Inter-gender Differences in English Conversation Style 英语毕业论文.docVIP

Acknowledgements I wish to express my thanks and appreciation to my tutor, Miss Zhang Bi, whose careful reading and suggestions have been invaluable to me throughout my thesis writing. My thanks should also be given to all the teachers who have taught me my BA courses. Without their enthusiasm and support, this work would not have been possible. I am also grateful to my classmates and roommates for their psychological support and encouragement. In particular, I own a special debt of thanks to Huang Linyin, who has given me many suggestions to revise the paper. Abstract The relationship between language and gender has long attracted the western sociolinguists’ interest. As early as in the 1960s, with the development of feminist social movement and the growth of sociolinguistics, there are many researches on inter-gender discourse. But how to explain speech differences between men and women remains a question in dispute among sociolinguists. The article reviews the definition of discourse and the definition and historical perspective of gender discourse. Five differences in conversations are displayed. They are the usage of “directness and indirectness”, “minimal responses”, “questions”, “swearing and taboo language, hedges, compliments and politeness” and “amount of talk”. The paper then analyzes the main causes of inter-gender differences, including ideology, socialization, interpretive frames and social status and power. Based on the analysis and discussions above, the author offers some advice to avoid the miscommunication: pay more attention and respect to the objective factors, gain share knowledge as much as possible and learn to be open and flexible. In fact, the study on gender discourse is still very new. Most of the available analysis is based on the patterns of discourse within American society. And it is very important to notice the inter-gender differences in western countries, and do further study on other inter-gender differences in other countr