Gendered Conversational Strategies in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and “The Chrysanthemums”.

Abstract

In the study of speech, there were some differences in how men and women use language. Although theoretical analysis is extensive, actual empirical research still needs to converge on a consistent picture of gender language differences. The lack of agreement on the right method to analyze language is an important reason. In this study, the gender differences in language use were examined to analyze a database in John Steinbeck’s stories Of Mice and Men and “The Chrysanthemums”. This dissertation attempts to study the language used in aforementioned works where the two selected stories were set in California in 1937 during the period of the Great Depression. The aim of this research is to examine differences between the speech of women and men in John Steinbeck stories and to typify the linguistic and conversational strategies representing female and male in different social contexts. In the corpus under research, and by using several methods, which are the theoretical literature analysis, the contrastive and qualitative method, the study concluded with results that in some parts, the findings from the two stories serve with and against the two theories that were applied in the second and third chapters, which are Robin Lakoff and Deborah Tannen theories, where men and women use the tag questions, hedges, intensifiers and adjectives, and the use of curse words as conversational strategies in their speech. Also, this study reveals the social status of women in the period of the Great Depression where they were suffering of oppression and male dominance.