A sociolinguistic study of language and gender in Desperate Housewives

Abstract

Since language is used as a tool for human communication, it is inevitably featured by gender. For quite a long time, language and gender study has been a heated issue in sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Former studies focus on linguistic levels such as phonology, grammar, syntax and gender differences. However, few of them are conducted in specific contexts. With the development of society, language and gender study in a certain context deserves to be conducted. Under such background, the proposed research examines language and gender in Desperate Housewives based on conversational analysis as its theoretical framework. It randomly selects each episode from all eight seasons as data source and adopts quantitative and qualitative analysis, comparison and contrast method. The study mainly concentrates on differences in the amount of talk, the amount of turns and distribution of them. Its findings are as follows. In terms of the amount of talk, men use more words to compose more sentences. In other words, they are much more talkative than women. In the aspect of the amount of turns, men are inclined to take the turn floor for a longer time. In a word, the proposed research, though has some limitations, is of theoretical and practical significance. © 2014 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland.