A Study Of Female Language Characteristics In Cross-gender Communication And Their Identities

As a form of intercultural communication, gender culture influences people’s lifein a all round way. Language, as a overt part of culture iceberg, inevitably presents theoutcome of the deep cultural influence. In their social life, women play multiple rolesfrom wives, mothers, bosses to employees. On one hand, their social identitiesinfluence their employment of language, and meanwhile, their language expressestheir social identities. Therefore, it is necessary to make an analysis of femalelanguage characteristics based on the authentic data, which is meaningful andinsightful to study women’s self-cognition. The related research results are ofreference value in the aspect of women’s spiritual needs of self-actualization inrealistic life.This thesis takes the scripts of American TV series Desperate Housewives(Season1) as the language research subject. First, the author analyzes the selecteddata linguistically in the aspects of lexicon and syntax, which shows that, comparedwith the males, the females use more intensifiers and less expletives at the lexicallevel, and that the females use more hedges and tag questions. Then by applying thecooperative principle and the politeness principle, the author makes a pragmaticalstudy of the females’ observance and violation of these two principles in cross-gendercommunication. The results show that the females often violate the cooperativeprinciple to express their implicatures, and choose to observe the politeness principle.On the basis of the above female language characteristics, the author discusses theindiscerptible relationship of language and identity: on one hand, language is a mirrorof their identities, the language characteristics shown in the heroines reflect who theyare: their identity as a female, identity as a mother, identity as a Christian, identity asa well-educated woman and identity as a rejected individual. On the other hand, theircultural identities, for instance, gender identity and ethnic identity constantly reinforcetheir language characteristics in communication. In this way, language characteristicsand identities are indiscerptible and indispensable.There are six parts in this thesis. The first part in this thesis gives a briefintroduction to the purpose, data collection and research methods of this thesis. Thesecond part introduces the applied theories including cooperative principle, politenessprinciple and identity theory as well as the review of the related studies. The third partmainly researches the female language characteristics in cross-gender communicationat the linguistic and pragmatic levels. Based on the female language characteristicssummarized in the previous part, the forth part discusses the relationship of languageand identity. The fifth part offers the author’s suggestions on how to be efficient incross-gender communication. The last part draws a conclusion of the whole research,points out its limitations and future research direction.