A Pragmatic Study On Gender Differences In Verbal Strategies Of Face Maintenance In Chinese-Speaking Movies

"Face"is a significant concept both in China and western countries. It is closelyrelated to social conventions, relations, status and personal capacity and achievements.It also constrains people's conducts, and coordinates the social relations among them.Consequently, great importance is attached to various"face saving strategies"tomaintain face, social balance, and friendly relations. Due to diversified culturalbackground, however, different face saving strategies are adopted accordingly whichwould be demonstrated in verbal behaviors. As different culture groups, males andfemales would apply different verbal strategies to save their face effectively andsuccessfully.This research attempts to present an elaboration on the gender differences oflanguage concerning face maintenance. As is known, the research of genderdifferences is a major issue in sociolinguistics. Based on theory of sociolinguistics andpragmatics, this thesis makes a pragmatic study of gender differences in dailyconversations. It aims to demonstrate how females and males differ in observing andflouting the pragmatic principles: the Cooperative Principle, the Politeness Principleand the Face Theory in daily conversations and explores the reasons and consequencesof gender differences in order to get a better understanding about gender differencesand the discourse styles from the pragmatic perspective, to minimize themisunderstanding between females and males and improve cross-gender conversations.In order to overcome negative effects caused by gender differences in dailyconversations, and to improve cross-gender conversations, this thesis initiates somesuggestions. Additionally, different context, ages, professions, statuses, etc. alsoinfluence females'and males'language use in conversation. And all of these are worthfurther study in the future.