Women’s speech features used by the main character of Eat Pray Love Movie

ABSTRACT

Women’s speech features are several aspects of speech difference between women and men which indicate the characteristic of women’s speech which include hedging, tag question, rising intonations on declaratives, empty adjectives, specialized vocabularies (precise color terms), intensifiers, hypercorrect grammar, super polite forms, avoidance of strong swear words, and emphatic stress. Meanwhile, women’s language: a language that signifies the characteristics of women, such as avoiding direct and forceful statements and relying on conforms that conveys hesitation and uncertainty.

This research has aim to identify the use of women’s features are used by
the main character of “Eat Pray Love” movie. The design of this research is descriptive qualitative. It describes women’s speech features used by the main character of “Eat Pray Love” movie. The data are words, phrases, clauses, and sentences that are used by main character, namely Elizabeth in several settings. The data were analyzed firstly by finding the context of the utterance, classifying them into ten types of women’s speech features, and then explaining and describing the utterance based on the categorization of the Lakoff’s theory.

The findings of this research show that is not all types of women’s speech features are used by four characters. There are only nine types of women’s speech features used in the dialogues, they are lexical hedges or fillers, tag question, rising intonation on declaratives, `empty' adjectives, intensifiers, hypercorrect grammar, superpolite forms, avoidance of strong swear words, and emphatic stress. A kind of features which is not used by Liz is specialized vocabularies. The contexts which almost occur to show the characteristics of women’s speech features depend on Lakoff’s theory are when Liz wanted to avoid something that made her nervous, curious and sad. It can be represented as the lexical hedges or fillers because Liz uses them eight times to express her condition. The uses of hedges are to keep conversation going.

The suggestions are directed toward to the next researcher, Discourse Analysis Lectures and readers. Next, to the Discourse Analysis and Sociolinguistics lecturers, this movie are expected that can give the material about women’s language especially on women’s speech, it can be applied on other texts or objects. Finally, to the reader, especially the linguistics students are expected to learn women’s speech features by watching this movie because “Eat Pray Love” movie has a good application on women’s speech features.