Abstract:

     Since the 20th century, language and gender has become a hot topic of social linguists. Women's special role, make its language has particularity. And the study of female discourse, help us to deepen understanding of women and reduce the daily communication barriers. The popular TV drama, Desperate Housewives, describes the daily life of several housewives. The conversation between the housewives is one of the most attractive features of the show, so it is very suitable to be used as corpus in linguistic research. This article belongs to linguistics and stylistics of multidisciplinary research. And I will take the Desperate Housewives as the research object, and made a deep and extensive research of its female discourse from the aspect of pragmatics. From the perspective of pragmatics, this article is based on speech act theory, politeness theory, cooperative principles, communicative competence, and aimed to explore the pragmatic principles and how its theory is reflected in the conversation of these ladies. Thus we may draw characteristic of female discourse in the session level. The innovation of this paper lies in the corpus, which is from the lines of the popular TV series, Desperate Housewives, rather than the traditional British and American novels, and these lines make its language more close to real life, so the results of this paper will be more real, more convincing and effective.

     As for the structure of the article, I will divide it into the main five parts. The first part of the article will lead to the topic. In the second part, I will do some literature review on discourse including female discourse analysis. In the third part, I will introduce the theory of pragmatics, such as speech act theory, politeness theory, cooperative principle, the theory of communicative competence etc. In the fourth part, I will emphasis on the embodiment of female discourse in the TV drama, Desperate Housewives, including its pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and topics. In the last part, the conclusion of the article, I will summarize all the contents of the article.

Key words: 

Discourse Analysis, Speech Act Theory, Cooperative Principle, Politeness Theory

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1. Introduction-1

2. Literature Review-2

2.1 Discourse Analysis-2

2.2 Women’s Discourse Analysis-3

3. Theoretical Basis-5

3.1Austin’s Speech Act Theory-5

3.2 Grice’s Cooperative Principle-7

3.3 Brown & Levinson’s Politeness Theory-8

3.4 Hymes’ Communicative Competence on Women’s Discourse Analysis-9

4. Women’s Discourse Analysis in Desperate Housewives-9

4.1 Phonological Level-9

4.1.1 Pronunciation-10

4.1.2 Intonation-10

4.2 Vocabulary Level-11

4.2.2 Exaggerated adjectives-12

4.2.3 Diminutive-13

4.3 Grammatical Level-15

4.3.1 The past tense-15

4.3.2 Tag Question-16

4.3.3 Subjunctive Sentences-17

4.4 Topic’s Level-17

5. Conclusion-19

6. Bibliography-20

7.Acknowledgements-21