社会语言学---女性面子.doc

Gender Language Difference: A New InterpretationAbstract: Face-saving theory (FST) advocated by Brown and Levinson emphasizes the universality of human beings to treat “face” and to take strategies so as to save face. Nevertheless, humans are quite different from one another, especially male and female. This article mainly concerns FST from gender difference in language and puts forward some new ideas about FST in order to make it a better system. Key words: face-saving theory; face; gender difference in language1. Introduction Language exists in society. It must reflect phenomena in society. Spoken by human beings in society, it will be carved by different characteristics of human beings, among which gender is an aspect, which cannot be neglected. In fact, gender difference in language has long been heated discussed. At the beginning of the 20th century, people began to pay attention to this phenomenon and ever since the 1960s especially after the womans movement; many articles concerning this phenomenon appeared in the world. During this period, people discussed the problem from different aspects and got great achievements. In this article, we will analyze FST advocated by Brown and Levinson in a perspective of gender language differences. 2. Face-saving Theory The word “face” was first introduced into the west by a Chinese Anthropologist, named Hu Hsien Chin. The western socialists began to analyze this phenomenon from the 1950s. It was Erving Goffman who first explained this word. He believed that “face” was connected with some emotional concepts, such as embarrass, and shy, losing face. Later two linguists Brown and Levinson presented specifically the “Face-saving Theory”. They divided “face” into two kinds: negative face and positive face. Negative face means that a person does not want others to enforce their ideas upon his/hers or to interfere in his/her behavior. Positive face is the hope that a person wants others to agree with him/her or to praise him/her. Brown and Levinson believed that essentially most verbal behaviors threatened “face”. So people always found ways to avoid threatening others face or to lessen the degree of making others lose face. They were: A. bald on record without redressive actions. B. positive politeness. C. negative politeness. D. off record. E. Dont do the FTA. 3.1 Negative face and positive face According to FST, when were talking with others, its likely for us to threaten our partners face, negative or positive. However, Brown and Levinson paid little attention to gender differences. In fact, males and females are quite different in regarding positive and negative faces. In interaction, everyone wants to maintain his/her face and to be respected by others. However, gender difference exists. Males are more likely to maintain their negative faces while females always pay much attention to their positive faces. This phenomenon can be seen in different gender languages. Although their actual usages are quite different from their self-evaluations, males tend to use low status, nonstandard variants, but females tend to use high status, standard variants. This phenomenon is best illustrated by Peter Trudgills self-evaluation tests in Norwich. One of them is the test of vowel in “ear”, “here” and “idea”. In Norwich, there are two main variants of this vowel: as in RP; with the vowel of care. So ear and air, here and hair are the same. He was surprised at the gender differences when he compared speakers observed usages with what they claimed to say when questioned directly. If a speaker used a favored variable more than half the time, that person would be classified as using that variable. The Norwich speakers were also asked directly how they normally pronounced certain words that contained the same socially diagnostic variables. In this way, it was possible for a speaker to over-report use of a favored variant (by claiming it was typical of his or her speech when it was actually used less than half the time during the interview), underreport usage (by claiming not to use a favored variant that was actually used more than half the time) or accurately report use (by claiming to use a favored variant that was actually used more than half the time, or not claiming a favored variant used less than half the time) (Fasold, 2000: 97). Using this method, he drew the following table: From this table, we can see that male speakers under-reported their use of socially favored variants far more frequently than female speakers did (50 vs. 14); while female speakers over-reported more often than male speakers did (68 vs. 22). So as Trudgill explained, male paid attention to covert prestige of the variant, females more concerned overt prestige of the variant. But why should it have such a result? And what can be revealed from this result? “Sex varieties are the result of different social attitudes towards the behavior of men and women, and of the attitudes men and women themselves consequently gave to language as a social symbol” (Trudgill, 1983: 94). We all know that for a long history women are regarded as inferior to men. They are treated unequally in society comparing with men. So they are likely to be ordered or tend themselves to the standard social values. In language,RP is the standard established by the society. So even if actually they do not speak RP, women still announce that they speak it in order to get praised and respected by the others. This, in fact, is what Brown and Levinson called positive face in FST. On the contrary, man is the controller of the society. They do not pay much attention to the standard established by themselves in language. Instead they are more concerned with their own power, their firmer control of everyday language. That is to say the vernacular. So they always underreported their language in order to show their power and their independence. This reflect in FST is the negative face. This result actually reveals that man and woman treat “face” differently. Man pays more attention to negative face and woman vice versa. From this perspective, we can see that in FST, gender language difference is a very important factor and need to be considered. 