A Statistical Analysis on Pragmatic Characteristics of American Women’s Lexical Usage【开题报告】.doc

1、 1 本科毕业论文开题报告 英语 A Statistical Analysis on Pragmatic Characteristics of American Womens Lexical Usage 课题研究意义及国内外研究现状 : Sociolinguistics is a discipline which investigates the relationships between languages and social relations. Wardhaugh(2000) pointed out that “sociolinguistics is concerned with in

2、vestigating the relationship between language and society with a goal being better understanding of the structure of language and of how languages function in communication.”(p.12) Since sociolinguistics is a discipline investigating the relationship between languages and society, it concerns about

3、how people use languages and how they convey information. Peoples expression is influenced by social activities. People from different cultures would have different characteristics in language usage. Besides, men and women also have different traits in language usage. Thus, peoples speaking patterns

4、 present numerous characteristics. While language usage can be reflected in several aspects, such as lexicon, tone, pronunciation and so on. This thesis aims to study the characteristics of American females lexical usage, and the reasons leading to these characteristics. Early in 1664, reports on th

5、e differences of conversation patterns between males and females had been released in Caribbean areas. Marie Ritchie Kay offered courses named “Linguistic Behavior of Male and Female” in California University in 1969. Progresses have been made, and remarkable achievements have been achieved. Lakoff(

6、1975) described six categories of language usage that are sharply differentiated by the sex of the speaker: lexical distinctions, strong verses weak expletives, womens versus neutral adjectives, tag questions, question intonation with statement syntax, and strength of directive speech acts. Lakoff o

7、nly describes the characteristics of females lexical usage very roughly. She didnt mention the method how she analyzed the traits in her book neither. Besides, when she described the lexical distinctions, she only listed the differences of curse words usage and adjectives 2 usage between males and f

8、emales. She didnt further analyze the features of females lexical usage in other aspects, such as the usage of euphemism, courtesy words, etc. Many Chinese scholars have also investigated the characteristics of females lexical usage. Lin Xiaoying describes females lexical usage in three aspects: col

9、or terms, adjectives and adverbs. (1994) She didnt conclude the methodology and she didnt specifically describe the characteristics of females lexical usage in any other aspects, such as euphemism, courtesy words, etc. Zhang Yanshuang, Zhang Fuli, WuYu also analyzed the characteristics of females le

10、xical usage. (2010) Both of them didnt mention the methodology and didnt analyze the females lexical usage in details. This thesis will describe the characteristics of females lexical usage in details by using the qualitative research method. 课题研究的主要内容、预期目标和研究方案 This thesis will consist of five part

11、s. The first chapter will be the introduction of this thesis. The second chapter will be the previous studies. The most important content will be discussed in the third chapter. In this chapter, methodology will firstly be introduced. And the analysis on the characteristics of females lexical usage

12、will be listed. Chapter three will be divided into two parts. The first part is about the introduction to the methodology used in the thesis. Since other scholars didnt set the introduction of the methodology as a separate part, this thesis will first take the introduction of methodology into consid

13、eration, so as to make clear about the method of how to do the research. The second part will be divided into other five parts in which data will be analyzed to express the characteristics of females lexical usage on politeness lexicon, adverbs, particles and etc. The four chapter is to analyze the

14、reasons for the phenomenon. Chapter five is the conclusion. This thesis will mainly focus on the combination of methodology and description of characteristics of females lexical usage. This thesis will collect a certain amount of American Womens dialogues or take some film clips, and analyze the pra

15、gmatic characteristics of American Womens lexicon usage. 3 Outline 1. Introduction 2. Previous Studies 3. Analysis 3.1 A Brief Introduction to Methodology 3.2 Statistical Analysis of Lexicon 3.2.1 Usage of Polite Lexicon 3.2.2 Usage of Particles 3.2.3 Usage of Affectionate Words 3.2.4 Usage of Adjec

16、tives 3.2.5 Usage of Adverbs 4. Reasons 4.1 Social Status 4.2 Personalities Influenced by Education Background 4.3 Psychological Factors 5. Conclusion 课题进度计划 准备阶段（第六学期第 9-13 周） 写作阶段 ）第六学期第 14-17 周：选题、任务书 ）第六学期第 18-20 周：开题报告、文献综述 ）第三学年暑假至第七学期第 2 周：初稿写作并上交 ）第七学期第 3-8 周：一稿修改、提交二 稿 ）第七学期第 9-15 周：二稿修改、提交

17、三稿 ）第七学期第 16-20 周：三稿修改、提交初定稿 答辩阶段 ）第八学期第 1-4 周：论文评阅与答辩 ）第八学期第 5-6 周：论文定稿、文档归整 4 参考文献 1 Ralph Fasold. The Sociolinguistics of LanguageM. 北京 : 外语教学与研究出版社， 2000. 2 Ronald Wardhaugh. An Introduction to SociolingusticsM. 北京 : 外语教学与研究出版社， 2000. 3 Zhang Yanshuang, Zhang Fuli, WuYu. Reflection on Characteri

18、stics of Womens Speech from the Perspective of SociolinguisticsJ. 语文学刊 ,2010(5):47-48. 4 董芳 (Dong, Fang). 运用社会语言学简析女性语言风格特色 J. 湖北广播电视大学学报， 2007, 27(3):57-59. 5 何自然 (He, Ziran). 语用学概论 (第 2 版 )M. 长沙 : 湖南教育出版社， 2006. 6 林晓英 (Lin, Xiaoying). 谈英语中女性使用语言的特点 J. 福州大学学报（社会科学版 ),1994, 8(1):54-57. 7 张廷国 (Zhang, Tingguo)和郝树壮 (Hao, Shuzhuang). 社会语言学研究方法的理论与实践 M. 北京 : 北京大学出版社， 2008. 指导教师审核意见 指导教师签名： 年 月 日