A Pragmatic Study On Gender Differences In Communication

Gender difference in language is a common phenomenon. There are obvious differences between male and female in language acquisition, language ability, and in language communication. These differences vary according to different regions and cultures. Some are obvious and some are vague. Women would like to use various words, adjectives, hedging expressions, question intonation, and so on, whereas men would not. Men, however, use more swearing words, strong directives than their women counterparts. Women can mostly comply with the principles of pragmatics while men don't, etc.This thesis will discuss and contrast, from the pragmatic point of view, the gender differences manifested in syntactic structure and language communication, and women's and men's respective speech features. Based on the theories of sociolinguistics andpragmatics, this thesis also provides a contrastive analysis of gender differences inconversation from the perspectives of cooperative principles, politeness principles, and facestrategies. It also aims at discussing linguistic gender differences in daily communications, making some possible explanations for the gender differences in language use and displaying some possible miscommunications in cross-sex interaction and providing sensible solutions. Thus people can achieve successful cross-sex communication, in which miscommunications are always produced.