The Features Of Women's Language

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Traditionally, both men and woman will speak the same language in the same society. However, there must be some differences between the language of men and women. According to Robin Lakoff (1975), there are ten different kinds of feature of “women’s language”, and there are some reasons for these features. Women like to use lexical hedges and fillers. Lexical hedges are used to weaken the strength of an assertion, for example “it’s sort of a beautiful dress!”. Fillers refer to some meaningless words that women always use, such as “you see , this is how it going’.Women also like to use tag questions, for example “he is very handsome, isn’t it?”Women like to use rising question intonation on declaratives, such as “he’s really nice?” Women like to use empty adjectives, examples are ‘charming, lovely, sweet’ etc.Women like to use precise color terms, they may talk about colors like aquamarine magenta etc.Women like to use intensifiers, such as ‘He treat me so sweet’. Women like to use ‘Hypercorrect Grammar’; they will talk like “between you and me”. Women like to use superpolite forms, such as “would you please…?”Women will avoid the use of strong swear words, e.g. fudge, my goodness. Women like to use emphatic stress to strengthen the strength of an assertion, e.g. “He’s a really handsome!” According to Lakoff, women use hedging devices to express uncertainty, and they use boosting and intensifying devices to persuade their addressee to take them seriously and to make the others pay more attention to them. Therefore, the use of hedges and boosters reflect women are lack of confidence. Woman is more polite than men because they use tag questions. According to Holmes, women put more emphasis than men on the polite or affective functions of tags, using them as facilitative positive politeness devices. Women use question intonation and superpolite forms of speaking to
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