Gender Differences In Conversational Behavior

Language is of great importance to human life in our society. Born with different sexes as males and females, human beings are educated to be gendered, which suggests that they belong to different subcultures. Scholars in the field of language and gender do a lot of work to compare then differences between languages used by men and women. Truly, males and females have their own characteristics of conversational behavior.Traditionally speaking, men's conversational behavior is viewed as dominant while women's is regarded as supportive. To some degree, men's speech shows more dominance, power and control, while women's speech is more associated with cooperation, support and submission.This thesis may make some contribution to the study of sociolinguistics. However, there are still some limitations in this research. With such a limited space and insufficient time, it is impossible to give a comprehensive description of all the aspects concerning gender differences. The current study only mentions some aspects of the issue. It is hoped that this study will contribute to the understanding of language and gender issues in the different cultures.