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Sex and the city is one of the most popular American films, which is created by Darren Star. Since the film was first shown on the public, it has been a hot topic among women around the world. The film tracks lives of four special characters that are single thirty-something women in Manhattan: Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte. The film has contributed to current discourse about fashion trends, discussions on sex and relationships and debates on modern femininity and the single woman. Women’s expression and talk are two salient features of this comedy movie. Because this film is an epitome of our real life and its language is more approachable to our real language, the study of the characters’ speech features is meaningful and practical.
This thesis analyzes the female language features in Sex and the City based on the theories of pragmatics. From the angle of sociolinguistics, the thesis would mainly analyze female language use in lexicon and syntax, and will be inclined to clarify female language features in the film. From the angle of pragmatics, this thesis will mainly analyze representative conversations from a film to discuss whether modern women’s languages are polite as stated by Lakoff (1975). In a word, the thesis hopes to add up to the future development of the study in female language and give some instructive propositions for the language use.
1.2 Significance of the Study
The major significance of the thesis is to identify different strategies adopted by modern women, so as to help people understand women’s language and to promote harmonious communications between man and women. Secondly, we can manifest whether the results of this study are consistent with that of the former studies in this field or not, with the purpose of improving the previous studies of female speech style and the theories of relationship between language use and gender. Thirdly, the study of female language features in Sex and the City can help us understand the influence of western culture on women’s communicative strategies in conversation. It’s beneficial to better cross-gender communication, effective misunderstanding and harmonious interpersonal relationship.
1.3 Organization of the Thesis
This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter one, as the general introduction of the entire paper, covers the objectives and the significance of the study and the organization of the thesis. The first part of chapter two is the introduction of the relationship of language and gender; the second part is the literature review of relevant studies on women’s language abroad and at home. Section three serves as theoretical framework, introducing relevant theories about Robin Lakoff’s about ten characteristics of female language (1975) and Leech’s politeness principle (1983). Chapter four deals with the methodology of the study and the collection of the data, also plus an introduction of Sex and the City. Chapter five is the processing of the data and the analysis of major features of women’s language from the pragmatic level. Chapter six draws a conclusion of this thesis, lists some implications of it and gives suggestions to further research.
2. Literature Review
2.1 Language and Gender
Communication is very important and necessary for human beings to better survive in modern society and language is one of the most important means to express people’s ideas and feelings. However, it is not always easy to have smooth communications between men and women in our daily life. Since attention was paid to this issue, psycholinguists and sociolinguists have more and more interests in studying the relationship between language use and gender difference. There exists masculine, feminine and neutral differences between words; what’s more, people’s use of language is always influenced by their personality, gender, class etc. Coates (1986) said that language is a way to reflect our mind, linguistics differences are merely a reflection of social differences, and as long as society views women and men are different, and unequal, then differences in the language of women and men will persist.