3.2 Redressive strategies In FST, Brown and Levinson also introduced five redressive strategies in order to save face. In fact, male and female also behave differently to these strategies. A. Bald on record without redressive actions This strategy means the speaker reveals his intentions directly and clearly to the hearer. The basic sentence pattern is “Do X.” such as Close the door (HE Zhao-xiong, 2000: 230). However, gender difference also exists in such kind of sentences. Lakoff has ever listed the following range of possibilities: Close the door. Please close the door. Will you close the door? Will you please close the door? Wont you close the door? According to Lakoffs investigation, women are more likely to use the more polite form than men. Thats to say, men use “Do X!” more often than women. So men always adopt this strategy. B. Positive politeness Positive politeness means to satisfy the hearers positive face, to agree with the hearers opinion and establish solidarity. For example, praise or respect the others. So this strategy is approach-based. The speaker always shows his/her agreement with the others. And it is more often used by women than by men. For instance, Holmes found that there were 80% of the people who use compliment in order to establish solidarity and agreement. Among them most were women (BAI Jie-hong, 2000: 110). On the other hand, men swear much more than women. They are more blunt and to the point in speaking (Wardhaugh, 2000: 316). Surely, men will threaten the hearers positive face in this way. And they are more likely to neglect the strategy of positive politeness than women. C. Negative politeness The speaker acknowledges and accepts the hearers negative face. In order to show this, he/she will not interfere with the hearers affair. He will be modest, self-controlled, avoid showing-off and pay attention to the hearers needs. So this strategy is avoidance-based. According to Brown and Levinson, the basic sentence pattern is the sentence containing modal verbs (HE Zhao-xiong, 2000: 18). In her analysis of gender language differences, BAI Jie-hong (2000: 18) found that females were more likely to use modal verbs, such as: can, could, shall, should, will, would, may, might, especially modal verbs plus other auxiliary verbs, such as have and be. It is because females are not certain about the environment around them;they are suspect of the environment. However, males always used fewer modal verbs. If necessary, they only use can, shall, will, which express certainty, authority and order. These meanings are surely contrary to the negative politeness strategy which needs the speaker to be tolerant instead of aggressive. From this analysis, we can see females are more likely to use this strategy. D. Off record In order to avoid the hearer losing face, the speaker use vague languages. Brown and Levinson showed 15 ways to do this, such as metaphor, sarcasm, hyperbole, rhetorical question, euphemism. In sociolinguistics, everyone talking about gender will mention tag questions. And many examples have been showed to illustrate females are more likely to use it than males. In reality, females like to use euphemism while males swear words. Both of these facts show obviously that women use off record strategy more often than men. E. Dont do the FTA This strategy is the most extreme one. That is not to make the hearer lose face by threatening actions.Sometimes the speaker even doesnt talk. After finishing an experiment, West and Zimmerman illustrated as following: The silences that were counted were those between the end of one speakers turn and the first utterance of the other speaker. Silences were “charged to” the speaker who had just stopped speaking. Ratios were computed by dividing the total number of seconds of silence “charged to” the speaker with the least silence by the number of seconds of silence“charged to” the speaker with the most silence, if each speaker in the dyed had the same amount of silence charged to him/her, this ratio would be 1.0. In the same-sex conversations, this was approximately the case; all the ratios were between 0.6 and 1.0 except for one conversation between two males. In the cross-sex conversations, though, the ratios were all below 0.5 except for one and, in every case, the woman had more silence “charged to” her. (Fasold, 2000: 108) The result surely shows that women use this strategy frequently. From A to E above, we can see that A is likely to used by males while B to E are more often used by females.Why should we have such a result? We have known that in reality, men want to seize and maintain control over the progress of conversation. As a result, its difficult for them to pay attention to the hearers face, positive or negative. So theyre more likely to use the direct and obvious strategy to express their own idea and take the first strategy. Women, on the other hand, have lower status in society. Theyre always looked down upon and are not listened to by the others so they tend to use various indirect interactive strategies to increase the probability that their contributions will be attended to and supported by their conversational partners. At the same time, they themselves tend far more to support the conversational agendas of the people they are talking with in order to maintain their faces (Fasold, 2000: 116). As a result, B to E will be adopted more often