| The production, existence, development of language is in accordance with humanbeing’s needs, and language will present its unique features by different users. As anextensive language using group, women’s language shows significant difference comparedwith men’s language. The research on the female language’s features may not only help usunderstand the language development trend, but also be helpful in understanding the deepsocial reason and the impact of culture changing on language.As a classic women’s television drama, Desperate Housewives receives huge popularwith audiences around the world since it was broadcasted firstly. The theme of secrethidden under quiet community life makes the drama get an outstanding achievement on itsratings. In total, Desperate Housewives has eight seasons, and each season has20to23episodes with single independent subject in each episode. The plot is presented throughdescribing the four heroines’ normal life including their family and work, thus a greatnumber of women’s conversation make it very suitable for being the language material inthe research on female language feature.In this thesis, the author chooses the episodes in Season two as the language data tosummarize the linguistic feature of female language from the perspectives of phonology,vocabulary as well as syntax. Meanwhile, the author also makes a pragmatic analysis onthe female language feature within the framework of Cooperative Principles andPoliteness Principles. The theoretical implication lies in manifesting whether the results ofthis study are consistent with that of the former studies in this field or not, with the attemptto improve and enrich the previous theories of female speech style and the theories ofrelationship between language use and gender. The practical implication rests onsummarizing the linguistic and pragmatic feature of female language and providingguidance for cultivating students’ sense of appropriateness. Through the detailed analysisfrom above two aspects, the conclusion could be drawn as follows:In phonology, it is found out that female characters in Desperate Housewives areinclined to use high-pitch and rising tone to fully express their feelings and meaningswhich is consistent with the previous study. Meanwhile, they also try to use low-pitch andnormal tone in some certain serious occasions; In vocabulary level, women are inclined touse intensifier adjectives and adverbs as well as interjections to express their strongemotion; In lexical level, they prefer to employ tag questions and hedges to get more support from other parties. From pragmatics aspect, the author found that women are moreinclined to observe the Cooperative Principle, in other words, female language is morepolite, cooperative, supportive, elegant and affectionate compared with male language.However, the analysis also shows that women violate the CP a lot for two reasons. Firstly,they try to observe the maxim of Politeness Principle. Secondly, their free will and strongself-awareness make them begin to care more about their own feeling rather than bealways supportive to other parties’ feeling. |
