- 上一篇：法律英语文体研究
- 下一篇：小组讨论在英语口语学习中的作用
Transcriptions of six selected scenes from Sex and the City made up of the empirical material that provides the basis for this paper. Naturally, it is not possible to include the whole series as data in this paper, which is why we have selected only six scenes for thorough analysis. These scenes come from the first and final seasons of the series, which have been taken in to several considerations. First of all, the selected scenes are considered content-wise and linguistically sensible because they contained several typical examples of the discourse of the show. After that, in all the selected scenes, all the four main characters are present, which is important in order to draw a clear image of each character’s language.
The paper is mainly structured around the empirical data. This means that the transcriptions of the scenes from Sex and the City set the premise for the paper. The most salient characteristics of the data have been a decisive factor in selecting our theories and methods. All theories used in this paper belong within the scope of sociolinguistics, more precisely within the field of ‘language and gender’ studies. The second chapter begins with a brief introduction to language and gender, which will clarify the sociolinguistic context of our paper. An overview of language and gender research provides the reader with background knowledge necessary for better understanding of our paper.
The theory, applied in the third chapter, follows in the second chapter. The theory, mainly by Jenifer Coates and Bent Preisler, are described and explained. All theories used in this paper are based on research conducted in same-sex group. The theories claim that men and women behave differently in conversations. The theorists have different perceptions as to how and why the two genders differ, but many of them discuss the same speech features, especially, Chinese theorists, thus redundancy is avoided as much as possible. Each linguistic feature is explained in relation to gender, in form of the subheadings. The particular features have been selected bearing in mind our empirical material. The process of selecting these linguistic features involved a first attempt at analyzing our data, and on the basis of this picking out the features that seemed the most applicable and relevant.
The third chapter contains four linguistic analyses, focusing on gender specific traits in the language of the inpidual characters of Sex and the City, in the following order: Charlotte, Carrie, Miranda and Samantha. Each of them is briefly introduced before the analysis in order to provide the general idea of each person’s personality and background. The analyses are based on transcriptions of selected scenes from the series. We have chosen to analyze the characters separately. We did so because, after watching the show, we found each character has a very distinct personality; therefore, we have found it interesting to see if an analysis of each character can demonstrate that their inpidual personalities are reflected in their linguistic behavior. Dealing with the characters separately will give a clear overall impression of their speech strategies, which offer us an opportunity to draw comparisons between four presumably very different speech strategies.
After the data analysis chapter, we will discuss the language in the show in terms of the feminist perspective. Finally, we will compare the show to a similar TV show in China, in order to find out the influence of the show to China, and whether it is groundbreaking and revolutionary in terms of language use.
Since the purpose of the paper is to look at the linguistic features represented in Sex and the City, to a large extent, we avoid interpreting any contextual references there might be. In other words, the non-verbal actions of the show will not be addressed, and the focus will be on the linguistic features.
As mentioned before, our empirical data is limited to six short transcribed sequences of the show. Although we find them to be exemplary, we are aware that they may not give a full impression of the series. Choosing other scenes for analysis may have provided different perspectives. Many of the theorists we use, such as Jenifer Coates, write about English language based on sociolinguistic work carried out in Britain. However, our data is an American show and there might be some cultural differences. It is believed that it is our assessment that these differences are so small that they are relatively insignificant in this context.