Females' Application Of Politeness Strategies In Runaway

It has been well-acknowledged that gender differences exist in people's use of language.Numerous language differences between the male and the female(phonetic difference,lexical difference,pragmatic difference and so on)are recognized by scholars,among which the difference in the application of politeness strategies is the most distinctive.This paper,in light of Brown and Levinson's politeness strategies,is intended to analyze the application of politeness strategies by the female in Alice Munro's work Runaway,and at the same time,this study tries to explore the possible factors that influence the female's employment of politeness strategies.This study is conducted,both qualitatively and quantitatively,to explore the female's application of politeness strategies.Specifically,the research questions this study tries to answer are as follows:1)What are the features of the female's application of politeness strategies in their interpersonal interactions in Runaway?2)What are the factors that influence the female's application of politeness strategies in their interpersonal interactions in Runaway?Through detailed analysis of data,this study draws the following main conclusions:1)Politeness strategies are widely applied in females' utterances,and relatively speaking,negative politeness strategies are more preferred by the female than the positive ones.In terms of the positive strategies,giving or asking for reasons,using in-group identity markers,avoiding disagreement are more frequently used.As far as the negative strategies are concerned,hedges,apologizing and being conventionally indirect are most favored by the female.And among all the 25 politeness strategies,the strategy of hedges ranks first,which is consistent with Lakoff's finding of women's language that women use hedges of various kinds.2)The reasons why the female prefer to apply politeness strategies in their interpersonal interactions mainly consist of their physical powerlessness,psychological sensitiveness and sociocultural inferior status,and all of thoseinfluencing factors work together and facilitate women's language feature of being polite.