy as head act. Both males and females prefer mitigator as supporting move. Old subjects use more polite strategies than young subjects. When (1) interlocutors are females, (2) interlocutors are strangers, both males and females use a little more polite strategies. Differences between males' and females' strategies are significant.2) When responding to criticism, both males and females prefer negative politeness strategy as head act, and mitigator as supporting move. Variable age doesn't influence much. When being criticized by females, males tend to use a little less polite strategy. When being criticized by strangers, both males and females tend to use more polite strategies.This thesis includes six chapters. Chapter one presents a brief overview of the whole thesis, and highlights the purpose and significance of this study. Chapter two reviews the previous studies on criticism and criticism response. Chapter three introduces theoretical framework-Brown and Levinson's politeness theory and theories on language and gender. Chapter four explains methodology adopted in this study. Chapter five presents collected data and makes analysis of them. Chapter six summarizes the research findings.