A Pragmatic Study Of Female Conversational Features

Female language, as a special language phenomenon, has long received extensive attention from scholars. Previous studies are mainly focused on the features and reasons of female language from three major perspectives:structural perspective, pragmatic perspective and sociolinguistic perspective. With the wide broadcast of TV dating shows, scholars both at home or abroad have begun to pay attention to the kind of shows. However, many studies have been done from such discipline and perspective as news media, social service and so on. Although there are some linguistic studies on the female language in TV dating shows, the findings mainly center on the turn-taking power and talking arts and greatly influenced and limited by the sole culture of the native country to a degree. Take Me Out, as a heated American dating show, includes a lot of young females from different cultural backgrounds and provides this research with much fresh and universal corpus. From a unique angle, the perspective of conversational analysis and pragmatic principles, this thesis, based on the language phenomena in the show, is going to find out and analyze the female conversational features in the show.Methodologically speaking, the present study is a qualitative one based on the analysis of data collected from the show. First, the author collected the data and categorized the statistics systematically and made comparisons of conversational features between the two genders at different levels. Thus, we can conclude different features in conversational structures, conversational strategies and conversational styles. Based on the features, the author makes pragmatic explanations through Cooperative Principle (CP) and Polite Principle (PP). The research findings indicate that in a certain context, influenced by the communicative purpose and gender differences, females present different conversational features from males at different levels and some new female conversational features have been found. In conversational structures, females’turns are more inclined to be disturbed by males’and female overlaps are comparatively less, which is opposite to males at this point. In conversational strategies, females tend to use silence and minimal responses more frequently as an effective tool to face embarrassing situations. Lots of intensified words and euphemisms are also frequently used by females at the same time. In conversational styles, there are some new features that females are more skilled to use vivid metaphors, rich humorous expressions, direct emotional expressions and strong exclamatory sentences to realize communicative purposes in different situations. All the features are jointly influenced by PP and CP in the process of communication. According to different communicational purpose, females, on one hand, violate some maxims of CP and obey PP on the other hand in order to show their respect to others.Though limitations inevitably exist in the study, it bears some theoretical and practical significance. From the perspective of conversational analysis and pragmatic principles, the thesis on female conversational features has proven the strong power of the theories in analysis and explanation and broadened the research field. Moreover, the thesis can benefit cross-gender communication and cross-cultural communication.