A Study Of Female Politeness Strategies In Americal Middle-Class Family Verbal Conflicts

There exist gender differences in human's use of language. The language features of female are often studied and analyzed by scholars; politeness strategy is one of research focuses. With Brown & Levinson's theory of politeness strategies as the theoretical framework, this paper examines the features of politeness strategies of American middle class females in family verbal conflicts and explores the possible reasons for these features.This study aims to answer the following research questions:1. What are the politeness strategies used by female in verbal family conflicts in Desperate Housewives? 2. What are the possible reasons underlying the application of these politeness strategies? The data sources of this article come from an American TV series Desperate Housewives. Taking Brown and Levinson's politeness strategy model as analysis framework, this paper conducts quantitative analysis to examine the frequencies of different politeness strategies and adopts qualitative analysis to find out the possible underlying reasons for politeness strategies employment features of female when they are in verbal conflicts with their family members.The results of analysis show that middle-class women in the United States apply both positive politeness and negative politeness strategies with similar proportions to ease family conflicts. Among all the strategies, two salient strategies of positive ones are (P4) using in-group identity markers and (P6) avoiding disagreement, and in the distribution of negative politeness, two prominent strategies are (N2) hedges and (N6) apologizing. Of all the strategies, hedges take the largest proportions in female's preference, which is accordance to one of Lakoff's findings of female language features that is-women favor hedges in communications. This study also finds out that the most frequently used vocabulary by female in conflicts is "well", mainly to soften the mood of interaction.Possible reasons for the features found in this study can include:1. Being less powerful physically may result in female as the weaker part in family conflicts; 2. Psychologically female is more sensitive than male and thus is more prone to sensing and controlling the direction of interactions; 3.From socio-cultural perspective, the sub-ordinate position of female may influence their language use.