A LANGUAGE AND GENDER ANALYSIS IN “THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST” BY OSCAR WILDE

Abstract

Language is a means of communication; it is mostly influenced by gender. For a long time, language and gender studies turn to be an endless issue in both sociolinguistics and pragmatics areas. Many studies focus on linguistic levels such as phonology, grammar, pragmatics and morph syntax. However, few of them are conducted in specific contexts. Based on the social condition above, this research examines the specific context about language and gender in “The Importance of being Earnest†based on conversational analysis as its theoretical framework. It employs each act from all four scenes as data source and adopts quantitative and qualitative analysis, comparison and contrast method. The study mainly concentrates on differences in the amount of talk, the amount of turns and also distribution of them. “The Importance of being Earnest†shows how people in the old day (1895) have views about education, politeness and gender. This drama is suitable to find out the different social interaction between men and women since the ways they use the language is different. By conducting this research, it leads to capture these findings: in terms of the amount of talk, women use more words to compose more sentences. In other words, they are more talkative than men. Meanwhile, in the aspect of the amount of turns, men are inclined to take the turn floor for a longer time.