A Pragmatic Approach To Women’s Language In Runaway

In order to meet the needs of communication, human beings have created and developed the language. Due to the diversity of users, language has shown its unique differences. As the majority group of language users, women play crucial roles in life, such as being mothers, most of the teachers, especially preschool teachers, principal organizers as well as undertakers of daily activities, and so on. Therefore, their language, namely,women’s language has a super dour life-force and deep and wide influence, and has also attracted the persistent attention of scholars. To a certain extent, women’s language represents the norms of language and the direction of the future development of language.Thus the research on women’s language may not only help us understand the language developmental trend, but also be helpful in understanding the deep social reasons and the impact of culture changing on language. Moreover, it is conducive to promotion the harmony of daily conversation.As a famous Canadian writer, Alice Munro won the Nobel Price for Literature on October 10 th of 2003, and then has received great reputation. Her masterpiece, Runaway,which consists of eight short stories epitomizes Munro’s literary attainments. This novel has plain words and simple plot, mainly telling the ordinary women’s life experiences. A large number of women’s conversations in this novel truly reflect the unique characteristics of women’s language, such as: sensitivity, courtesy and passivity etc., which are really suitable to be the corpus for women’s language research.This thesis chooses women’s conversations picked from Runaway as the research object, analyzes verbal features of women’s language, including lexicon, syntax,conversational styles, meanwhile, focusing on analyzing the pragmatics characteristics, i.e.how women apply the Cooperative Principle, the Politeness Principle, and the Face-Saving Strategies. At last this thesis summarizes the main factors to promote women to have their own language from aspects of physiology, psychology, history, society and culture based on previous studies. This thesis also describes the significance of women’s language research and gives some suggestions to promote harmonious cross-gender communication.This thesis inevitably has some limitations, but also has the relative significance in theory and practice. The thesis studies women’s language in Runaway from the perspective of conversational analysis especially pragmatic principles. It shows that pragmatics has great explanation, and can also be used as an effective tool to analyze discourse, then broadened the research field. Moreover, the thesis might benefit cross-gender communication and cross-cultural communication.