A Study Of Gender Differences In Chinese Communication From The Perspective Of Conversation Analysis

The relationship of language and gender is one of important subjects in linguistics. And studies of language and gender have become popular since 1970 s. The studies at home and abroad experience a change from the initial static study to the dynamic study. The static study focuses on language structure, such as pronunciation, morphology and grammar, while the dynamic study pays more attention to communicational interaction. What’s worth mentioning is that foreign studies take English as the study materials and most Chinese studies focus on gender differences in language structure at present. The thesis, based on Conversation Analysis and results of dynamic studies abroad, takes conversations of Chinese TV series Beijing Youth as study object, to analyze whether gender differences in language use in English context exist in Chinese context. And through the study of gender differences in language in Chinese context, people can avoid misunderstandings and improve communicative ability as well as build a successful interpersonal relationship to some extent.The author takes the Chinese TV series Beijing Youth as the object, for the reason that it is famous for conversations which come from daily life. And TV series can be regarded as the reflection of real life to some extent. After transferring the TV series,the author finds that there are 69 conversations among men, 65 conversations among women and 73 conversations between men and women. Then the author analyzes the selected conversations which randomly select 50 conversations from each conversation group with conversational structure, conversational strategy and conversational style through quantitative method and comparative analysis. The result reveals that study results of gender differences in language use abroad exist in Chinese context in general, but there are some differences. Specifically speaking, modern women in China almost have the same rights with men in controlling the topic; modern men and women have the same times in using minimal responses in Chinese context.The present thesis contains five chapters. Chapter one is the introduction, including research background, research significance, research method and data collection, and the structure of the thesis. Chapter two is the literature review, which introduces studies of language and gender abroad and at home. Chapter three is the theory framework of the study. It explains conversational structure, conversational strategy and conversational style. Chapter four is the main part of the thesis. It analyzes the selected objects in details and provides some suggestions for cross-gender communications. Chapter five is the conclusion of the thesis, in which the author introduces major findings of the study firstly, and then points out limitations and provides some suggestions for the future studies in this area.